Why I Am an Organic Gardener

[stella1751]

Like all of us in this forum, I love virgin, chemical-free soil. I love the feel of it, the smell of it, and the teeming microsociety living within it. Being descended from a long line of North Dakota farmers, I also like the notion of growing plants as did my ancestors. However, there's much more to my desire to garden organically.

In the early 1990's, my father was diagnosed with a rare form of Parkinsons, something called PSP. If memory serves, this stands for Para Supranuclear Palsy. He went downhill fast, this giant of a man quickly losing his balance, his sight, and eventually his mind.

Dad was the most courageous man I've ever known, my greatest hero. A year or two before he died, he was contacted by John Hopkins to participate in a study on this rare disease, a disease contracted by only a handful of people in the nation. Worried that this disease might be genetic and that one of his eight children might one day develop symptoms, Dad traveled across the nation, Mom at his side, pushing his wheelchair, handling all the travel details and safely passing him into the hands of the researchers.

Dad was there for about a week, bravely enduring poking, prodding, and scanning. Although his mind was already starting to fail, he filled out pages and pages of questionnaires, responding verbally to questions he could no longer read given his blindness. It was exhausting, but he felt he had done his best for his children. He died about a year later, taking a bad fall and lapsing into a coma.

Once the study was completed, John Hopkins still had no definitive answers to the cause of PSP, but the researchers had a solid hypothesis: All the people participating in the study had come into contact with agricultural chemicals.

When Dad was a poor young farmer in North Dakota, he was able to purchase what are known as "mill screenings" to feed his chickens, picking them up for mere pennies per bushel. These screenings, the dusty leftover wheat chaff refused by the major bread companies, had some grain in them, and Dad was glad to have them.

This was in the 1950's, the ushering in of the age of agricultural chemicals: Brand spanking new fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. John Hopkins researchers positing that Dad's daily inhalation of the dust from these screenings contributed to his development of the disease later in his life.

I can't save my Dad, but maybe I can save someone else's. My garden will never, ever see a chemical being distributed from this brave man's daughter!

[applestar]

Stella, thank you so much for sharing your father's story.
(I can't find the right emoticon for what I'm feeling now....)

[stella1751]

Thanks, Applestar. He died in 1995, but I cried while I was writing this posting. I'm very distraught at the thought that my cousin-in-law may have used Miracle Grow on the garden I conceived, making me an accomplice to chemical usage

[GeorgiaGirl]

Thank you for sharing his story... wow... I'm so sorry he had to suffer that disease. I've been wondering a lot lately just how many wonderful people have been lost to diseases caused by exposure to chemicals.

I hope you'll continue to share his story far and wide because it will surely make others rethink their use of chemicals... and I suspect your father would be glad to know that his suffering was not in vain if it could prevent others from suffering the same fate.

[Zofiava]

This gave me goosebumps and put a lump in my throat. I applaud you, and hope you spread your story around.