Greener Gardening - One Weekend at a Time

Even a hint of sunshine or the wafting scent of a flower on the wind stirs the heart and brings joy to Winter-weary humans. If you're a gardener, those small moments stir, instead, the need to get your hands dirty, play with well-composted manure, and scour the garden store for little plants just waiting for you to take them home and help them realize their full potential.

Whether you garden on a 5th floor patio, in an urban back yard, or on acreage in the suburbs or rural America, you can turn your passion for gardening into a tool for improving your own health, improving your families health, and making the whole world a healthier place.

Organic gardening, gardening without artificial soil additives, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or other man-made materials, applies to growing any plant, tree, shrub, or bulb. You can start gardening organically today by making one small change in your current gardening habits.

This Hub is here to help you add organic techniques to your gardening repertoire, one day at a time.

Organic gardening means working in concert with nature. The modern garden store is full of thousands of plants, all of them beautiful, but many of them never having set root on our continent until a human brought a start, or a seed, or a plant to our shores and stuck it in the ground.

Some of these "alien" plants seem like natives because they are everywhere. The common foxglove is an alien plant. English ivy is a gift from our English ancestors. And the ever present dandelion? A native of Africa, Asia and Europe.

These aliens love North America so much, they have nearly taken over. Other aliens, like tomatoes, are from climates so different from ours that we find ourselves having to invent ever more elaborate cold frames, water walls, greenhouses, and other environments in hopes of coaxing a few of the red, round orbs into ripeness.

Gardening requires many fewer chemicals and artificial aides if you plant plants used to living in your city, state, region, or country. Today, when you go to the garden center, look for plants whose ancestors evolved right here in North America.

Called "native" plants, these hardy beauties are often found on roadsides, riversides, lake banks, meadows, forests, in deserts, and on high, alpine mountains. Two examples are shown below.

When you plant a native plant in your garden, you are adding something for which natural pollinators are already plentiful, temperature ranges are what the plant expects, pests that may attack it have predators just waiting to swoop down and gobble them for dinner, and the soil in your garden is just what your green friend hopes to find.

All this, of course, is true if you have not killed off the pollinators, pests, and predators with chemical pesticides or fungicides; you have not depleted the soil of its natural nutrients with chemical fertilizers; and you checked before planting to make sure you are giving the plant the amount of sun, shade, and moisture that best suits it.