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ORGANIC GARDENING
Greening your yard: trees, shrubs and wildflowers help clean the air, provide us with fresh oxygen. These plants also create natural habitats for wildlife by providing shelter, nesting and resting sites, berries, seeds, nuts, and nectar. They also add beautiful colour and natural fragrances around your home. Trees and larger plants can also be planted strategically around your home to help shade the hot summer sun, or provide shelter from cold winter winds.
Vegetable gardening: by growing some of your own vegetables, you can ensure you are providing your family with healthy, nutritious, fresh produce, without the use of dangerous chemicals. By growing your own, your are also helping to reduce pollution and energy use which are consequences of shipping produce from different parts of the world.
Herb gardening: herbs add wonderful flavours to food, provide natural sources of aromatherapy for homemade cleaning products and cosmetic uses, without the use of harmful synthetic chemicals. Herbs also make great host plants for butterflies and other beneficial insects.
Balcony, and container gardening: for those of us with limited green space, container gardening is just as beneficial and effective as backyard gardening. Birds, butterflies, and other beneficial insects will visit potted plants if they are hungry!
Indoor gardening: growing house plants inside your home help clean your air of harmful chemicals (formaldehyde is just one of many) that can be leaching from painted walls, furniture, fabrics, and household cleaners.
PESTICIDE and HERBICIDE FREE! These chemicals are dangerous to our health, especially children. They also harm insects and other wildlife through direct or indirect ingestion. A butterfly or other animal may eat a plant that has been sprayed, directly ingesting the chemicals. The butterfly can die, become very ill, or become unable to reproduce, or escape predators. If a bird then eats the same butterfly, the bird has indirectly ingested the chemicals, and can then become affected by the chemicals. This process can climb up through the food chain, with the animals at the top of the food chain having higher concentrations of the chemicals than those at the bottom. This is called biological magnification. Pesticides also move through the environment through air, water and soil, no matter how careful one is when applying them. Soil composition is altered, thus eventually altering the state of vegetation in the area.