Organic Gardening

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.