Andrew F. Smith

Organic Gardening

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
Organic gardening is based on a system of growing food or cultivating plants that maintains and regenerates the fertility of the soil without the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Gardening around the world has become a popular pursuit and a thriving industry. By the early twenty-first century approximately 80 million households were participating in lawn and gardening activities, representing a $40 billion industry. Roughly 10 percent of this industry is organic.

All gardens and farms remained essentially organic until the early 1800s. In 1840 the German scientist Justin von Liebig sought to produce artificially the major nutrients that plants absorbed naturally from the soil. At the same time John Bennet Lawes discovered that adding sulfuric acid to phosphate rock would more rapidly release phosphorus to soil for plant use. He opened a fertilizer factory in London in 1842, and within a decade manufacturers had opened similar chemical factories in Baltimore and Boston. This development marked the arrival of chemical fertilizers into soils of farms and gardens in the United States.