Green Gardening

There are a few things that you’ll need to remember right away if you’re planning on having a green garden and the first rule is that there is no room for chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides in an ecologically friendly garden. Remember that at first it might be a little unnerving to go about your gardening without the help of all your chemicals, but you need to keep in mind that chemical gardening is polluting, energy intensive and bad for the soil. There are people who say that while homemade garden compost is alright, you can’t get good yields or healthy crop without chemicals.

This is not true and there are many organic farmers around the globe that are proving this to be false everyday. One of the strange things that gardeners find about chemical fertilizers is that the more of it that you use, the more insecticides you need. Too much nitrogen is often the culprit here as it affects the way a crop grows so that it needs more chemicals. One of the big advantages of non chemical growing is that you’ll no longer have poisons in your garden shed. Without all these chemicals to mix and match, there are fewer possibilities of making mistakes as well.

So when you’re reading a gardening book and it talks about using natural fertilizers, what that is actually talking about, is animal or plant based products rather than chemical based powers and solutions. Two examples of this are processed manure and garden peat. As well, keeping insects under control without having to use harmful chemicals might not be as difficult as you might think. Remember that healthy plants are more disease resistant and the organic gardener makes use of techniques like companion planting and of natural predators like ladybugs.

Two of the worst problems that the organic gardener faces are slugs and snails but the organic gardener has many techniques for dealing with them. Some of these, like saucers of beer, might seem like you’re trying to invite rather than hinder the bugs but you can also get rid of them with a more traditional bucket of soapy water. Here, chemical slug pellets are a real danger to birds because the birds have been known to eat the dead slugs. A recent study also concluded that the use of chemicals also led to high Aphid populations because a particular chemical can kill off the natural Aphid predators.

There have been other studies in Sweden that state that stinging nettles make a great natural fertilizer which has a much better effect on plants than chemical fertilizer.

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