Garden Household Chemicals: Confessions of a Concerned Scientist and Recovering Garden Center Employee

Below are my not so flattering confessions of my personal experiences on the front lines of the dark consumer underbelly of the garden household chemical industry. I hope my experiences helps you to become a chemical-free organic gardener and homeowner too.

Garden Household Chemicals Left a Bitter Taste in My Mouth

My distaste for all garden household chemicals started quite literally when I was a kid.

Take it from me, Diazinon pesticide does NOT taste very good. In fact, if I had to liken it to something, I'd say it tastes like liquid death.

And I can also verify first-hand that the warning label is accurate when it comes to the exposure-caused headaches, plus the eye, skin, and respiratory irritation.

But I was lucky. My lesson in pesticide exposure came with only mild acute symptoms, though it's impossible to know the long-term chronic effects (which I hope are none). But many children with pesticide poisoning aren't so lucky.

According to the American Association of Poison Control Centers, pesticide poisoning is not nearly as common as poisoning from cleaning chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but pesticide poisoning is often far more serious, with a higher potential to result in death.

And almost every lawn and garden pesticide has been linked to various cancers (such as breast cancer in women), neurotoxicity, birth defects, reproductive abnormalities, or organ damage.

It scares me to think my entire family was consuming this pesticide laden garden produce for years, though I'm not sure if our vegetables were any worse than the typical pesticide contaminated produce for sale in today's supermarkets.

It's been thirty years since I learned that hard-knock lesson as a child just starting out with my new-found hobby of backyard gardening. But even still today I clearly remember the noxious chemical stench, acrid pungent taste, and odoriferous skin penetrating properties of that brown bottled witches brew of milky poison.

That's what happens when you carelessly and copiously spray fruit trees and gardens with dangerous pesticides on a windy day and without the proper gloves, Tyvec suit, respirator, boots, or goggles.

Today we Chemists call these items "personal protective equipment" or PPE, and they are an integral part of good chemical hygiene.

Given the strong garden poisons I was working with as a young gardener, and knowing now what I didn't know then (or chose not to worry about), I should have been wearing PPE while carelessly mixing and spraying this poisonous garden household chemical.

Yes many times the poison residues got into my mouth, all over my hands and arms, on my clothes and in my hair. The same probably happened with Malathion poison too.

Today, I believe both Diazinon and Malathion have been pulled off the market due to their worse then expected toxicity to people, wildlife, and the environment.

Sure we skimmed over the labels and read the vague warnings, but no one thought too much of the health or environmental consequences back then.

After all, the government was protecting us and would never allow household chemicals to be sold to homeowners if they were especially harmful...right?

That was pretty much the naive assumption of most people in the late 1970s.

The EPA was still a fledgling agency. And most homeowners would not have been too concerned about occasional exposure to lawn and garden household chemicals or any household chemical for that matter, much less its effects on wildlife, food supply, water supply, or the air we breath.

Of Silent Springs, Love Canal, Bopal, and Agent Orange

Thanks to the Petro-chemical industry lobbyists, little testing on chemicals was ever required before incorporating them into thousands of household chemical products. And little or inadequate testing of chemical ingredients is a major problem still today.

The rampant use of Agent Orange to rapidly destroy the enemy's foliar cover during the Vietnam War was an example of this problem on a massive government directed scale.

Who would have known that this powerfully effective defoliant, which stripped the Vietnamese jungles to their bare bones, would cause such horrible and persistent birth defects, human deformities, and chronic disease after it saturated villages, fields, and forests?

The same could be said of inhaling Asbestos fibers, second-hand cigarette smoke, or leaded gasoline fumes.

Many of us as children were exposed repeatedly to these toxic compounds and without much concern from anyone because it took decades for the extent of the health consequences to be fully realized. Industry lobbying did not quicken our learning curve either.

Public education campaigns and legislative changes were not put into place until well after the downside was fully understood as a result of the diseases and damage these exposures eventually produced - two examples being childhood asthma and learning disabilities in school children.

