Pesticides

Before The 3 Day Weekend, Please Reconsider Pesticide Use

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If you read my little “Introduction,” it says that I’ve been an organic gardener since 1994. What it should really say is that I’ve been totally organic since then. Before I had been primarily organic, but if something really got out of control, I might resort to a chemical control. In 1994, when I realized I had no butterflies on my property and that butterflies were extremely sensitive to pesticides, I completely swore off them, cold-turkey. As my long-time readers know, my husband, the Spoiler, is not quite so committed, however.

But on occasion, I’ll come across something that just makes my jaw drop and makes me think that even I’ve been living under a rock.

The other day, I was reading something–I don’t even recall what–and it made a passing reference to a golfer who passed away in 1982 after playing 36 holes of golf on a pesticide treated golf course.

At first I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of golf, ” but then I googled the story. I won’t link to it here because I don’t know the real outcome–I suspect it’s been suppressed. Suffice it to say the 36 rounds of golf were over 3 days–and the man was a Navy pilot, a fitness freak, self-described, who had complained of illness when playing on this course before. He died a grotesque and horrible death. The pesticide is still on the market and is sold to the home gardener for use on edible crops.

Better yet, this is not the only report of illness linked to this pesticide and the EPA lists it as a probable carcinogen–and yet, this weekend, we can all waltz right into our garden centers and big box sores and get it if we have a few spots on our plants–because it is a fungicide.

So I ask you all, please, to reconsider what you’re doing in the garden.

Just in Time for Spring–More Weedkillers!

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Well, you knew this was coming, didn’t you?  Round-up ready crops and the over use of Round-up has spawned–what else–Round-up resistant weeds.  So what would be the natural solution to that?  More and more potent weed killers of course, at least in the midst of the chemical companies.

You can read about the proposal here in an article from a web site called Natural News.  I see it has the same problem I had for a few brief moments last July–even as I try to be all organic and sustainable, WordPress was putting ads for Round-up and Scott’s weed killer on the site without my permission and without my knowledge because I couldn’t see them when I logged in to do a post.  I wonder if Natural News knows it is advertising gallons of glysophate on its web site?

But I digress.  If any of you have tried to kill bugs with bug killer or weeds with weed killer, you may know that at first you may get some good results, but gradually, as the ecosystem weakens, the result you get is less and less good, so that you need more and more of whichever poison you are using.  Then the insects or weeds become immune so you need to switch poisons and after a brief time you start to wonder, “What am I doing here, using all this poison just to kill….?”

Or at least that’s what you do if you pay attention and you’re somewhat sensible about it.  There are those who never seem to catch on and who just keep going back for the latest and greatest and strongest poisons, never caring that their children and pets are playing in the same yards where all those chemicals are being applied.

The 2-4D that Monsanto wants to use to replace Round-up as its next weed killer du jour is hardly harmless.  If you don’t believe me, “google” it.  I have no children but I do have pets and it’s fairly lethal to them in the studies I’ve read.

And anecdotally, back in the day, when my husband was still using a weed killer with 2 4D  in granular form on the lawn, he reported a horrifying incident to me:  he was spreading it in the spreader, on a lovely spring day, and our birds were hopping all around.  Because it was  in granular form, it must’ve looked like seeds to some of them.  He said he watched a robin eat some of it and keel over dead. 

 Is this the kind of stuff we want to be using around our homes and families?  Thankfully, it cured him of the stuff!

But I don’t know what it will take to cure Americans of their obsession with weeds–or their need to be free of them.  Perhaps we ought to learn to be a little more tolerant–some of them can be very pretty, and others make great salads–if they’re not loaded up with toxic pesticides.