Organic Gardening

For anyone with a garden, it seems simple: grow your own produce. But the chemical industry is big business, so gardeners have, over the years, been persuaded that they too can "benefit" from research carried out by the commercial growers and farmers. After all, what is good for the professional must be good for amateurs. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

While we can certainly benefit in some ways from research, there is absolutely no need for the home gardener to follow commercial practices blindly. Remember, the professional grows on a large scale for profit, while we do so on a small scale for pleasure. He needs all his harvest to be ready at the same time, while we want to stagger it. What's more, there is no need to sacrifice anything in terms of yield and quality. Let me give you an example.

If a farmer has twenty acres of cabbages, he can almost certainly expect an attack of cabbage white butterfly, since no self-respecting butterfly could miss such an opportunity. So, to stop the hungry caterpillars from devouring the entire crop, the farmer may have no alternative but to spray. The gardener, on the other hand, has