Similarly, our understanding about the synergistic toxicology of many of these exotic Organo-phosphates and petroleum-based pesticides used daily on food-growing areas is still rudimentary.

So over the past four or five decades the public has essentially been the guinea pigs of a vast chemistry experiment. What we have learned, we have often learned the hard way.

A lot of what we know today about the health effects of these agricultural chemicals has come about through case-studies involving real-life human exposures and the birth defects and chronic diseases they have been statistically correlated to over time.

We are more reactive than we are pro-active. History proves that time and time again.

But even still, every year many more Super-fund caliber hazardous chemicals hit the garden center shelves to quench the marketing driven thirst of consumers for an ever growing selection of new lawn and garden products.

The public apathy about chemical safety still exists among many consumers today.

"Lawn and Garden Center Pollution"

I Put myself through college working full time in the busy lawn and garden center of a big box retailer.

So I have first-hand experience with how many tons of toxic lawn and garden chemicals farmers and home gardeners dump on their properties.

In fact, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, homeowners apply ten times more synthetic chemical pesticides per acre for just their lawns than farmers apply to their crops.

Having spent many years at the point of sale of all these pesticides, this statistic does not surprise me at all.

I know people will apply poisons to their yards as readily as they will pop a pill for a quick fix, with little regard for the longer term consequences.

The annual chemical run-off from yards and farms of just what our one garden center sold must be enormous.

Just the run-off from the store's parking lot, where significant spillage often occurred among the many pallets with thousands of bags of synthetic fertilizers like 10-10-10 and 34-0-0, was a major environmental concern every time it rained.

On a larger scale, this man-made pesticide and fertilizer run-off from factory farms and private properties in this nation's Bread Basket region is suspected to be a major cause of the massive lifeless dead zones found in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay every year.

In just this one of tens of thousands of garden centers in the U.S. I alone was regularly selling thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals to ecologically complacent homeowners and farmers every year.

So I could not help but think about environmental damage that must be happening once these poisonous compounds leached from these homeowners' and farmers' land.

Because most garden fertilizers and pesticides are water soluble clearly much of it has to be ending up in the local streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, wetlands, and ultimately the local food supply and the ocean.

The really sad thing is that most of the local lakes and rivers are already deemed to be impaired due to industrial PCB contamination from years ago, and on-going Mercury contamination from coal-fired power plant emissions frequently raining down (a national problem).

But then there is all this garden household chemical leachate being flushed on top of it. Pollution piled on top of pollution.

It's a public health and environmental crisis, but no one seems very concerned, probably because there is little testing and little media coverage.

We can't hurt GDP or threaten jobs now can we?

But where is it all going to end? We are burning down our kitchen, yet still expecting to be fed. It's like peeing in our own fish bowl.

It worries me that my local experience was just a very tiny snapshot of what is happening globally on a massive scale.

While working in this bustling garden center I also became aware of how the average citizen was often directly poisoning themselves with pesticides and other garden chemicals, like I did when I was as a child.

Many people still do not heed warning labels and are largely oblivious to chemical hazards and longer term consequences of pesticide use.

There was the guy who's trailer was infested with fleas. So he told me he dowsed his entire home including the kids and pets with Seven Dust (which contains Carbaryl 7), a garden pesticide. He was not the only one. I heard this many times.

Another man sprayed his entire house, furniture, kids and all with my old nemesis and potent now banned pesticide Diazinon.

There was also multiple stories of fungicide, herbicide, and pesticide being applied to pond banks, stream, and lake shores.

This was definitely a no no pointed out on the labels because these garden chemicals are almost always efficient killers of aquatic organisms. My warnings about what they were doing usually fell on deaf ears.

People just don't care most of the time. Getting their job done in the usual chemical way is what they are most concerned with.

Most are not aware of alternative natural methods; and if they are, they assume they won't work as effectively as man-made chemical products.

But besides these careless customers, there were a few customers who learned to care what was in these garden products the hard way.

"Sick Building Syndrome in the Workplace and Human Canaries in the Coal Mine"

Most interesting during my years working in this lawn and garden center were the calls from patients' doctors in the midst of trying to make a diagnosis.

