My wife and I have nearly gone organic.
Our gardens have remained largely free of commercial fertilizers and insecticides. Our lawn has never, in the years we've been caring for it, tasted weed killer or turf builder. The water we use for irrigation, drawn from an old well, contains no chlorine (and tastes a lot better than the "city" water we have pumped into the house).
When I built a chicken coop last summer, I used no pressure-treated wood. A lot of the lumber was recycled from an old, dilapidated barn I finally had to tear down a few years ago. I roofed the coop with cedar shakes to avoid using asphalt. And when the chickens arrived this spring, I started them on organic chick mash rather than giving in to the possibly sage advice from my father-in-law, who's kept chickens for decades, to start them on medicated feed. So far, the chickens are thriving on their diet of mash mixed with a little garlic powder. (The tip to use garlic came from my friend Geoff Robinson, one of the founders of the Valley Advocate, who says he's been using the "natural antibiotic" for years.)
It did occur to me when I was considering the choice of organic versus nonorganic chicken feed that my selection would have lasting consequences in our gardens: the ample manure and wood shavings that come out of the coop holding 12 chickens go into our compost, which then goes into our gardens. Whatever chickens eat that's not organic is still not organic when it comes out. Do I really worry about it? No, but I think about it.
But here's the thing: I'm not a zealot, nor is my wife. We didn't grow up around people who aspired to any particular kind of green living. I remember, on my mother's shelf of gardening supplies, the odoriferous boxes of Miracle-Gro, which she fed liberally to her flowering shrubs while wearing gloves to keep the electric blue chemical granules from staining her fingers when she mixed them with water. I remember being instructed to keep my distance from her gardening supplies—the insecticides and herbicides and fertilizers, and anything else with a skull and bones on the label—because they were poisonous. Not poisonous enough, apparently, to dissuade a gardener from dousing them on tomato plants and rosebushes, but poisonous enough to necessitate keeping them out of the reach of children.
To this day, I bet my mom uses Miracle-Gro. I know my father-in-law does. They both have beautiful properties lush with lots of beautiful, apparently healthy gardens. When we visit, we don't think any less of them or their gardens because of their chosen methods. Nor, when we return to our relatively chemical-free homestead, do we think better of ourselves for our decision to eschew chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates, pyrethroids, ammonium sulfamate and the like.
Truth is, we stumbled into our decision to try to keep our home and gardens as natural as possible. We started doing it purely for the fun of it, because it was easy and cheap and meant we didn't have to bother reading the warning labels on a bunch of products we really didn't know how to use anyway.
When we bought our place in Whately 12 years ago, we were city slickers, yuppies, whose recent gardening experience had been largely limited to house plants, window boxes and, at the first house we rented in the Valley after moving from our apartment in Boston, a small perennial garden. Betsy did all the work, but I was happy to tag along to the garden store and watch endless hours of HGTV.
The place in Whately was in need of work, particularly in its overgrown gardens and half-acre lawn, which had become a tangle of sumac, locust, wild rose and bittersweet. After a year of cutting and burning brush, weeding and edging the gardens, and mowing whatever approximated grass, in addition to painting the house inside and out, things started taking shape. In the spring of the following year, we finally had some time to plant flowers, to get a vegetable garden going, to consider how we might landscape the yard.
With each new project came a decision we weren't entirely prepared for. Should we fertilize our ornamentals? How about the crops? What kind of fertilizer? What ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus? If this particular N-P-K (nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium) ratio works for woody shrubs, will it also work on delicate tubers?
So we studied. We read books and hunted around online for advice. Finally, I made myself buy a bag of standard-issue 10:15:10 commercial fertilizer. Afraid of burning the plants—plants that seemed to be doing perfectly well on their own—I was trepidatiously measuring out the first cupful when I spied the farmer across the way spreading cow manure directly on his hay field.
"How can I get some of that cow manure for my gardens?" I asked him the next day.
"How much you want?" he said with a sly grin.
Ever since, we've had more manure than we really need—yards and yards of the stuff—though none of it goes to waste. We mix it into the gardens and spread it on top as mulch. We toss it around the lawn and mow it in. We pile it heavy on sheets of newspaper anywhere we plan to open a new garden bed; a year or two later, the beds are ready to dig and till.
Not all of our problems could be solved with a pile of well-cooked dung. But most of those problems have been easy to ignore. We get japanese beetles on the roses, for example, but I'm not keen to use grub poisons—don't think it would be healthy for my cats, chickens and especially my daughter and her friends. So we pick the beetles off the roses and drop the nasty buggers in a coffee can of gasoline—hardly green, probably not humane, not effective. (This year, my free-ranging chickens will find tasty snacks in those grubs, as well as in the mosquitos and ticks.)
Weeds in the lawn? Who gives a damn? Mow with a mulching mower and live with the results. I guarantee my lawn is as lush and healthy—dandelions, clover and all—in August as any chemically treated lawn. My only real worry has been the size of the lawn and the gas it takes to cut it once a week. To solve that, I steadily work at shrinking the lawn by digging more gardens, by creating more patio-type spaces, where, again, taking a rough and natural approach—using loose gravel contained by untreated timbers, for example—turns out to be cheaper, easier and more practical than installing a fixed-stone patio. The wood will rot out eventually, and the stones get a little more littered with twigs and leaf debris every year, but with a few more timbers and a load of fresh gravel, I can fix those problems in an hour or two. With a permanently fixed patio, I'd have to think about drainage, and if I ever did want to change it or get rid of it altogether, I'd have some work on my hands.
The only problems I haven't found a good organic solution for are house pests like ants and carpenter bees. I have a light hand with it—probably too light—but I do use a can of Raid for ants and bees. I've also got a bottle of Round-Up that I use on patches of poison ivy. But it bothers me.
Like most people who are now in midlife, I've been exposed to a vibrant if not always successful ecological movement since I was in kindergarten. I learned at a young age about the food chain, about the way in which toxins, like those in pesticides and herbicides, get into the food chain and have an unintended harmful impact on far more than a single ant colony or patch of weeds. I am thoughtful whenever I face a problem that I know might be solved with chemicals—and being thoughtful, I try hard to find another way.
My wife and I like to think we see a difference. We like to think that our gardens and fruit trees are healthier because we don't use chemicals, that we have more honeybees, more insect-eating spiders, more bats, more birds because we haven't poisoned the food chain. But we're not scientists, not even truly organic gardeners. We know, at some point, we're taking it on faith that organic methods really work. But we'd only be taking it on faith with chemicals, too. In the end, we'd rather put our trust in nature than in something a chemist mixes up in a laboratory.
