Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
Written by Alan Hickman

At Peel Teaching Garden (PTG), the season starts early and the first, and most important, class of the year took place a couple of Saturdays ago.

The purpose of the class was to introduce the attendees first to each other and then to the school: why it was created, what its objectives are, and how it is run; and also, what they can expect in return for investing some thirty-six hours, in classes and in the gardens, over the coming months.

Before the mid-afternoon break - garlic sablés, lemon butter cookies and apple cider - everyone present wrote an anonymous 30-question test to establish some sort of baseline level of knowledge for the group as a whole.

The second half of the session began with unlearning stuff that people had been quite happy with for years, and to putting in to question a lot of other stuff that had always been taken for unchallenged truth.

With the deprogramming under way, the session ended with defining several words which come up often in conversation and in newspapers and which are carelessly misused by speakers/writers or misunderstood by their listeners/readers.

From time to time the Garden Writers Association commissions surveys to measure public opinion regarding various garden-related topics and last week, by pure co-incidence, association members received the results of the 2008 winter survey "Consumer Attitudes on Organic"; ‘organic’ being perhaps one of the currently most misunderstood and misused words in the English language.

Although the polling company talked only to US residents - almost a thousand of them - the great commonality of media and information between the countries likely makes the data quite applicable to Canadians as well.

Regarding ‘organic’, respondents generally thought that the word had some real meaning.

However, about the closest there was to consensus, 70%, was that ‘organic’ equated to "costly to buy". About half the respondents thought that it meant safer and/or more nutritious. A mere 17% considered ‘organic’ to have no real meaning or value.

When asked the question "Would you say that products labeled ‘Natural’ are...", 26% said ‘natural’ is not as good as ‘organic’, 18% though they were the same, 5% said better, 10% couldn’t make up their minds and 42% opted for none-of-the-above.

To the statement: "I would like to use organic products more if I could..." a whopping 80% responded "Get an effective result for no more cost". 53% offered: "Understand what to buy and how to use it."; which might lead one to wonder why people would suppose that an ‘organic’ potato or bag of fertilizer would be used somehow differently.

The misunderstanding of the actual definitions of the words ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ also showed up clearly in the PTG test. Only 20% of first-time students knew that natural pesticides can be highly toxic to humans, and, remembering enough of their grade school chemistry, about a third correctly answered that the word organic simply means: carbon based.

In the supermarket, certified products carrying the label "Biologique Canada Organic" must meet exactly the same standards of quality, purity and safety as produce resulting from non-certified methods.

Contrary to what some consumers apparently believe, industry and government officials make a point of stressing that it is the methods of production which are certified.

The quality of the resulting products is not the focus and it is stated clearly that certified products are not guaranteed to be entirely free from the residues of prohibited substances and/or other contaminants.

The common misunderstandings highlighted by the garden survey and the PTG test are nothing new at all. A piece in the Toronto Star referred to a Canadian Council on Learning report that Canadian adults struggle to grasp the core principles of science, with perhaps less than 20% being considered scientifically literate.

In 2003, an Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey reported that less than one third of Canadians over fifteen have the analytical reasoning skills to reach: "the desired threshold for coping with the increased skill demands of a knowledgeable society".

It should be noted that lacking an understanding of basic science and scientific principles has little, if anything, to do with ‘intelligence’ as such. People with quite huge IQs can be more-or-less science idiots .

For an individual, being scientifically ill equipped, means that much of modern life is inexplicable and is scarily out-of-control. Critical decisions, with potentially grave long-term consequences, can get made based on group-think, hearsay and ‘common sense’ - rather than on properly researched information - and it is easy for the uninformed to fall victim to marketers and con-artists who bamboozle and take advantage.

Although the first gardening class covered a lot of ground, perhaps the most important advice was to treat the English language with respect and to use it with care.

It can dissect with the precision of a scalpel or it can bludgeon like a club. Try always to say what you actually mean.

Don’t say that you’re an organic gardener if what you really mean is that you don’t use manufactured insecticides or fertilizers.

All gardeners - and, for that matter, all things that have ever lived - are based on carbon, so being an organic gardener is hardly a distinction.

Day -2 cloudy flurries Wind SW22km/h P.O.P.10%
Night -13 wc-27 cloudy light flurries Wind NNW22km/h P.O.P.44%