I can recall several instances when physicians had called to try and decide (futilely) which airborne chemical compounds in our garden center had caused their patients to have such a violent allergic reaction.

There was constantly a mixture of many toxic odors, so it was impossible to pinpoint any particular culprit.

But to me these human "canaries in a coal mine" were clues as to just how toxic our indoor air had been made by these isles of poisonous garden chemicals.

I personally witnessed several shoppers become physically ill simply by spending a few minutes browsing our lawn and garden household chemical isle, which was always thick with a mixture of pungent chemical odors off-gasing out of the product containers.

And to think, garden center employees such as myself had to work up to forty hours a week inhaling this sickening air.

A lot of employees found they could not work in the area for long because they would become ill from the smell.

I myself noticed frequent sinus problems and skin irritation when stocking the shelves and coming into contact with the chemical residues on the packages. You learned to wear latex gloves quick.

And often tropical plants would be treated with milky white fungicide before being shipped from the nurseries and would have a paper wrapper around each which had to be torn off before display.

This was always an unpleasant job because the dried fungicide residue would cause skin, eye, and respiratory irritation.

Working in this garden center, particularly inside where all the garden chemicals were, was certainly a case of Sick Building Syndrome.

Eventually the manager had to install a high powered ventilating fan because of all the respiratory complaints from employees and customers.

Sadly I know of many homeowners who have little mini-garden center inventories stored in their crawl-spaces, garages, and sheds.

The noxious off-gasing from numerous boxes, cans, bottles, and bags of Rodenticide, bug repellants, pesticides, herbicides, weed killers, and chemical fertilizers often finds it's way into the living space of these houses.

So poisoning by vapor and particulates often begins even before it's ever applied to the lawn or garden.

"Chemical Complacency Running Rampant"

So why is the general public not more concerned about the possible dangers of lawn and garden household chemicals?

Why aren't more people aware of and concerned about the growing evidence pointing to a rise in breast cancer in both men and women from home and garden pesticide use and frequent exposures to toxic household cleaners and detergents?

Why is the average citizen not very worried about the growing contamination of our food and water supply caused by run-off from our yards and household hazardous waste packed landfills?

Sure many people have vague worries but not enough to change their buying habits and wasteful and careless practices, such as dumping chemicals all over their properties.

How many wonder if the meteoric and mysterious rise in the rates of Autism and Alzheimers Disease could be related to our daily chemically saturated lives?

Well, I think our lack of urgency about chemical safety has a lot to do with the fact that chemical testing of product ingredients is not strictly required in this country.

And if testing is done, the tests are poor at modeling what long-term effects multiple low dose exposures will have on the complex real life biological systems they impact.

Chemical toxicity is often based on lab testing with "human proxies" such as rats. These human stand-ins have metabolisms different from ours.

So it's no wonder these tests likely result in poor extrapolations of possible consequences in humans. That is what you call an educated guess.

Secondly, this chemical testing is often based on single large doses of a SINGLE chemical ingredient. Whereas, growing human body burdens of many man-made chemicals is because we are exposed DAILY to small doses of many.

And the complex interactions of these many small doses is increasingly thought to produce synergistic damage which far outweighs that from the sum of the parts. Single large dose testing does not take this into consideration.

You can't educate the public about the hazards of chemicals if no one really understands what true hazards exist or what the extent of those hazards are.

This is why so many chemical products like Diazinon, Dursban, and Chlordane (for termite treatment) end up having to be pulled from the consumer market years after they were supposedly "safe enough" for public-wide use, but turned out later not to be.

But as far as garden household chemicals go, yes there are warnings on the labels about the dangers of using some of the products around aquatic environments or the acute health risks that may result from human exposure.

But the chemical safety information and health warnings on the labels of chemical household products is still often vague and many folks don't read the labels.

I know this first-hand having sold these products and seen them often misused due to lack of reading / following the directions or heeding the warnings.

But regardless of labeling, there is a public knowledge gap about chemical safety information.

