Observing your natural environment — watching the weather or noting the arrival of migrating birds and emerging insects — helps you choose the most appropriate ways to plant and nurture your vegetables, flowers, and landscape plants. When you see white butterflies fluttering around your garden, you know it’s time to protect your cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower from cabbageworm. Instead of sprinkling on a pesticide after the caterpillars hatch, you can cover the plants with a special fabric to prevent the butterflies from laying eggs in the first place.

Organic gardening is about preventing and treating problems in the least toxic and least invasive ways.

Working with Your Ecosystem

Plants and animals live in ecosystems — communities in which each part contributes to and affects the lives of the other parts. In a balanced ecosystem, each plant and animal species has enough food, water, and habitat (place to live). The predators have enough prey, and the prey have enough predators.

When one part of an ecosystem dies out or becomes too scarce, the plants and animals that depend on its function in the environment get out of balance, too. If honeybees disappeared, for example, the plants that need bees for flower pollination wouldn’t be able to produce seeds. If predators, such as ladybugs, become scarce, the insects they normally prey upon — aphids — could become so numerous that they would seriously injure or even kill the plants upon which they feed.

Some call this cycle the web of life, but ecosystems contain important nonliving parts, too. Soil nutrients, sunlight, water, and decaying plants and animals also contribute to the community health. When decayed organic material, called humus, becomes scarce, the soil microorganisms that feed on it die. Many of these microorganisms help release soil nutrients that plants need for growth. Without them, plants starve. Humus also holds moisture in the soil and helps soil particles stick together. When humus becomes depleted, the soil dries out too quickly, parching the plants and risking erosion.

Organic gardeners observe and use these natural relationships to grow healthy crops and landscape plants. For example, a gardener might shred the leaves that fall from his landscape trees and use them to mulch perennial flowers. The leaves suppress weeds and, as they decompose, they release plant nutrients and feed earthworms, which loosen and aerate the soil. When plants grow in such a balanced ecosystem, they receive all the nourishment they need from the soil and sun, and they bear plentiful flowers, fruits, and seeds. Insect pests and diseases do little long-term damage.

Taking from the soil without giving anything back breaks that natural cycle. Harvesting crops, bagging the lawn clippings, and raking fallen leaves removes organic material that’s ordinarily destined for the soil on which it falls. If the organic material isn’t replenished, the soil loses humus and its natural fertility. Substituting synthetic chemical fertilizers for naturally occurring nutrients may feed plants, but it starves the soil.

Pesticides also upset the natural balance. Using pesticides to kill insects deprives the pests’ natural predators of food, which causes the predators to decline, necessitating more pesticides to achieve pest control. It’s a vicious cycle. In addition, pesticides often kill more than their intended targets.  ....read more