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  • From: "Miranda Smith" <mirandaconstance@gmail.com>
  • To: gardenwriters-on-gardening <gwl-g@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [gwl-g] Organic or chemical future?????
  • Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:11:35 -0400

Hi,

I finally had to jump into the "organic" discussion.

I have always been an organic grower, too. It wasn't a mark of rebellion on my part, though. My mother ran a small nursery and never "went chemical" after the war, when most of her friends and competition starting using things like black flag and DDT. I spent a lot of time helping her, not always voluntarily. And as I did, she taught me how to manage both a large vegetable garden and a small nursery "organically." This was primarily in the 1950s, when manners were as much a part of our training as any academic subject. One of her iron-clad rules was "to be polite to racists and chemical growers." Just as it was clear to my mother that all people were people, regardless of origin, it was equally clear to her that if a chemical could kill an insect, it could kill, or harm, a human being--it was just a matter of concentration and exposure. The second half of her saying was, "they are just too ignorant to know any better." She also said that chemicals were for those people who didn't understand soils and plants well enough to be a grower--they were for amateurs and she would even recommend a chemical fertilizer to the occasional person who had demonstrated a hopeless black thumb.

So my problem over the years has been to let go of a basic prejudice about anyone "too ignorant to know any better and so poor a grower to have to resort to chemicals." 

That's occasionally been a struggle--when extension agents and FMHA loan officers refused to put any credence in organic techniques, for examle. But on the home gardener front, I have no trouble with it. I just figure that part of my job is to help people shed the ignorance that keeps them from being able to grow without resort to the very things that will eventually harm their soils and ecosystems.

Best,

Miranda





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