Paradigm shift needed

One characteristic of the post-World War II era was cheery optimism about the potential for solving problems with synthetic chemicals. Perhaps the best example was DDT, which was going to rid the world of insect-borne disease. Look how well that turned out.

Spraying DDT over Oregon forest, 1955

    In the fifties and sixties, we all tended to trust safety and effectiveness claims for household and garden chemicals. Synthetic fertilizer was going to make soil stewardship irrelevant by spreading unlimited quantities of the basic plant nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. We learned that doing this destroys soil fertility while causing dead lakes and rivers as fertilizer runs off fields and lawns into nearby waterways.

Fertilizer runoff causing algae overgrowth and eutrophication

    There was 2,4-D, invented as a defoliant during the war and brought home as Scotts Weed and Feed to eliminate broad-leaved weeds from American lawns. 

     Imagine what would have happened if Scotts had brought home Agent Orange from the Vietnam War—by then, public attitudes toward war materials had shifted significantly. Since the 1940s, 2,4-D has taken us down a path toward increasing insistence on monocultural lawns, with all the water and chemical inputs necessary to maintain them.

Grass doesn't grow this way naturally

    The 1970s brought Roundup (glyphosate), marketed by Monsanto as a benign product to spare us the trouble of bending down to pull weeds. 

Roundup is ubiquitious

By the 1980s, genetically engineered “Roundup-ready” crops resistant to the herbicide enabled spraying this product on agricultural fields. Farmers took up the practice on a massive scale. As a result, we’re all eating Roundup, which a United Nations agency has declared a probable human carcinogen, a hormone disruptor, and a contributor to antibiotic resistance.

    Neonicotinoid pesticides, my garden nemesis, are the next in this series of chemicals first thought to be harmless. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the most commonly used pesticides were organophosphates, which had high toxicity for humans, other mammals, and birds. Neonics are safer for the people applying them, and since the nineties they have dominated the market, used for treating both seeds and growing plants. 

     Now we know that neonics are very persistent in plant tissues and toxic to many insects, including honeybees and other pollinators. 

Neonics poison pollinators

I recently learned that some insects have already developed resistance to neonics. That’s the predictable result of widespread use of any pesticide, analogous to development of antibiotic resistance in treated bacteria.

    Maybe we can stop thinking about living systems in such simplistic ways. Instead of charging in with blunt instruments like herbicides and pesticides, we need to think about what keeps natural systems in balance. Diverse populations and healthy growing conditions help plants to weather the onslaught of pests and diseases. Every organism has its place in a natural community.

Biodiversity protects plant health

    Insect populations are dropping worldwide. We need insects if we’re going to continue living on earth. Times have changed since the fifties. We’ve stopped watching TV Westerns. Let’s also stop thinking of plants and insects as good guys versus bad guys.

Nature or "all-natural" products?

There’s a thriving market for organic lawn care in my town. These contractors offer periodic fertilizing and even pest control with certified organic products. 

Organic lawn service

Intrigued, I met with Jim Agabedis of Minuteman Landscaping in June 2013 to see about switching to lawn care on sustainable principles.

    Jim had a lot of sensible advice to offer. Some was about switching to better-informed practices, such as letting clippings compost in place on the lawn, changing mower blades frequently so they cut rather than tear the grass, weeding by hand instead of spreading weed killer, and aerating sections of lawn where telltale plantain indicates compaction. 

Could the lawn benefit from organic methods?

Another part of his advice was about “product.” That’s where I started to feel ambivalent.
 

    Jim had a compelling story of how he decided to switch from conventional to organic lawn care. He started his business while he was still in college and built it up to 360 accounts. Then an acquaintance shared a one-page article on lawn care without chemicals, and he had an epiphany. 

     Most of his clients didn’t make the transition to organic, but he fought his way back. He said it’s worth it to avoid practices and products that could make people or pets sick. 

Not the approach Jim was aiming for

The lawns his company cares for testify to the effectiveness of his method.

     I didn’t end up hiring Jim’s company. I was looking for weekly lawn mowing informed by organic principles. He was offering something more ambitious: a commitment to a beautiful organic lawn. For me, it’s not worth the money, and it's not the direction I'm heading.
 
    I could see that Jim’s approach was better than conventional lawn care, but I balked at the idea of a lawn, or any other garden area, depending on application of lots of purchased products for health or survival. Jim proposed to apply benign products such as compost pellets and compost tea. 

Spreading compost on a lawn

That’s the organic approach I’d pursue if I had enough time, motivation, and compost to get serious about lawn care. 

     Ideally, though, the compost I’d apply to our lawn would be made up of decomposed materials from our own yard. That way I’d be imitating the natural soil cycle, where organic materials such as leaves and branches decompose on the ground and build soil. 

Organic material cycles back into soil

    I have a problem with replacing chemicals from the garden center or big box store—weed killers, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer—with pricey organic products purporting to fill the same roles. It’s better than the old way, but it’s still a paradigm we should be moving away from.

     Now I see the garden as a community of plants and animals. I aim to enrich and protect it by letting natural processes do their work freely, 

Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooming this week

rather than just by replacing synthetic products with store-bought “natural” ones.


This is SEG’s 100th post! Thanks for reading. It’s great to know that we share the same gardening pleasures and concerns.

Front yards that time forgot

I live in a suburb with a firm code for front yard landscaping. The norm is evergreen foundation plantings—yews, hemlocks, rhododendrons, azaleas—with a well-tended lawn flowing toward the street, and possibly a privet hedge along the sidewalk.

