Honestly Organic

Is organic really organic? A question that arises an awful lot concerns organic producers. On the one hand if they are growing in fields adjacent to nonorganic growers, the challenge is preventing exchanges of herbicides and pesticides. One way to overcome that issue is to grow in greenhouses where you can control the environment. Gina Ott is an organic producer who does just that and I had a conversation with her. “ We organically grow melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and peppers and squashes so we do not put pesticides on anything it is grown naturally. Let me challenge you. I used to be in the greenhouse business myself. Controlling aphids was a nightmare because they always got into the greenhouse. How do you handle that? There are some organic pesticides that we can spray on but most of the time, like we have had an aphid problem this year on our lettuces and if they get too bad we just have to pull up the plants and start over again. There is not a whole lot that we can do to get rid of them. A lot of times we have to let them have at it. Can’t you use an army of ladybugs? They eat aphids. We do have ladybugs but sometimes the only way to do things right is to start over again. We do what we can.