Fundamentally, school systems should teach environmental education so the public is not so clueless about common sense issues related to their impacts on the land, water, and air.

Most people are pretty oblivious to the consequences of their consumer actions.

It sounds harsh, but lets take off our rose-colored glasses for a moment. There is a lot at stake afterall.

Many people do not know how to think for themselves. Basic ecology is not taught in public school systems, so chemical consumers depend on someone else to tell them what is ok or not ok.

Polluting industries love consumers who can not think for themselves because then they can be the messenger and tell us with zeal that "It's proven safe and effective", when the reality years down the road proves otherwise.

The public has been brainwashed into not questioning things. This is a fundamental flaw that has to be reversed if we are ever to overcome the many environmental dilemmas we now face globally.

A homeowner should automatically think, "hey this chemical product is un-natural to the sensitive environments around me and of which I am a part of..."

"The manufacture of this product used several finite non-renewable resources and produced pollution at several steps in the process...."

"So is it really worth me wasting money on this product and putting myself and the ecosystems at risk just so I can impress my neighbors with how green my lawn is, or how spotless my apples are, or how perfect my roses are?"

Do you ever think about the consequences of your purchases?

"Crony Capitalism and Chemicals"

But then, of course, there is also the very big factor involving the crony capitalism of chemical industry lobby groups and special interest influencing politicians with campaign funding to ultimately kill any sort of increased public awareness about the true costs and hazards caused by chemical product over-use.

If the public understood even half of the basics of what their daily wasteful habits and toxic gardening routines, like habitual herbicide and pesticide use, did to the environment on a collective scale, the profits throughout the chemical industry would be drastically slashed.

Upton Sinclair said, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

This hits at the heart of why many of those in positions to serve the public are often not interested in serving the public, such as by passing more stringent environmental regulations to product homeowners, frogs, fish, and birds from the affects of rampant household chemical manufacturing, use, and disposal.

History proves that the FDA and EPA are more about protecting corporations than they are about protecting the environment and the public's best interest. Share-holders and bond holders certainly don't tend to put you, your family, or the environment ahead of their profits.

Of course often the manufacturers know the hazards, but they won't tell, unless they are legally forced to. Otherwise it would hurt their bottom lines.

It was the same with the cigarette industry. They knew of the toxicities long before they were forced to divulge them. The true costs of smoking were downplayed as much as possible.

Even between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), chemical testing of product ingredients often falls through the regulatory cracks in between both of them. This is probably the fruits of the chemical lobbyists' and special interest groups' labor.

They don't test for the long-term health affects of frequent exposures to small doses of many different man-made chemicals over time.

It's not the large, one-time exposures to one chemical that is killing us. It's the gradual accumulation day after day of a multitude of chemicals in air, water, and food and the interaction of these chemicals with each other and our complex metabolic biochemistry.

The accumulating doses from air, water, and food contributes to our growing "body burden" of chemical contaminants.

How this stew of chemicals interact with our metabolic functions and chromosomes is also poorly understood.

Plus, even if testing is done, toxicology of these chemicals is very complex and a direct causal relationship between disease and chemical is very difficult or impossible to assert. Progress is slow and findings are hard to scale up to the human species.

And a vested interest in their bottom lines assures a corporate-scale investment in our continued ignorant bliss as well.

Commercials constantly tempt homeowners with the newest synthetic chemical panacea, such as the latest must-have sprays for ridding your yard of Japanese Beetles or Crab Grass Preventer or weed and feed.

And most of us blindly rush to the stores eager to try it, with no concern for environmental damage from their toxic trade secret ingredients.

Mindless of the long-term consequences, like clockwork every Spring and Summer most of us flock to Lowes or Home Depot in our seasonal pilgrimage to purchase collective tons of herbicides, fertilizers, and pesticides.

And then we continuously dump these powders, granules, baits, sprays, and pellets carelessly and liberally around our properties for only ethereal superficial benefits which are diluted easily away by a few rains (likely acid rains).

Is Rounding Up your weeds really worth killing the Amphibians and fish far down stream of your yard?

