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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Organic vs conventional test WAS Livingontheland Digest, Vol 45, Issue 2

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: "Sharon Gordon" <gordonse@one.net>
  • To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing" <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Organic vs conventional test WAS Livingontheland Digest, Vol 45, Issue 2
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:45:38 -0400

>There was an article in our local paper about a group who will do a test to
see if organic gardening is really better than conventional gardening.
The article did say that the land has been fallow for at least 10 years
which is a good start.
Now I wonder how many years are they going to persue this? To have a fair
comparison, the test should be for 5 or so years to allow the soil to be
healed and built up with compost..., to encourage the "good bugs" - snakes -
frogs - worms... to find it, and to show that with a proper balance of good
soil - healthy plants - and nature's garden helpers : we don't need to
poison our food.

I think it's good to have this comparison. However, it's very difficult to
make the gardens equal. For instance if you have an organic biointensive
garden, you have a different planting pattern which has all sorts of
advantages over a conventional row garden. Adding organic compost as
fertilizer increases the humus in soil which is good compared to
conventional agriculture. Both the intensive planting and the humus
conserve water in the soil of the organic plantings, so if you watered both
fields the same, it would be too much water or too little for one of the
fields if you water one of them enough. And if you are watering with
treated city water, the chorine isn't good for either. so it would be good
to filter that out, but filtering might remove other minerals that were good
for both gardens. One garden might experience more predator damage by
chance rather than becauxe the animals or insects were drawn to a particular
field. If you are spreading conventional fertilizer with a tractor in the
rows vs digging in compost with a shovel, you would have different labor
amounts for that process, though you could compensate with the hours of
labor it took to earn the money to buy the fertilizer plus the labor it took
someone else to process the fertilizer.

So while this comparison might be partially useful, I think a home
demonstration garden that shows how much beautiful and tasty produce you can
grow in an organic home garden might be the most inspiring, especially if
you can make a visually attractive edible landscape. One family that has
inspired a lot of people with this type of garden is the Dervaes family.
They have a small house lot and grow 6000+ pounds of food per year in about
3900 square feet of growing space. They are redoing their webpages and I
can't find their detailed produce weights for 2004, but you can see some
photos of their beautiful and intensive plantings at
http://www.pathtofreedom.com. There are also some pictures in the recent
Natural Home and Garden magazine.

Sharon
gordonse@one.net








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