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So, why Organic?
Many of you will be aware of Organic Standards and how they apply to food. The idea that your meat or veg are produced responsibly without the use of any nasty chemicals or genetically modified shenanigans is something that most people now appreciate, but why should people who grow bulbs want to get involved? Well, it is all quite simple. When you buy from us you can rest assured that your plants or bulbs have not been fed, irrigated, chemically enhanced or otherwise messed about with. Most of the plants that we grow have been growing wild in this country for many years and have done so without any help from us, so we reasoned that if it wasn’t broke, then we were not going to try and fix it.
The practice of ‘forcing’ bulbs has been around for as long as people have been growing them commercially. The idea is that they are grown in temperature-controlled glass houses where they get just the right amount of water each day and get fed just the right amount of food at just the right time and that is all very well and good. The only problem is that once you purchase one of theses bulbs and trot happily down your garden to plant your purchase, the bulb has to cope with the legendary English weather. Once planted in the garden, the bulb is not protected from the elements and does not receive its regulation watering or is ideally timed feed. Not wishing to anthropomorphosise the bulb, but it is more than likely that it will get the right hump about it.
In order to avoid this situation, we grow all our bulbs as nature intended. They are outside and open to the elements. The rain waters them, the soil feeds them and we think that they are better for it.
We decided to undergo conversion to full Organic status with the Soil Association so that we could put an official stamp on the way that we grow and so that our customers know that everything we grow is done so without the use of chemicals or controlled growing conditions.
Low Environmental Impact Gardening.
In addition to becoming certified by the Soil Association, we at Orchard Nurseries have adopted a policy of Low Environmental Impact Growing.
There has been a lot in the news of late concerning the impact that our lifestyles can have on the world around us. One of the most popular media buzzwords is Carbon Footprint. This is basically a way of attempting to measure how much filth is pumped into the atmosphere in order for us to have whatever it is that we want.
Most people, whether they care about such things or not, have got used to the idea that motor vehicles cause pollutants and wasting energy is generally a bad thing, and we are told to buy responsibly from people that tell us they are not harming the environment in producing whatever it is that they have made. We all know that an item of clothing that has been made just down the road from us and taken to the local market by horse drawn cart is going to have had far less impact on the world than the one made by children in India, flown to the UK and driven to its destination on the supermarket shelves. The only problem is that the one in the supermarket costs a fraction of the one from the market and there is a recession on don’t you know.
Gardening is often thought of as something that is very friendly to the environment. It must be mustn’t it? I mean we are planting plants and growing things and making the world just a little bit greener.
Having asked around a little, it became apparent that hardly anyone that we talked to had thought about where the plants come from that they have put in their gardens. A shrub, for example, may have been grown in Surrey, in a heated and irrigated greenhouse, transported to the Garden Centre by lorry, where it is kept in a heated and artificially lit building until it is sold. Once sold, it is placed in the back of the car and driven home. As you can see, a fair amount of energy has been used to get this ‘green’ item to you home.
All that is most certainly true but we grow on a commercial scale and thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the way that we do things and the way that other growers do them and see if there is a better way.
The first thing we looked at was energy usage. We have never used a great deal of electricity as we work mainly during the hours of daylight and are not using any for heat, but we did feel that the amount of fuel used to keep the grass at bay over the summer was something we needed to address. To this end we have now stopped using any machinery to cut the grass and instead we use approximately eighty sheep over the summer months to keep the grass in check.
We now collect enough rainwater to enable us to get our mains water usage down to zero.
Finally, we use all the unused hay bales from the area too. These are ones that have been left out in the rain or are too old to use for horses. The hay works very well as a weed suppressant and once used can be rotted down and mixed in with the soil.
In short, we try to make as little negative impact on the environment as we possibly can.
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