“It’s a Great, Wide, Chemical World That We Live In”

© Eddie Rhoades
BittersweetGardens.Com

Harry Abel had been telling me what a great nursery Habersham Gardens is. It took quite a while before Linda and I found the time to go there. Harry was right, they had wonderful plants plus they had lots of garden ornaments and yard art.

It wasn’t until later that I asked Linda if she’d noticed anything different about Habersham. It had dawned on me that they didn’t sell any chemicals! The more I thought about it, the more I felt that’s the way it should be. Of course there are lots of nurseries and garden shops that do sell chemicals, and do you know why? Because we buy them. We are a society that believes there is a chemical solution to almost every problem: Car won’t start? Spray it with Rapid-start. Carburetor sticking? Use Gum-out. Spray your tires with Armor-All, your windshield with Windex, and this is just your car. Look at our gardens. Does it make sense to put 20-10-10 fertilizer on your lawn to make it grow, then as soon as it does you whack it off with a lawn mower?

Nobody’s going through the forest spreading 10-10-10 yet those plants are doing fine, in fact, that’s where all plants come from in the first place. We fertilize too much and we spray too much.