Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.