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Originally Posted by natedogg1026
This is a side shot of my tropical bed. Pure organic soil. Local compost made mainly of leaves and grass.
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That looks alot better now that all the snow and ice is gone!!
Hey Richard, my Grandma would have called you a 'puddin' stick'...out to stir things up...
California has a different definition for alot of things! There is a difference between organic , Earth-friendly, and green.
Organic should mean non-synthetic, even though there has to be some processes to get it to the end user. Even the act of bicycling to the HD to pick up the bag of manure uses fossil fuels and is not Earth-friendly or green. The bags of stuff at HD are not produced from the steer and chickens on location, but trucked there using vast amounts of diesel fuel. Most times diesel fuel is used to procure the manure from where it lays, and the machines that pack and sort the yit need energy to run. Then there's the plastic in the bags, and God forbid the methane from all the steers. And that's just the manures. Peat production is killing the peat bogs. The minerals are all mined (some in open pit mines) including perlite and vermiculite. Fish emulsion depletes fish stocks. Kelp meal reduces kelp forests. There is nothing Earth-friendly or green about most organics. The best thing to use is compost from your own maker, and some other ammendments sparingly. Blood and bone meal products are by-products of the slaughterhouse industry. Shredded bark and bark nuggets are by-products of the logging industry. Their sale keeps that stuff outta the landfills and incinerators. In my opinion, it approaches more of a green product than some of the others. Other by-products that lean to the green side include spent grain from breweries, spent media from mushrooms, and shredded trees from tree trimming companies, and waste from vegetable canning plants. This stuff would be disposed of if not made into another product. Oh, bat guano is a green manure in that the bats are there naturally, and not artificially as in a beef or chicken ranch produced manures. That's my pudding!!
P.s. nice bump, Dean!
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Originally Posted by Richard
So I'm guessing that by "organic" you folks mean "non-synthetic" ?
For example, Neem Oil is a non-synthetic pest control material. It has been processed (distilled a bit) so that the concentration is the same in each bottle. Does it still count as "organic" this way?
Alfalfa meal has a rating of 2-0-3 and is nothing but finely chopped alfalfa. It takes 1.3 cubic feet (9.5 gallons) of it per year to feed a full-size crop-producing fruit tree. Alfalfa extract is a 14-0-21 liquid that only takes 1 cup a month to feed a crop-producing fruit tree -- but it is created by a series of chemical treatments, one of which involves Benzene. Does it still count as "organic" ?
Also, Potassium Nitrate and Sul-Po-Mag are minerals that are mined directly out of the earth, often crushed and then mechanically sorted to get a standard level of purity. There is no chemical processing. Do these count as "organic" ?
The reason I ask is because in California there is a completely different standard for "organic farming". According to the State, it is "methods which do not significantly impact the environment". What do you think about this definition ?
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