Dilution is NOT the solution.

This is how the individual homeowner and non-organic gardener effectively contributes to dead rivers, lakes, estuaries, marshes, and oceans.

Most don't yet realize that when we poison our oceans, we end up poisoning ourselves.

But the resulting damage to the ecosystems from not just the run-off of our home chemical use, but also from the factory emissions, mining pollution, resource destruction, and hazardous wastes from the original manufacturer and their suppliers causes long term and wide reaching environmental consequences as well.

"Sweet Misery and the Demise of the Honey Bee"

Is the temporary greening of our non-bio-diverse mono-culture lawns really worth it? Are no spots on our apples really worth losing the birds and the bees?

You have no doubt heard about the bees disappearing, right?

It is still a mystery, but I think it is a good bet that some gardeners and factory farms are contributing to what scientists are now calling Colony Collapse Disorder.

I don't think it is a coincidence that a study in 2010 showed that bee pollen typically has up to 98 different pesticide compounds detectable in it. Many of these compounds are detectable in almost everyone's blood as well.

You can be darned sure the presence of even trace amounts of this toxic cocktail of pesticides is not improving our health or that of the honey bees.

Did you know the EPA allows many different systemic pesticides to be sprayed on crops and that these systemic pesticides are taken up internally by fruits and vegetables such they can never be washed off? No wonder it's in our blood.

The poison is often inside our fruits and vegetables through and through. There is no escaping ingestion of it and if it kills bugs, it also likely poisons us too, slowly but surely.

Tests conducted by the USDA have proven that most factory farm grown cucumbers and lettuce contain Imidacloprid pesticide residue - a systemic poison often applied right up to the date of harvest.

Tests have also found Imidacloprid pesticide levels in nectar and pollen which were almost three times higher than the levels needed to kill honey bees.

It is these especially toxic systemic pesticides in the Neonicotinoid and Nitroguanidine group of chemicals where much of the research into the disappearance of the bees is being focused.

Three other systemic poisons used regularly are Dinotefuran, Clothianidin, and Thiamethoxam. These are used to treat seeds, soil, and plants.

Some of these systemic pesticides have been proven to persist in the soil for up to two seasons. And if plants are grown from seeds treated with Neonicotinoid pesticides, they can still exude enough of this poison in their leaf droplets to kill bees within minutes.

I first learned of systemic pesticides when I was a young gardener. Many of the bottles of fruit spray I used were labeled as being systemic.

So my family was probably ingesting pesticides because the poison was inside the vegetables and fruit. Even as a young and naive gardener I remember thinking systemic poison didn't sound like such a good idea.

Systemic poisons are proof we have gone way off the deep end with chemicals. I mean who in their right minds would come up with a poisonous product like this not knowing what human health effects would eventually result and with a design which assured our ingestion of it?

And what about all the other species exposed to systemic pesticides - earthworms and beneficial insects, and thus the creatures that eat them, and on up the food chain (and back to us again, indirectly).

How ironic it would be if gardeners and farmers really are helping to wipe out the bees upon which they depend for pollination of their vegetables and fruit crops. If the bees disappear, we all disappear.

"Superfund Sites from Sea to Shining Sea"

Despite the warning signs of the imbalances we are creating in ecosystems, we will continue to have extensive and wide-spread pollution problems which is what led to the formation of the EPA in the first place.

And now we have a legacy of tens of thousands of toxic waste Superfund sites.

How many household chemical products for use in your garden or home did your family purchase last year and what are the true costs of these products from cradle to grave?

These are questions all families should consider, but most don't.

Since there is little media coverage of the extent of our environmental unstainability, our body burden of chemicals continues to grow along with the list of hazardous waste sites on the EPA's clean-up list.

Not many people take inventory of their chemical consumption because the environmental damage and consequences are often out of sight, and thus out of mind.

The "Not in My Backyard" mentality, often referred to as NIMBY, is a well documented reaction by the public to news that a garbage landfill may be coming to their neighborhood.

However, though the public is quick to scream "not in my backyard", most of those who protest are the same ones who never make an effort to reduce, re-use, or recycle.

