What is Organic Gardening?

At the beginning of Organic September, a month-long celebration of organic food, seems a good time to answer this question. Yes, there is some science in the answer, but I will show you some of the links between our gardening habits, the wider farming community, and our planet as a whole, now and for our children’s children. If you already garden organically, there may still be a new fact or two to discover. Gardeners are always learning something new from the plants, creatures and soil around them.

What is Organic Gardening? – Organic Soil

It is a method of gardening which considers our health, our children’s health and the health of the planet to be intertwined. And if that sounds a bit ‘woo-woo’ consider this:
Organic soils trap atmospheric carbon dioxide and convert it to carbon.

A comparison of organic and conventional farming, a scientific study carried out since 1981 by the Rodale Institute, has brought to light a number of important facts. One of which is the above. That atmospheric carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse effect gases can be trapped and converted into an essential element of healthy soil by organic soils.

By healthy soil I am referring to a nutrient-rich one which will produce food crops and scented flowers; which has a population of microbes, mini beasts and other organisms within it.

An organic soil gets the carbon dioxide as a result of photosynthesis. Which, if you remember biology lessons from school, is how plants ‘eat’.

The plants take stored carbon dioxide from the surrounding soil, and, with the addition of water, use sunlight to convert it into energy in the form of carbohydrates and oxygen.

Carbohydrates effectively consist of carbon and water (although it’s obviously not quite that simple!)

A healthy organic soil will be nutrient rich and able to feed a vast range of edible plants (crops) and ornamental plants AND reduce the greenhouse effect.

What is Organic Gardening? It doesn’t affect me anyway!

Now, this research was carried out on different farming systems, so you may be asking how this is relevant to you and your garden. After all, you have a suburban sized garden not 1000 acres.

Quick checklist: –

1. Do you have children?
2. Would you like to grow strawberries you can pick and eat straight away?
3. Do you have pets? – dog, cat, rabbit, etc
4. Are you vegetarian or vegan?
5. Would you like to have garden birds visit?
6. Are you or do you have disabled and elderly relatives and friends who use your garden?
7. Would you like bees and butterflies in your garden?
8. Are you or your family allergic to washing powders, cleaners etc?
9. Do you already buy, even occasionally, organic fruit and veg, chemical-free cleaning products?
10. Would you like an easy maintenance garden?

How many ‘yes’ answers did you have?

If your ‘No’ answers were for numbers 1, 3 and 6, then that’s less important than if they were for number 7, for example.

if the bees disappeared off the surface of the earht then man would only have four years left to lice, Einstein quote

In fact, did any of you say ‘No’ to number 7? You do realise that those insects are pollinating insects? Many of the chemicals used in conventional gardening and farming practises harm pollinating insects and are killing some of them off. Without pollinating insects, roughly a third of all plants, edible as well as ornamental would have to be pollinated by hand. Which would be highly impractical and extremely costly. Think what that would do to your weekly shopping bill.

What is Organic Gardening?

Organic means working with nature, not against it. By creating a biodiverse habitat in your garden, you improve the health of the soil, the plants and your family. Those are the ‘small’ easily seen benefits perhaps. The larger benefits are being a part of the area in which you live and garden. For example, organic city gardens can form a corridor between parks and open green spaces through which bees, birds, hedgehogs can easily travel.

A couple of methods you could try in an organic garden.

Companion Planting

In the vegetable garden you might grow companion plants alongside your crops. These companion plants might be ‘sacrificial’ for example, marigolds for the snails to eat rather than eating your young spinach plants.

Or they might be grown to reduce pests and diseases. Growing chives near roses in the flower border reduces the occurrence and severity of blackspot.

snail on orange calendula flower, marigold

Green Manures

Easiest to use in allotments and kitchen gardens where there are more likely to be designated areas which would be bare earth over the winter. By using a green manure, you protect the soil over winter and improve the nutrient content by digging in the green manure plants in the spring. An additional benefit is the cover the plants also give to insects and small mammals over winter.

What is Organic Gardening? – Is it Easy Maintenance?

Gardening organically need not be any more labour intensive than gardening with non-organic /’ non-friendly’ chemicals. It is arguably easier to garden organically as you are encouraging birds, bees, insects, mammals and even the plants themselves to do a lot of your work for you.

For example: Growing pollen heavy flowers for as long as season as you can will give you lots of pleasure and provide food for that large group of creatures we call pollinating insects. These insects will not only pollinate your ornamental flowers and flowering shrubs. They will also pollinate the flowers on your strawberry plants so that you get strawberry fruits to eat.

If you have encouraged a biodiverse, wildlife friendly garden, then it can be a great space for you, your children, your pets, and the planet. And yes, it can be full of scented flowers and flowering shrubs with not a vegetable in sight. But it will have a compost heap or bokashi bin or wormery.

vine, unripe grapes, edible gardens, grow your own fruit

What is Organic Gardening? – Would you like to know more?

I will write a specific article on easy maintenance organic gardening. However, if you look through the Plews Potting Shed blogs, you’ll find a lot of information is already there for you to use. See the links below for some suggestions to get you started and to answer particular questions such as the importance of peat free compost.

Perhaps you’d like some more help with your organic garden? Plews can offer you garden design, gardening lessons and garden consultancy to get you started and resolve any issues you may have along the way. So do get in touch.

Organic September is organised by the Soil Association to educate and promote organic gardening and organic produce.

And for further gardening advice and inspiration, check out Plews Potting Shed blogs, including the selection below and our monthly Tipsheet – You could come and find us on Instagram Pinterest and Facebook too.