Where should you buy organic gardening supplies? Your local nursery should stock most of the organic gardening supplies you will need, but when it comes to fertilizer, Mr. Englade recommends recycling any organic material you can find by turning it into compost.
First, I tell people to try to produce as much as you can on your own. So try to compost, use local resources. We don't have a municipal composing facility where I live, so I go around in my truck and I pick up big bags of leaves and grass and I compost them. We're putting in a bamboo grove right now at the store, so I need a lot of nitrogen, a lot of organic material to put in before I plant my bamboo. So I pick up a whole bunch of grass clippings. If you can do things that are free, that would normally become waste, that's the heart of organics. The heart is the recycling part. So, coffee grounds can be used as a nitrogen fertilizer. Look at your surroundings and don't be afraid to go down the street to a local coffee shop and ask for some of their coffee grounds. We feed our worms in our worm farm with all the coffee grounds from a coffee shop down the street. So we get five gallons a day. We pre-compost those in trash cans that we converted to compost bins. We age them and we put them through a shredder that consists of the coffee grounds and filter paper and then we feed them to our worms.
Locate your local resources. If you want to be the good recycler, then you can go from there. The next area that I will tell you to look is your local garden centers. If your local garden centers do not have the products, harass them, and then they will start carrying the products! I'm a serious environmentalist kind of guy, so the way I look at it is when you get something shipped in, even though the item might be certified organic, it also consumes some fuel on the way to the grocery store. If you buy an organic orange, that's wonderful, but that organic orange and all those other fruits were grown in South America. So you have to ask yourself how much energy was consumed in getting that orange from here from South America when we have a wonderful citrus industry here right outside New Orleans. So I tell people to first buy local. If your local suppliers don't the organic gardening supplies you want, then ask them to carry them. If they refuse to carry them, then go ahead and mail order them. There are a lot of excellent companies that specialize in organics. We're hopefully setting a new trend in that. We don't give people the option to use synthetics and we ship supplies all over the country to people who can't get them locally. So you need the mindset. Try to recycle, try to get supplies locally, and if they are not locally available, harass the local industry. Just try to get them. Then, mail order to people who specialize in organics.