Responsibility and taking ownership at the individual level depends on education and awareness.

For example, have you ever checked how many Superfund Sites may be near your home or your friends or relatives' homes?

Are your household chemical purchasing decisions contributing to future Superfund sites, like many others' decisions are?

Like a rash across the nation, these heavily polluted sites pot mark every state and continuously poison us from land, water, and air.

Many people just don't care about nature and the environment. We are taught to believe nature is something to be conquered by human civilization.

But, in fact, if we conquer nature, so too we conquer ourselves because we are a part of nature, inseparable from it.

Humans can not survive on this planet at the expense of all the other species. But citizens of industrialized nations sure act as if we are independent of all the other webs of life on planet Earth.

Human desires for so many chemical quick fixes shows how little we understand about the consequences of our actions and how unsustainable our way of life is to this planet.

Like global warming, people can not see a causal link between their actions and what is happening around them.

There will always be gaps in the science, but people want absolutes. But it is time we all started connecting the dots. We depend on the chemical industry to do it for us.

Their bottom lines make their messages biased, and those marketing messages are often saying "safe and effective", without speaking to the actual environmental costs or knowing the long-term health implications.

The public's apathetic attitude about the dangers of household chemicals is bread and butter for the lawn and garden chemical manufacturers. They hope we will remain mindless chemical consumers.

Today with autism and Alzheimers Syndrome on an alarming rise and cancer now an epidemic, SOME people are starting to question the wisdom behind the ubiquitous use of all the petroleum based synthetic pesticides and garden household chemicals.

Yet thousands of these toxic waste dumps still remain on the National Priorities List slated for eventual clean-up for decades to come.

Many of these "Love Canals" are related to the industrial production of lawn and garden household chemicals and farm chemicals. The list continues to grow.

We all share the costs of pollution and we all can vote with our dollars to try and solve the pollution problem. I know I do.

"Start a Home-Based Revolution: Buy Organic...Grow Organic"

Change has to begin with each person and within each of our homes.

We can chose to fund the factories and farms producing green products or we can support those raping the land. It's up to us, the consumers.

Based on everything I've learned from my lifelong Chemistry education - in school, work, and home - I have made many conscious changes to banish synthetic chemicals werever I can, and to lessen my impact on the environment.

Unfortunately many others are moving in the opposite direction.

The word "tree hugger" is used often as a derogatory term in this culture. That says a lot about how wrong-minded some of us are.

We all need to become "tree huggers" to some extent because each of our actions affects everyone else GLOBALLY.

Those who are the opposite of "tree huggers" don't yet realize that some day soon many wasteful actions currently being taken for granted will not be an option anymore.

We are approaching a period in our civilization, with so many billions of humans on this one planet consuming and polluting, that it will be very easy (if we havn't already) to pass the point of no return with regards to climate, resource depletion, and pollution.

There is a finite carrying capacity of planet Earth and already some industrialized countries are consuming resources at such a rate that the equivalent of five planet Earths would be needed to sustain this level of consumption.

So "one giant leap for mankind" must first begin with "one small step for a man".

And this man has decided to grow almost totally organic fruits and vegetables in my garden, and when I can afford it I buy organic.

My dollars only get spent on the most basic inert non-toxic ingredients, such as baking soda and vinegar.

With just a few of these safe and cheap ingredients I am able to easily make my own safe, non-toxic home made green cleaning products and homemade garden remedies.

If you want to see my extensive list of home made cheap and non-toxic environmentally friendly cleaning products and many other homemade recipes for common household products, return to the House of Chemicals via the link at the bottom or top of this page.

There is a whole section just of home made garden products and remedies if you follow my link found there.

Unlike when I was just starting out as a young gardener, now I DO NOT use any synthetic chemicals like pesticides and man-made fertilizers in my garden, except maybe a little Epsom salt to add Magnesium once in a while.

Magnesium is an important ion found at the center of chlorophyll molecules in plant leaves, so Mg is essential for healthy plant photosynthesis. Epson Salt adds mostly Mg, so it's not a balanced fertilizer, but more of a supplement. I never use more than a tablespoon or two per 5 gallon bucket of water.

