Home Gardening Benefits

Home gardening is gaining popularity in the United States, where renewed interest in self-sufficiency and green living has become widespread. Backyard fruit and vegetable gardens are part of a larger shift toward ecological consciousness and bioregional cuisine. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) encourages the use of home gardens and provides resources that enable success. However, despite its benefits, backyard gardening is also associated with many drawbacks

Nutrition: The nutritional value of food is largely a function of its vitamin and mineral content. In this regard, organically grown food is dramatically superior in mineral content to that grown by modern conventional methods. Because it fosters the life of the soil organic

Drought Resistance

Organically grown plants are more drought tolerant. This was dramatically illustrated to me several years ago when I was fortunate to attend a workshop with Australian organic gardening guru Peter Bennett. A slide he showed us has stuck in my mind ever since: it was a field of wheat, organically grown on re-mineralized soil.

Bisecting the ripening green crop was a wide yellowed strip that had already finished growing and hayed off. He explained that the strip had been nourished using agrichemical fertilizer early in the growing period.

Because chemical fertilizer is soluble, plants are forced to imbibe it every time they are thirsty for water. They can and do enjoy good growth as long as water is readily available. As soon as water becomes limited, however, the soluble nutrient salts in the cells of chemically fed plants are unable to osmotically draw sufficient water to maintain safe dilution. They soon reach toxic concentrations, and the plant stops growing, hays off and dies earlier than it otherwise would have.

Added

Organic farming benefits food production without destroying our environmental resources, ensuring sustainability for not only the current but also future generations.

Cultivation

While their conventional counterparts may sow by direct drilling of seed into herbicide treated soils, organic farmers are usually at least partly dependent on cultivation to remove weeds prior to sowing. In contrast to cultivation, direct drilling does not mechanically disrupt soil structure and removes the risk of exposed soil being lost to wind or water erosion.

This is a valid argument where farmers are working marginal quality soils. However, the structure of agrichemically-deadened soils is weakened by the corresponding loss of soil life and thus unable to maintain its integrity under occasional cultivation. So it’s a circular argument!

Structurally sound (life-rich) soils may be cultivated regularly without significant damage, particularly if protected appropriately by windbreaks and Keyline soil conservation