Growing Your Own
How should I go about growing my own organic food?
The best way to grow your organic food is probably to start small to begin with, so you can grow tomatoes and strawberries and imports, you can grow herb imports as well; so you might want to start off small. If you get on successfully with it then you can perhaps dig a patch in your garden, if you've got one. There's a brilliant organization called Garden Organic who has shown what you can do with a small amount of land and how you can grow all kinds of vegetables that are really quite easy to grow. So they're a really good organization to contact -- Garden Organic. The main elements are not to use chemicals to kill your pests and to apply composted manure and your home composts as well as growing things that add nutrients to the soil, like peas and beans and other nitrogen fixing crops.
What are the key things I need to do to keep it organic?
The main thing you'll need to do to maintain your patch as organic is to apply compost. This adds all kinds of nutrients to your soil. Weed by hand, and things in your garden like ponds and bird boxes, so they will be your pest-eaters. If you keep your garden as wildlife friendly as possible, you're much less likely to have a problem with pests.
How can I avoid pests and disease without using chemicals?
When planting a garden and growing your own produce, you can avoid pests and diseases by providing places for wild life. Ducks and hedgehogs will eat snails. Hedge hogs like lots of leaves as well. You can use nettles soaked in water for fertiliser when growing your own. Attracting certain types of bugs can help prevent other types of pests. Slug rings are also useful. Use different types of plants to work together and help each other avoid pests and diseases.
What are the best things to use for fertiliser?
The best things to use for fertilizer in your organic patch are nettles, to soak a load of nettles in water for a few months and then you can pour the water onto the patch and that's a really good source of fertilizer and to use your compost. So if you keep your vegetable peelings and fruit peelings, once you've stacked it for a certain amount of time, like 6 months or so, that then actually ferments down and becomes an incredibly rich source of fertilizer; those are the two main things.
What costs are involved in growing organic produce?
For the gardener, the only costs involved in growing organic produce would be buying the seeds or the plants. You can spend more money; if you wanted to, you could buy a compost bin, but you could equally make one yourself out of planks. There really aren't any more costs involved at all in organic gardening. You're in fact actually probably saving costs, because you're not buying expensive chemicals. You might want to build a pond, but really the only sort of outlay you'd have to make for organic gardening would be the actual seeds themselves.
Do organic vegetable growers use human manure as fertiliser?
No. Under organic farming standards, human manure is not allowed. But obviously, as a gardener, you could use human manure because you're really allowed to do what you want because there's no one checking it but under organic farm standards, human manure is not allowed.
How can I ensure my soil is up to organic standards?
The best thing you can do is to apply as much dead matter to your soil as possible, so dead leaves, composted manure; all that. All that organic material actually then breaks down, and it's the life within the soil that then transforms that into food for the plants. So, if you can just add as much of this as possible to the soil, then you're well on the way. The number of earthworms you have in the soil is a really good indication of how healthy your soil is. Earthworms aerate the soil, so the soil is more able to hold water, and improve the structure of the soil as well. So, the more earthworms you have in the soil the better it is. That's a good indication.
