“Eco” = house

“logy” = study of

Ecology is the study of environment and relations of organisms to each other and their surroundings.

—–

As a restorative / healing garden designer, I receive deep  joy as I help homeowners and residents restore, maintain, enhance their emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual well-being — their house, I suppose you might say. The MG course allows me to provide information that fortifies the physical house of clients’ gardens. I care deeply for my clients’ well-being as well as the cause and effect of my design service on my clients’ respective communities.  So this week’s MG class was right on time. 

Organic Management Techniques:  “restore, maintain, enhance ecological harmony”. 

For what we do and how we “care” for our gardens does not end at the property lines nor the edge of garden beds. Potions and lotions leach, blow, move, carry, spread. Wrong plant, wrong place invites trouble.  No soul to your soil means no life to your landscape. Now, may seem obvious to you – ’cause we all want harmony, right? – but check this out.

Despite the news of the National Gardening Association conducted the Environmental Lawn & Garden Survey which found that 

• 5% of America’s 90 million households gardened using exclusively organic management techniques;
• an additional 31% reported to be hybrid gardeners (practicing some sort of organic management approach);
• and numbers of both were expected to double in coming years,

we have this:

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 100 million pounds of active ingredient from herbicides, insecticides, miticides, and fungicides were applied in homes and gardens in the United States in 2001. Of that, homeowners used 13 percent of total herbicides, 16 percent of total insecticides and miticides, and 16 percent of total fungicides…  Applications of pesticides by professional applicators (e.g. commercial lawn services) are not included in the numbers outlined above and if included would, no doubt, raise these numbers significantly.

How is this stuff stored, applied, used, disposed of in your house?  

No, not rant on never using chemicals in the landscape. Rather learn to manage your house’s health, with an eye (body, brain, respiratory system,… you get it) to our collective well-being through the principles of Integrative Pest Management, baby.  Simply, a wake up call to express compassion for the collective house.