Let’s face it, these days it is cool to be Green.. In this new found popularity, the environmental community (often labeled as tree huggers) has found whole new voice. More and more people are driving hybrids, recycling curbside, using CFL’s, and eating organic, all in an effort to reduce our strain on the environment and live healthier.
A big step towards this collective effort is right out our front doorstep. According to NASA, there are over 31 million acres of turf in the United States, that is over 50,0000 square miles. And, on all of that turf, over 70 million pounds of active pesticide are dumped. And then there’s the dead zone issue in our open water areas regularly blamed on the farmer, however, the application rate of herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizer is on average ten times more per acre on a homeowner’s yard, than in agriculture.
It’s easy to think that the few bags of chemicals we use to green up the lawn and keep it weed and pest free are really just a drop in the bucket, but cumulative effect is mounting.
So, easy fix. Everyone just stop using conventional lawn chemicals and go organic. Hard sell to the typical American homeowner who is uses the reactive style of landscape fertility. . . Grass is yellowing? Add fertilizer. Fungal problem? Fungicide. Pest problem? Pesticide. Pesky dandelions? Herbicide. And so on.
This cycle persists indefinitely because the landscape doesn’t have the ability to fight its own battles, or you might say it is lacking an immune system. Just as a cough suppressant temporarily stops the hacking, a chemical additive to a landscape can quickly quiet the symptom, while doing nothing to correct the underlying problem.
I like to equate a synthetic fertilizer to a sugary energy drink. After all the stimulants and quick calories hit your system, you may feel, act, and maybe even look like you are healthy, vibrant and ready to for anything. After the high wears off, you often feel less energized than even before you had the drink, finding yourself craving another pick-me-up. This cycle can wear out your system, and since you are substituting real nourishment for an empty stimulant, you eventually get weaker.
This is very much what we see in a chemical landscape. All synthetic fertilizers are in the form of a salt. Salts dissolve easily in water, making them highly available to the plant in large quantities. This produces the quick “green up” experienced from synthetic fertilizers. After the synthetic fertilizer passes by the plant leaf and root, its high solubility also makes it great at leaching or running off . . . often into our water sheds. The environmental issues aside for now, the plant is soon left hungry again. The high N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) synthetic fertilizer didn’t provide the plant with a balance and sustaining meal.
Also, what happens when you poor salt on anything full of water? It dehydrates. In the soil, nature has created a complex “soil food web” of organisms that have evolved with plants over the millennia to live symbiotically. The plant roots excrete sugars and proteins into the soil to attract and feed microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes. In return, the organisms act as the “gut” for the plant, breaking down and pre-digesting complex nutrients, and making them table ready for the plant to take up. As the plant needs different foods, it sends a chemical signal to the soil organisms to “fetch” whatever it may need. These necessary creatures are, like humans, mostly water, and are quickly pickled when salts are regularly poured on them.
In an organic landscape, the goal is to feel the soil, and let the soil take care of feeding the plant. In this process, the plant gets what it needs, when it needs it, providing the soil is fortified.
Now, think of a pesticide/fungicide as being a broad spectrum antibiotic. An antibiotic is a necessary tool in the modern world that allows us to combat a bacterial invasion to strong for our immune system to handle. A great tool when used properly, highly degenerating when used improperly.
Ideally, we want to be strong enough to fight whatever invader may come with our own immunity, including white blood cells and the beneficial microorganisms found in the intestines, skin, eyes, etc. When we are unhealthy from poor diet, lack of sleep, lack of exercise and too much stress, we lack the ability to fight.
Same applies in the plant world. When the plant lives on a nutritionally poor diet, and in biologically dead soil, disease and pests are naturally drawn. It is nature’s way of weeding out the sick. It has been shown in many studies, pests can actually sense the chemical stress signals emitted from a sickly plant, and hence will be drawn to the weak. In a healthy plant environment, leaf and root surfaces are physically covered with beneficial bacteria, fungi, etc., who stand guard and out-compete the disease causing organisms for food and space. This creates a natural barrier for disease and pests to access the plant.
A chemical/ conventional system makes the plant so dependent on the constant chemical inputs (energy drinks and antibiotics), that without those being regularly dosed, they cannot stand on their own and soon “crash”. The more chemicals applied, the more the plant can’t live without them.
The paradigm shift has been made, and the homeowner decides to go completely organic. So, now why doesn’t my grass look as good anymore?
The organic industry sometimes calls this “taking the rug off the drug”. Depending on how dead the soil is, and how dependent the plant is on the drug, there may be a transition period where the landscape actually has to de-tox and repopulate all the beneficial microorganisms.
This process can be sped up through the use of high quality compost, liquid compost, and other soil building amendments. The compost, if it was made properly, will have the high quantities of beneficial microorganisms to help create the necessary structure in the soil to grab and hold nutrients and water for the plant to use as needed. The EPA has even stated that the use of compost and liquid compost can reduce the use of water up to 50%.
What is liquid compost? Often, it is too impractical and expensive to spread out the amount of high quality compost needed to attain the desired effect. Instead, there is technology that can actually extract the nutrients and organisms from the compost into a liquid form so it can easily be sprayed out to foliar feed, and inoculate the soil and leaf surfaces with the good critters.
In a balance program of organic soil nutrients and beneficial microorganisms, we can successfully see a landscape fully convert into a naturally healthy environment, as nature intended.
Thankfully we need not to figure out this process alone. Many non and for profit groups have compiled “how to” information to get on the right track. Check out Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) www.pesticide.org , www.dirtdoctor.com and www.safelawns.org to read helpful information on the why’s and how’s of organic land care.
