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Practical philosophy is at the root of organic gardening
by Pat Underwood
photos courtesy Republican Valley Review

"The wisdom that comes with age should be that you finally learn how and especially why you need to manage things rather than trying to control them," says “Dr. Tom” Tomas. “I sure wish I had learned that in my teens or twenties," he added, shaking his head and laughing.

“Dr. Tom” has a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York's Cornell University and that’s one of the reasons he was selected by the Nebraska Resource Conservation and Development Councils (RC&D's) to lead a highly-informative tour that started right in his own yard. That’s where he and his wife, CeCe, organically grow pears, grapes, apples, strawberries and other fruits, along with countless varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers. But what in the world does philosophy have do with Tom's organic gardening?

"Everything," Tom said. "Philosophy is about thinking and reasoning and logic, it's about taking a systematic and ethical approach to solving problems and dealing with what life hands us. The world already has everything in it that we need, as long as we don't mess it up. This is the fundamental understanding behind organic farming."

Insects are good for gardens

For just one of countless examples, Tom explained, about 99 per cent of insects the world "hands us" in a garden are beneficial to the garden's health, but when commercial pesticides are used to kill the 1 per cent of harmful insects, all the beneficial insects are killed, too. Instead, creating a habitat that is friendly to the beneficial insects will take care of excluding the pests. Dill planted throughout a garden habitat, for example, helps keep harmful pests away.

People also sometimes need to re-think their idea of what a "pest" even is, Tom said. "Most people think of crickets and ground beetles as pests, but did you know they actually eat the weed seeds in your garden?"

Similar logic can be applied to one's perception of what qualifies as a weed. Gardeners would be gratified to know that just like many other things in life, weeds cannot be controlled, they can only be managed, Tom said. And studies have shown that spraying herbicides on certain types of weeds actually stimulates those weeds to quadruple their weed-seed production.

"People sometimes get a little panicky when they see something in my garden that might be considered a 'weed' and that they therefore think shouldn't be there, but there are certain of these plants I leave growing in the garden on purpose, exactly because they serve as a draw for the beneficial insects every garden needs," he explained. Then he reached down and yanked up a slender green sprout, adding with a sage smile, "Every gardener does, however, have a 'moral obligation' to pull up and dispose of bindweed."

Tom also has patches of clover and a few larkspur plants scattered throughout his garden, to help draw beneficial pollinators. He explained that if people kill all our wild pollinators, we will no longer be able to raise things like cucumbers, watermelon, squash, apples and other crops that rely on the wild pollinators.

The philosophy of pruning

"Most of our so-called 'gardening rules', including but not limited to the rules about pruning things like apple trees, have come from industrial thought," says Dr. Tomas. "But large industrial orchards are pruning for their own commercial development, not for good-tasting apples or any of the many other things you might want to consider when pruning your own apple tree."

In other words, Tom explained, commercial orchards just want to grow as many apples as they can, and get them on the market as quickly as they can, where they will last as long as possible in the bins before they are sold.

"So we shouldn't be surprised if the box the apples were shipped in might sometimes taste better than the apples," he said.

Tom recommends, instead, that each person should find the pruning method that works best for them. It all just depends on what you want from your tree, and from your life, he explained.

"Me, I pruned my apple tree to make sure a ten-year-old could climb it. I had my grandchildren in mind," he said.

Organic gardening also about building community

How we decide to grow our food should have a lot to do with how we wish to grow our community, says Tom Tomas.

"For example," he says, "I would never sell or give to one of my neighbors any fruit or vegetable I would not feel comfortable eating myself or feeding to a member of my family."

Organic gardening, Tom says, therefore pertains to relationships. Not only our relationships with our neighbors and families, but also our relationships with our own bodies. He asks the not strictly rhetorical question: If we know good food is better for our own bodies and better for our neighbors' bodies, isn't that the kind of food we would want to eat and would want everyone else to have an opportunity to eat, too?

"The best food any of us can eat comes from local growers and farmers markets," Tom says. That way we know where the food was grown, how it was grown, and who grew it. It also tastes better, he says, and hasn't been sitting around forever, and doesn't use nearly as much fossil fuel to be transported from the ground it was grown in to our own table.

"Fruits and vegetables grown other places aren't grown based on what we want to eat or even what tastes best, they are grown based on what will make the most money for the industry," he says. "Don't we care more about what is best for the people in our own local community?"

Pat Underwood is a resident of Alma, Nebraska, where she does grant writing, fundraising, and other development work for non-profit organizations and serves part time as Harlan County Tourism Director. She also writes for the Republican Valley Review newspaper. She is a former resident of California, Hawaii, Guam, and most recently Florida, where she worked for a variety of federal and state government agencies and non-profit organizations. She can be reached at 308-928-8992 or underwoodpat@ymail.com.

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