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  • BBC Gardeners' World

    Nature’s way

    May 27, 2021 5 minutes
    PHOTOS JASON INGRAM
    “The organic gardener is not a heavy lifter but a fine tuner, responding to what is happening as much as dictating it”

    In many ways, being an organic gardener is easy. For a start, you stop doing things. You do not use herbicides, pesticides or fungicides, and you do not feed plants or soil with chemical fertilisers. You focus on soil health, make good compost, plant with – rather than against – the prevailing conditions and let the garden find its own centre of balance, which, by and large, it will do without your help.

    I have gardened organically for the past 30 years and doing so was, in many ways, the least line of resistance. I hated using chemicals and got rid of them all with a huge sigh of relief. But organic gardening is much more than just not using chemicals. It is, above all, a

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