Gardening is making me weird

Some of my organically grown radishes. That sounds pretty high-falootin' until you realize that it serves no purpose whatsoever to use chemicals on radishes.

Yesterday, I went - intentionally - to Dirty Jack's (where this beer is brewed) in Asheville to watch soccer, specifically the U.S. against England in the World Cup. As stunning as it was for the game; errr, match, to end in a tie, that unexpected turn of events paled in comparison to fact that I, a lifelong soccer mocker, was there.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, there are a myriad of potential explanations that I won't delve into because, you know, this is a gardening blog. But my erratic behavior can't be blamed on the chemicals in my garden. 'Cause I ain't usin' any.

It would be easy to deduce if you watch a lot of Fox news that my plants aren't drenched in the world's finest poisons simply because I've devolved into a soccer-lovin', cumbaya-singin' ideologue. Perhaps. I've tried, however, to justify this decision to myself more thoroughly.

When I moved into my house and found myself taking care of a yard for the first time, one of the first things I did was run out and buy one chemical to kill the bugs and another to kill the weeds (I also bought traditional lawn fertilizer, which I have also decided to eschew. More on that later). I was vaguely troubled by all the warnings to not let myself have any contact whatsoever with the strange-smelling stuff I was gleefully spraying and spreading everywhere, but that was how you were supposed to do it.

As the years went by, though, and my reading evolved past Sports Illustrated, I was no longer so gung-ho about raining death on the world around me. On a practical level, it was expensive. On a logical level, killing every single insect in order to get rid of a couple you don't like was an ignorant way, at best, to manage an ecosystem that I'm a part of whether I want to admit it or not. On a gut-feeling level, handling things that come in skull-and-crossbone adorned jugs seemed like something to be avoided. And on a moral level, I didn't like the idea of starving or even fatally poisoning higher animals on the food chain so one kind of grass could have a competitive advantage over another.

There had to be a better way, which there was. Guess what? My grass (and some other stuff) grows just fine fed by its own clippings and the occasional autumn overseeding, surviving even Boone and Chloe's relentless pee-bombing campaign. Fleas, ticks, roaches and ants have not left me pinned in the closet with a flashlight, a revolver and a nearly empty can of Raid. Oh yeah, I've also saved hundreds of dollars by weaning myself off of that entire aisle at Lowe's.

So naturally I brought this philosophy of living-in-instead-of-being-constantly-at-war-with-the-world-around-me to my garden - but not before I asked why. Why not use chemicals? Common consensus among environmental types is that pesticides will be bad for you if you eat the food on which they were used, but the truth is I haven't been able to find any hard science to back that up (here's a good link). A major caveat is that the population hasn't been exposed these poisons for very long, and there's a long list of things - generally man-made - that, surprise!, turned out to be bad for us after all. Still, the facts are the facts right now: Scientists say I won't die or even get sick if I use a few of their modern miracles to help my veggies grow. But you know what? I still don't want to. Part of it is the challenge, but the bigger motivation is that it goes against my world view.

Humans managed to feed themselves for hundreds of thousands of years without bullying and destroying everything else. All other animals do it every day still. Evidence continues to mount that at its current scale our new way ain't gonna work forever, maybe even not for long. "Traditional" farming destroys the soil. It eliminates genetic diversity, which has sort of been the key to survival for about a billion years. Even if pesticides aren't hurting me, they're hurting a lot of other living things through indiscriminate direct killing or tons - literally - of pollution, creating a cascading effect on the ecosystem that is felt by people and animals alike hundreds and even thousands of miles away.

That makes me feel icky, and I don't want to do it that way. So I won't.

On that note, I'll leave you with a fairly ironic picture of our cherry tree's first crop last month. Only four feet tall, it surprised us with about 25 berries. The irony arrives in the form of all of those cherries being eaten by birds before we could have even one. Isn't nature cute?