Topic: How would you define organic?

[Jeannine]

Somebody asked me today if I gardened my lotties organically,I answered oh yes,then got to thinking about it.Do I really??

Weedkillers...no

Plant remedies..no

Soap for aphids...yes

Slug pelletts..rarely cos John bought them,but they are gone and won't be replaced
but if I use the new safe ones are they considered organic.

Fertilisers..yes, poo, seaweed concentrate,blood, bone meal, lime and tomato feed( says organice on the bottle but I can't remember it's name).I do use acid Miracle grow occasionally on my blueberries but they ar not on the lottie, and I did have the bag of Growmore I asked a lot of questions about but I ended up giving it away.

Oh and I wipe my storage squash in a mild bleach solution.

So of I was to go completely organic, what would that be please?

XX Jeannine

[tim]

Don't know. All I do is avoid anything that might harm the children.

But I do spray Bordeaux.

[manicscousers]

you're gardening naturally, jeannine, we do the same..organic is such an emotive word, I think it would be really hard to do it strictly..
what happens if a bee fertilises an unorganic crop then fertilises yours, does that do something ?
are the horses we get our manure from fed with organic feed ?
I've given up thinking about it and just , as I say, be as natural as i can  :)

[David R]

and if your neighbour douses everything in chemicals, there's naff all you can do to stop wind carrying it, or it leaching through the soil to your garden or plot.

Blood, bone etc rarely organicly produced but possible, chicken pellet fertiliser mainly come sfrom battery hens ( but you can get "organic"). Its easier to become organic once the garden is established if its sizeable enough to provide all the compost needed, otherwise its quite tricky.

I claim organic pretentions but must admit to using the odd bit of packet fertilizer, and i use tap water (added chlorine?) as there's not enough stored rainwater to see me through.

[cleo]

This one riles me. "organic "-well you have to have a label to be called organic.

I once heard someone on the TV say " I want flavour and I want freshness and that means organic"-what utter rot-an MM grown organically and then left to hang around for weeks is still "organic"

I have no qualms about using weedkiller now and again-I don`t use pesticides apart from a bit of Savona (soft soap)-and I do compost stuff to feed the soil.

I`m happy in my own skin about that

[Curryandchips]

Yup, I garden naturally too. I went 'off' organic, when someone on an organic site refused to accept my attitude, claiming that it had to be total to be considered organic (talking amateur gardening here). Chestnut compound (Cheshunt?) is on the list of approved chemicals for treating damping off on tomatoes, but it is still a very toxic chemical ... (there appears to be no alternative, so I have been led to believe). I therefore accept the limitations of my environment, and live as healthily as I can realistically. No deliberately added toxins, but I won't lose sleep over it.

Derek :)

[asbean]

Some toxins and chemicals occur naturally .  Does that mean they are not organic?

[Jeannine]

Thank you all.Tim what is Boardeux?

[davyw1]

Don't know. All I do is avoid anything that might harm the children.

But I do spray Bordeaux.

Gardeners TIPsy

[emmy1978]

 I try to garden using organic methods. Having said that I am using blue pellets for some stuff so... :-X
For me it's 'natural gardening'. like so many here have already said, Organic is such a label - it means different things to different people. In M & S or Sainsbury's it means you pay a lot more for a lot less and on the lottie it means you grew it yourself without spraying it to death.  ;D

[Rhubarb Thrasher]

I bet most of us who don't count ourselves as organic nevertheless have greatly reduced the chemicals we use. Twenty years ago we'd have happily sprayed at the first sign of insect attack. I can't remember the last time I sprayed roses with anything against anything and they're fine. I suppose we take a kind of Integrated Pest Management approach - use every trick in the book to reduce pests, and then only as a last resort think about using a chemical control

I don't like the term Organic either, if only because the alternative word to Organic is Inorganic,for me anyway, and that's not right, particularly since Bordeaux Mixture is allowed, and that's about as inorganic (and synthetic) as they come. I've never used it, I assume it's a fungicide, like Cheshunt. If it's on the allowed list as someone said because it's the only thing that works, then that's no different from what I do