Epsom Salt is so harmless it is used as an astringent in bath water and can be ingested in small amounts as a laxative. It is typically 9.8% water soluble Magnesium and will often turn leaves lush green. Evergreens respond well to a little Epson Salt solution once in a while.

So besides a few tablespoons of Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulfate), I practice complete organic gardening.

I compost all yard wastes in my compost pile. I recycle newspaper and cardboard as mulch for my garden to retain moisture and add carbon to the soil. And I produce my own organic fertilizers from kitchen wastes using Vermicomposting (composting with worms). I recycle more and consume less than the average American.

By the way, the extent of the Earth Worm population around your yard and garden is a good indicator of whether you may be using too many synthetic garden chemicals.

Like amphibians, worms are pretty sensitive to lawn and garden pollution such as from chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

So if you hardly ever see any Earthworms in your garden soil or when you dig a whole to plant a tree in the backyard, there is a good bet the soil is too toxic for them and you need to reduce or totally eliminate your use of chemical products in your yard.

"Learn from my Garden Household Chemical Mistakes"

I know what dead soil looks like. As I describe at the start of this page, I over-used synthetic pesticides and fungicides on the family garden, back before I knew better. And the soil was often literally super saturated with these chemical sprays.

Being an avid digger of free fish bait in the form of Red Wrigglers and Nightcrawlers from the backyard, I started to realize that the worms were disappearing from my garden and any surrounding soils, such as near fruit trees, where I often used pesticides.

There was also a noticeable absence of other soil organisms like the common white grubs which were once common.

Toad frogs, bees, butterflies, beetles, and ladybugs were few and far between as well. The poisons were doing their jobs well because the only bugs I ever saw in the garden were dead, including the all important pollinators like bees and butterflies.

There is no telling how many baby birds I indirectly poisoned as their mothers fed them from this toxic food web.

The soil showed signs of being stagnant. Organic matter tilled in seemed not to degrade as fast as one would expect.

I noticed even in hot wet weather, leaves and green manures tilled in showed no signs of hyphae from fungi, which should appear when decomposition begins.

I had probably obliterated the all-important soil microorganisms such as Rhizobacteria and fungi, which are essential for rich garden soil.

I doubt if the all important Mycorrhiza and Actinomycetes in the soil could survive the onslaught of pesticides and fungicide. The damage to the soil food web probably meant that plants suffered more from pesticide use than they may have benefited.

The chemicals were no doubt destroying the intricate web of life important to all healthy organic gardens. And before I stopped using these poisons, my garden was certainly NOT organic. The signs of a breakdown of the living web was pretty obvious after a few years of my chemical spraying.

I soon noticed vegetable yields actually seemed to drop over the long-term, the more poisonous chemicals I used.

Without Earth worms or bees, or symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria and beneficial fungi, there was less soil aeration, nutrients, and pollination. So it is no wonder garden output dropped.

Through the noticeable damaging effects of my chemical sins against Mother Nature, I learned to reduce and eventually completely stop using all man-made synthetic chemicals in the garden, and eventually even throughout my entire household.

I hope that if you are poisoning yourself, your garden, and our environment you will stop and consider how these garden chemicals could be replaced with cheaper natural alternatives for garden insect control and soil fertilization.

If you are interested in becoming more of an organic gardener too, first take inventory of your household chemicals and begin eliminating them from your home and garden.

Dispose of the chemicals properly (DO NOT throw them in the garbage). Call your city to find out more about proper chemical disposal procedures and pick up sites.

Below are some of the most common garden household chemical sources to look for. How many of these do you use and what might be the real costs of using them?

It really is easy and satisfying to replace toxic lawn and garden chemicals with organic gardening skills like the various composting methods, integrated pest management techniques, natural organic pest control, and making home made organic fertilizers.

By mastering these skills, I hope you too acquire a lifelong "not in my backyard" attitude about synthetic chemicals in your home and garden.

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