by Sam E. Jones

Created on: July 05, 2010

Mother Nature has been working for millions of years on nature’s garden, and somehow she managed to get by without using phosphates and extreme amounts of heavy metals. Instead, she relied on the action of microscopic organisms to break down dead plant and animal matter, the occasional rain and snow, and the feces and urine of the animals that that lived and thrived on those plants that grew. It all worked very nicely and neatly.

And then people came along and at first replicated Mother Nature’s methods; but then decided after awhile that it just wasn’t good enough, so they started adding extra nitrates, and phosphates, and chemicals that had never existed before in the natural world, and the crops grew bigger and faster so everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done. But then, people started noticing that they needed more and more fertilizer to get the same results, because the fertilizer had damaged the soils’ ability to rejuvenate itself. So, they added more and decided to worry about it later. But then, there was a bad year; the rains didn’t come and soil dried up and eventually started to blow away. It picked up the dust that had once been soil and carried it from one end of the continent to the other, eventually dumping most of it in the ocean. And the people starved.

But then they figured out how to tap into the water below the earth, and so order was restored even as the aquifers were being drained. All was well, the crops were growing again, just not in ways that could ever be sustained if they fertilizers were to stop.

And this is the reason you should use only natural fertilizer on your vegetable garden; because man-made fertilizer doesn’t replenish the soil, it only feeds the plants. Thus, the soil becomes barren after only a few years, only able to grow anything if those same man-made fertilizers are applied. People should instead create their own fertilizer the way Mother Nature did; by composting dead plant and animal material, and then tossing in the occasional manure and urine, which you can add yourself quite naturally.

But also because no one really knows what chemical fertilizers do to the human body, especially when you consider that the chemical fertilizer that is sold to gardeners, rather than full scale farmers is not the same stuff. Instead, gardeners are sold products like Miracle Grow which was developed for use on flowers. No one knows what it does to the human body, because it’s not been used long enough, nor have any real studies been undertaken. That seems reason enough to avoid its use, don’t you think?

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