Greener gardening: More people turn to organics

I first thought hard about chemicals poisoning the Earth years ago when I wrote about a small group of naturalists that fought successfully to ban DDT from the fields of Long Island and save ospreys from extinction. Soon afterward, I thought even harder. That happened on a December night 11 years ago when I was getting ready for bed and my hand - for no reason I have ever been able to explain - strayed to my right breast and touched a lump.

I was lucky. I had a lumpectomy and 25 lymph nodes were removed, and I'm still here. But that spring of rebirth when I was nauseous from chemotherapy and burned by radiation, I tore up a large part of my front lawn to grow a combination vegetable-flower garden. My husband and I call it the Garden of Health and Joy. It's a metaphor for my life. So are the ospreys that show up once in a while to fish in the freshwater pond behind my house. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I'm a woman. I'm an 11-year breast cancer survivor. And my Garden of Health and Joy is organic. So is my lawn. Now that we can't hide from the truth, inconvenient or otherwise, more and more people are experiencing similar epiphanies.

People like Pat Shanley, president of the Manhattan Rose Society and an officer of the American Rose Society. She grows 150 rosebushes at her home on Nassau's North Shore. She grows hybrid musk roses such as Cornelia and Kathleen and a double white mini called Gourmet Popcorn and a shrub rose named Gartendirektor that grows six feet tall and almost as wide and several varieties of disease- and pest-resistant Knock Out.

"But they're roses that never have been and never will be sprayed with chemicals," she says. The same goes for all the beauty in her gardens - from daffodils to weeping cherry trees and hydrangeas to hostas.

Pat had been spraying for nearly a decade when she went organic. The catalyst was the death of her Harlequin Great Dane, Winston. "I sprayed the fungicide Daconil and Sevin, a pesticide that kills aphids and Japanese beetles and absolutely everything else. I'd suit up in long pants and long sleeves, a hat, goggles, a mask, gloves, socks and shoes."

The day is vivid in her mind: Winston running around the pond in the back of her property while Pat and her husband ate breakfast on the terrace. "I remember thinking, 'Look at Winston, he's in such great shape, he'll live a long time.'" She put him in the house after breakfast while she sprayed. He went outside again in the afternoon, but it wasn't long before he was at the door, sick to his stomach. She rushed him to an animal hospital, where he died.



'No more chemicals'

"Do I absolutely 100 percent know for certain that the chemicals killed him? No. But I know that dogs chew things. I know I sprayed my roses that day. And I had a perfectly healthy dog in the morning, and by four o'clock in the afternoon he was dead. Right then and there I vowed, 'No more spraying, no more chemicals.' I got rid of everything, and I never went back."

Pat lost many of the roses that couldn't make it without chemicals. But she kept replacing them with pest- and disease-resistant varieties, and she discovered Messenger, which she describes as "a naturally occurring protein that stimulates the immune system of plants." She also uses Peter Beales Complete Natural Rose Care, a new organic product from the world-renowned rose

grower, which is available at OrganicPlantHealthcare.com. And she considers the Knock Out family of roses "a dream come true."

"The roses look wonderful, and my pets are healthy and happy," Pat says. "I found that plants develop a natural resistance - now my roses just don't get black spot. Now I get butterflies in my garden, and I don't have as many aphids because I have ladybugs and praying mantises and birds. All in all, the ecosystem that is my yard works better without the sprays. Life without chemicals is good."

Going organic induces a desire to spread the message. If you need a prophet of the new way, try Steve Nowotarski of Massapequa Park. "I got religion," he says. "I'm going green in the dahlia garden."

Steve, who has a national reputation as a dahlia grower, saw the light last year when he read a book titled "Teaming with Microbes - A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web" by Jeff Lowenfels, who gardens in Alaska and - I know this from knowing Jeff - cares deeply about the earth.

"A whole new world opened up to me," Steve says. "It explained the complex subject of soil biology in an understandable way."

Last season, he experimented on his own plot of land and in the dahlia garden he helps tend at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay. He went organic in some beds; in the others he did things "the old-fashioned way": He used chemicals. Chemicals like miticides that kill spider mites - a dahlia scourge that wipes out plants by sucking moisture and nutrients from the foliage. As well as insecticides that do in aphids and whiteflies, and fungicides that stop stem rot, which can topple a two-foot-tall plant in 24 hours. Not to mention toxic slug baits because "you should see what a slug can do to a young tender dahlia; it breaks your heart." And of course there were the high-nitrogen synthetic fertilizers he used on his lawn as well as his garden.

"I used just about every combination of synthetic fertilizer and jumped at every new chemical that promised to kill all my pests and take care of every fungus," Steve says. When he read Jeff's book, a figurative lightbulb went on over his head. "I realized I wasn't just killing the bad things, I was killing everything. I was killing my soil."



A focus on the earth

So he turned his attention to the earth, where organic gardening begins. When the forsythia bloomed in spring, he sprinkled granular corn gluten meal - a natural protein that prevents the emergence of weeds - in his beds and borders. He stopped rototilling and raked nutrient-rich worm castings into the ground. He brewed compost tea with aerated water and served it to everything, drenching the soil and even spraying it on a bank of 9-foot-tall mite-infested arborvitae that screens his pool.

When he planted his dahlias in late May he mixed a cup of worm castings in each hole as well as a cup of organic Alaska Humus, which is available at Friendly Farms in East Meadow (friendly-farms.com). From mid-June into August, he fed his plants "weekly - weakly," as he likes to say, with hydrolyzed fish, then spritzed them with compost tea in early August.

What he got for his efforts were healthier plants with glossier foliage and more vividly colored flowers. "Everything was better-looking. And I won the $1,000 prize at the nationals in Chicago for Bo-De-O, which proves you can grow dahlias organically and still win awards."

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