    From the point of view of sustainable gardening, this traditional approach poses a lot of problems. Most of those evergreen shrubs are species imported from Asia that won’t provide native insects with food they need. 

    The lawn is a monocultural desert, especially if it’s fertilized and treated with pesticides and broadleaf herbicides to keep it green and weed-free. Over-fertilizing is all too easy, leading to accumulation of excess nitrates and phosphates in ponds and rivers via stormwater runoff. Pesticides and herbicides reduce biological diversity and interfere with the full functioning of the food web—not to mention the risk many of these chemicals pose to human health.

    Mowing the lawn is another environmental “don’t,”  because gas-powered lawnmowers are heavy polluters and inefficient users of fossil fuels.

    Then there’s the privet hedge. Privet (Ligustrum species) is a nonnative genus of shrubs introduced to North America as early as the sixteenth century. It’s popular because it takes well to shearing, and its leaves contain a chemical that inhibits insects’ digestion. 

A privet hedge marks the boundary of this property

Birds eat the black fruit and distribute the seeds, allowing privet to escape into the wild, crowding out native plants in fields and forest gaps.

    People are still installing this classic formula of lawn and nonnative shrubs, but there’s a trend toward a more sustainable approach. One of my neighbors, Doris Lewis, is a front yard revolutionary. There’s no lawn in front of her house at all. When the house was built, she designed a beautiful combination of trees, shrubs, perennials and groundcovers that make a lovely vista for passersby. It’s much lower maintenance than a grass lawn and doesn’t require mowing, chemical fertilizer, or pesticides. 

Doris incorporated roses and small trees in her front yard design

    Short of Doris’ radical rethink, there’s an incremental, sustainable-enough approach to the front yard that I’ve tried to embrace. It involves minimizing lawn, avoiding use of landscape chemicals, and planting native substitutes for problematic nonnatives such as privet. At present I have no front lawn, and I’m starting to integrate some native plants to liven up the boring shrubs in front of the house. 

An oak leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) is a new addition to the front yard

I notice that some neighbors are trimming away lawn to plant insect-friendly perennials and shrubs too.

    If your front yard is sunny, there’s another way to go. A friend who was part of the local food movement told me that when she saw a front lawn, she thought of it as wasted space for growing vegetables. I’m not aware of front yard vegetable gardens in my neighborhood, but I know they’re thriving in other areas. 

Raised beds in front of the Becker School in Austin, Texas

I recently heard a determined urban gardener describe successfully growing cucumbers right next to her parking spot at the front of her house, inspired by what she considered the outrageous price of organic cukes at Whole Foods. That's the wave of the future.

Full circle in a lifetime

My generation has lived through a sea change in how we conceptualize soil and fertilizer. We’ve come a long way from uncritical acceptance of chemical products after World War II.

       Today every school child hears about how the soil cycle works.  In undisturbed fields and forests, nature returns nutrients and organic material to the soil through a continuing process. Plants use sunlight, water and soil components to grow. Dead leaves and branches fall to the ground, decompose, and feed soil organisms that in turn provide nutrients for the next generation of plants. 

Leaves decompose into soil

    To understand how soil can be improved, New England school children learn that the Wampanoags added a fish to the hole when planting their hills of squash, beans and corn. As the fish decomposed, it fertilized the plants.

    So why didn’t I hear about building soil when I was growing up? It was because of something that happened between New England’s bucolic past and my birth in the Baby Boom.

    In the early twentieth century, German chemists invented an industrial process for fixing nitrogen from air, ushering in a radical change in the way farmers and gardeners thought about soil fertility. For a while it seemed as if synthetic fertilizer would replace traditional soil amendments such as manure and composted plant material. 
 
    During the twentieth century, the combination of manufactured high-nitrogen fertilizer, new high-yield grain varieties, and potent pesticides like DDT enabled the developed world to increase food production. Starting in the 1960s, a Green Revolution followed for areas of the Third World where famine was a chronic killer.

      I didn’t know it when I first encountered chemical fertilizer at age four, but I was living in a unique era in gardening history. Because I grew up with them, I thought those bags of 5-10-10 had always been around. Before the slogan became a joke for druggies, I remember a DuPont poster in my tenth grade chemistry classroom touting “Better Things for Better Living . . . Through Chemistry.” 
 
    But there was a dark side to farming with the new chemicals. Starting in 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened Americans to the dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, exposing how DDT spread its lethal effects up the food chain. Meanwhile, soil scientists were noticing that intensive crop production with chemical fertilizer did not maintain soil fertility, and soil and water were being poisoned by over-fertilization and overuse of irrigation.

    As Americans questioned conventional ideas in the sixties and seventies, J. I. Rodale’s magazine Organic Gardening started to gain traction. Rodale had founded his magazine in 1942, with Albert Howard, a British pioneer of the organic movement, as associate editor. Organic techniques hadn’t completely died out with the advent of chemical fertilizer, of course, but there had been enough mass forgetting that the ideas Rodale proselytized were initially regarded as somewhere between cranky and dangerous. As the counterculture grew, his message found receptive readers.

    Seventy-four years after OG’s birth, there’s organic food available in every supermarket, and gardeners like me aim to improve soil without chemical fertilizer. Living through such a radical change in point of view makes me wonder what shibboleths the next generation will find to be dangerous and unjustified.