To be honest, I don't like Natural either, not just because the alternative ie what I do, would be Unnatural. Using the word Natural is misleading because nearly everything we grow, apart from some salads and herbs, is far removed from any natural species. The closest is probably parsnip, where you can get a reasonable cultivated parsnip after about half a dozen generations from the wild species. Course the irony is that parsnip is one of the most unreliable veg we grow.
Another reason why Natural is not quite right is because of course most of our fruit and veg is not only not native to Britain, it's not even native to Europe. All our beans (except Broad beans) come from the Americas, and tomatoes too. All our large fruited strawberries for example come originally from American plants, and not the native wild strawberry. The list is pretty endless. One of the criticisms against the West regarding Africa (for instance) is that we encourage them the grow cash crops - cereals, tobacco, maize etc which are not suitable or native to the region, and the only way they can do it successfully is with extra irrigation, pesticides and artificail fertilisers. In a way, that's exactly what we do on our plots. It's not really surprising that we can struggle without some kind of intervention

[grawrc]

Bordeaux mixture is a mixture of copper sulphate and hydrated or slaked lime and water. I think it was originally used in Bordeaux to treat vine fungus but has a lot more applications e.g.early blight.

[Rhubarb Thrasher]

I don't know that copper based sprays are a problem, but I was genuinely surprised to see that they're considered organic. I suppose that if they're used against blight, then commercial growers use them whether or not there's a problem, which perhaps goes against the spirit of things too.
I worry more about what's gone on on the plot before I got there. It's not the greatest thing in the world to dig up an old battery for instance, and quite what old carpet breaks down into I don't at all know. Mr Flowerdew used to recommend putting down carpet to suppress weeds, but maybe he could afford pure wool ones.
One of our plotholders keeps his plot reasonably clear but doesn't actually grow anything. He just uses it as a handy place to burn the rubbish he generates from whatever he goes for a living. That's a bit scary too, for whoever comes next

[froglets]

Rhubarb Thrasher, that sounds like the plot we have inherited.  Mostly fine, but at the end was a rectangle of metal corrugated sheets full of soil & stuff which had been used as a fire pit while the plot was derelict.

We knew that a load of old kitchen cabinets and a kids paddling pool had been burned in there which was when the site rep put a stop to fires on the site full stop after the smoke, smell and complaints that it caused.

Unfortunately, in clearing it out we've found what may be asbestos.  We're having it checked out by a mate who does factory site management for a living & hoping it's the concrete equivalent.

I am sparing with weedkiller & only use it while we are clearing this overgrown plot to give ourselves a fighting chance & use slug peletts sparingly until the plants are robust enough to cope with the odd nibble, but this takes "organic" in any form and chucks it out of the window for now!

Having said that, my last plot was on a site that ran as a strip down the railway sidings.  That was an interesting intellectual discussion on the nature of organic!

[David R]

yep, YOU may try to be organic, but "chemical ali" who was there before you might have left a lasting legacy :(

On the asbestos issue, if its asbestos cement dont worry too much as its difficult for it to release fibres unless you drill or cut it. I work in an environmental consultancy and might be able to offer better advice if you post a pic.

[prink13]

This is such a difficult question, have seen various disscussions on this subject on line.

Some people say that it is where no chemical pesticides, herbicides etc. have been used, however others go as far as making sure the raised beds etc. are not leaching any chemicals into the ground, and items like cabbage collars are natural and organic.

I think that organic is whatever you percieve it to be........I personally dont use any soap, bug spray, herbicies, peticides etc. but I don't worry about the wood, mulch and gravel etc.

Kathi

[grawrc]

Mmmm ... one of my plots is beside the railway line. I've often wondered about that.

[David R]

well, paraquat has a half life of 1000 days, glyphosate (roundup) 47 days.

grawc, wouldnt want to worry you but im sure ive heard that they used to spray arsenic on rail lines to stop insects getting into the sleepers etc  :o :o half life of that - decades!

[froglets]

Thanks David R.

With work etc , It'll be Friday I think before I get back to the plot but will take a piccie of what's left.

On the asbestos front, my dad was in the Merchant Navy & I have pictures of him in the 1950's standing beside pallets of hessian like sacks of raw asbestos that they were loading onboard.  And all the men were smoking!  At the time of course, it was all perfectly acceptable.  Thankfully, although he did absorb some fibres, but they didn't give him any problems, just showed up on every x-ray.

Wonder what we are doing now that will be totally unacceptable in 20 years time.

[Rhubarb Thrasher]

Yes i've seen lots of plots alomg railway lines. I'd have thought they were now pretty clean places, though you don't know what happened historically, and then you've got any spraying on the embankments

Do people still put soot on plots? What was that for-just to get rid of it, or to make the soil darker, so it absorbed more heat?

Isn't arsenic supposed to have aphrodisiac properties?