Organic Home Gardening Movement Takes Root in the UK

Even greener than the greens
By Fiona Harvey
Published: February 17 2006
<http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d222536c-9ee9-11da-ba48-0000779e2340.html>
Financial Times - London, England, UK

Coffee grounds, old carpets, a few worms and some washing-up liquid. It does
not read like a promising list, but it should give you (nearly) everything
you need to help your garden grow in an environmentally sound fashion.

And increasing numbers of people are trying it out. As the popularity of
organic food rises, home gardeners have begun to grow their own organic
produce, and to tend their lawns and flowerbeds organically too. Spurning
artificial pesticides and fertilisers, they are turning ­ or returning ­ to
natural methods.

Zoë Appleton-Thomas has a small garden in London, in which she grows a
multitude of flowers ­ sunflowers, lilies, pansies, ornamental thistles,
tulips, nasturtiums and morning glory, set off by the jasmine creeping up
the walls. There are also fruits and vegetables, such as tomatoes,
courgettes, radishes, beans and squash. And all of them are grown
organically in pots. "You don¹t have to have acres and acres to be organic,"
she says. "You can have a little tub."

Helen Jolly, a nurse who took up gardening from scratch three years ago on
an allotment near Brighton, also found that going organic was much easier
than she had thought. "I was fed up with buying food in supermarkets that
had been flown halfway round the world, and with vegetables and fruits that
were not very nice anyway. Also I wanted to get outdoors more and get a bit
closer to nature," she explains.

The basic principles of organic gardening are fairly simple: avoid the
artificial, prefer the natural and if in doubt about the organic credentials
of anything you¹re planning to use on your soil or plants, check first in an
organic gardening manual or on one of the legion of organic gardening
websites that have sprung up all over the internet.

Anything that involves the reuse of materials is grist for the organic
gardener's mill. Take those old carpets, for instance. When laid down in the
garden with a bit of mulch on top, they act as an excellent weed
suppressant. Cut holes in the carpets in the places where your plants are to
come up and only they will be able to grow, with no weeds.
Scientists discovered a few years ago that coffee grounds are excellent
deterrents to slugs and snails, providing an alternative to artificial
pellets. Caffeine kills the creatures in concentrations of between 1 and 2
per cent in liquid, and a cup of instant coffee contains about only 0.05 per
cent caffeine. But even weak solutions, as low as 0.01 per cent caffeine,
are sufficient to stop slugs from feeding. Conversely, beer attracts slugs
and snails, so half-burying a glass in the border can act as a trap, luring
them to a liquid and drunken death. Although, says east London gardener
Clive Pankhurst, "fishing drowned slugs out of beer traps in the night can
get very tedious".

Washing-up liquid can be used to kill insects. It might not seem strictly
natural, but it¹s much more friendly than the alternative of harsh chemical
sprays. Rather gruesomely, soap works by suffocating the insects, preventing
them from breathing through their spiracles.

Home gardeners feeling guilty about murdering all these creepy crawlies, no
matter now natural the method, can salve their conscience with careful
cultivation of worms. A wormery is fun for the kids and a way to turn much
kitchen waste into a nutritious plant feed. This is much more
environmentally friendly than leaving the waste to rubbish collectors, since
food decomposing in landfills gives rise to methane, a potent greenhouse
gas. Wormeries work even if your organic garden is a window-box, as they can
be kept in the kitchen.

Another must for organic gardeners are compost heaps, where kitchen and
garden waste is broken down to a fertiliser. These sound like a lot of work,
but they don't need to take up much space and can be managed with relatively
little attention. "It's really not that hard, because things tend to
decompose whether you want them to or not," Appleton-Thomas says. ³Just"
leave them open to the elements and after a while you have compost."

Manure also acts as an effective environmentally friendly fertiliser, but
choosing the right kind is important, Jolly says. Some can come from farm
animals that have been raised in factory-like conditions and may have been
fed with antibiotics or genetically modified food. To avoid this, choose
horse manure where possible, since horses are not factory farmed and are
generally well looked-after, as leisure animals rather than meat.

An alternative is ³green manure², which is made by growing a crop of plants
during the winter ­ when nothing much else is alive ­ that you will simply
plough back into the earth rather than keeping. Good plants for this purpose
are those that "fix" nitrogen, an important nutrient, into the soil, such as
legumes or mustard.

There are some big no-nos for organic gardeners. Peat is commonly on sale as
a bedding compost in garden centres but is severely frowned upon because of
the destruction its harvesting entails. Formed in bogs over thousands of
years, the peat is ripped up by mechanical diggers, destroying an ancient
and unique natural habitat for many species of plants and animals. There are
plenty of alternatives.

Also to be avoided are any invasive species of plant, which have been
introduced from other parts of the world and have taken up residence, often
to the detriment of native flora. Examples include Spanish bluebell, which
was introduced into the UK as a decorative garden plant and has nearly wiped
out the more delicate native bluebell in the wild in some areas. Another is
parrot¹s feather, a pond plant that can choke waterways. Shockingly, some
garden centres continue to sell invasive plants, so it can be a good idea to
check on a website such as www.plantlife.org.uk