Image of fox in leaves

Growing a Cruelty-Free Garden

Image of red fox
Don’t believe the hype: Predator urine isn’t sourced from animals in the wild like this one; it comes from foxes and other species cruelly confined on fur farms. (Top photo by Jennifer Howard/Nature Works Photography; above photo by John Harrison)

The products and potions lining the shelves of local nurseries and big box centers used to mesmerize me so much that it was as if I’d thrown the rational part of my brain onto the compost pile with the rotting squash rinds. Overpowered by the sights and smells of floral abundance nearby, I didn’t even think to question what was really in those packaged promises of gardening nirvana.

I can’t remember what finally activated my B.S. detector, but once it went on, many things smelled rotten, and it wasn’t just the contents of the bags of festering cow poo from industrial feedlots. Plenty of products billed as eco-friendly have negative impacts on our fellow species, either directly or indirectly. Some come from cruel operations that confine animals in cages and pollute the broader environment, while others contain ingredients harvested from fragile ecosystems that provide critical habitat for wildlife.

Rather than supporting exploitive industries or robbing distant ecosystems to improve our own, we can purchase more humanely manufactured items or, better yet, rely on materials we already have in our backyards. Here are just a few of the strange products of 20th century commodification that we’d do well to avoid in the 21st, along with tips for finding humane alternatives.

1. Predator Urine: Cruelty in a Bottle

Marketed by one company as “the all natural, organic and humane way” to defend garden borders from wild nibblers, bottled urine–if it really is what it purports to be–is anything but humane. There’s no way to gather that much urine from wild animals without keeping them in intensive confinement, whether in a fur farm or other mass-housing facility.

Image of Will
This is my go-to for “predator” urine. He’s locally sourced and free-range, unlike the bottled products made from wild animals kept in cruel confinement. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

The best alternative? Create habitat that attracts real predators who can help create a balance. Adopt a dog and enlist her assistance in marking your territory. Or make your project even more DIY. Every couple of weeks in the summer, I ask my husband to go on pee patrol—an effective way to protect Joe Pye weed and other plants from nibbling so they grow tall enough for the butterflies to enjoy. It may sound ridiculous, but isn’t it so much more sane than imprisoning wild animals and bottling up their waste products for interstate transport to unsuspecting consumers?

2. Mail-Order Ladybugs: A Not-So-Special Delivery

Those ladybugs billed as natural biocontrols for the home garden are vacuumed up from where they congregate in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. “If you’re an organic gardener, this goes against everything organics is about,” says entomologist Suzanne Wainwright-Evans, owner of Buglady Consulting, “because organics is about being good to the environment, being sustainable, being ecological.”

Image of Asian ladybug
Asian ladybugs get a bad rap, but they are voracious feeders, says Wainwright-Evans. Encourage these and other ladies in your garden rather than purchasing creatures snatched from the wild. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Though companies harvesting ladybugs claim there’s no real impact on the populations, “I don’t know if they have any science to back that up,” says Wainwright-Evans, who recalls one season when ladybug sellers ran out of their supply. “But just from a common sense standpoint, if you go to an ecological area and remove a major portion of the population or even 25, 30 percent, there is going to be some impact.”

And if you don’t already have the habitat to attract ladybugs, these voracious feeders aren’t likely to stick around anyway. Companies selling “conditioned” ladybugs claim to ship them ready to eat, having held them until they are practically starving, Wainwright-Evans says, “but how do they know when they get to that point?” Rather than importing animals to release in your garden, make a home for those already present in the region by adding wildflowers, shrubs and trees where many insect species can eat, reproduce, and provide natural balance.

3. Animal-Based Fertilizers: A Bloody Business

Many organic potting mixes and fertilizers sold en masse contain byproducts of slaughterhouses and industrial operations raising animals in intensive confinement. The lists of ingredients—bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, and pasteurized poultry poop—aren’t just nauseating to read. They can also sicken pets tempted to snack on them.

Image of blood meal bag
Is the eggplant a vampire? Is someone strangling the eggplant? There are much better ways to grow eggplants–and treat farm animals. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Yet you wouldn’t know it for all the corporate greenwashing. Marketers for the most visible brand promise a “simple, down-to-earth gardening” experience with soil made “simply from organic things.” Their green bags pair kitschy cartoon drawings with verbiage that sounds like it was adapted from the script of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure; on the packaging for blood meal, a devious-faced eggplant dons a cape above the promise of a “luscious way to feed your plants for bodacious blooms and vibrant color.”

A product summary on Home Depot’s site takes it one step further by warning consumers about what they’ll get if they don’t accept the pitch: “pale, sickly, lifeless gardens.” It’s an interesting assumption to make, as my free-of-slaughtered-animals garden is anything but lifeless, buzzing and humming with bees, butterflies, birds, and countless other organisms making their home here.

Rather than seeding the “bodacious blooms” we grow for butterflies among the sad remains of once-sentient beings who spent most of their short lives packed into dark warehouses and feedlots, here’s a better idea for reducing the waste and misery of factory farms: Don’t buy anything they’re selling. Nature knows what she’s doing, and plants grew for millennia without our help.

In fact, many native species such as purple lovegrass don’t fare as well in overly composted or fertilized soil. And vegetables proliferate among natural materials from our own gardens—namely compost and leaves that are all too often sent to the landfill. “Why waste those nutrients?” asks Jim Nardi, author of Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners. To enrich his gardens, he doesn’t go to the store; he shreds leaves gathered from neighbors and mixes them into the soil, adding food for millions of underground creatures and creating a far better substrate for root and water penetration than any bottled product could, whether organic or chemical-based. “You can add synthetic fertilizer, and you’ll add plenty of nutrients,” he says, “but it doesn’t do anything for the structure of the soil.”

4. Mystery Mulches: A Masquerade?

What’s in that mulch from the local big box center, and where did it come from? It’s hard to know for sure. Some bags could be filled with the wood of cut-up virgin forests that take centuries to regenerate. Despite efforts to limit the logging of mature bald cypress trees, these stalwarts of rich wetland ecosystems—which help control flooding and provide food and shelter for many wild species—still meet untimely ends as garden mulch.

Other mulch products may be filled with raw construction debris; cloaked in red and chocolate brown dyes, some could contain contaminants invisible to consumers blinded by the bright color choices. “That’s an example to me of sort of treating your yard like the inside of your house,” says William Cullina, executive director of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. “You have to kind of think about ecological function when you go outside too, and it’s beyond just the sort of color-of-the-rug decisions.”

Image of mulch around garden
We occasionally use mulch from the landfill, layering it over newspaper and other natural materials from our property to add and extend plantings. Although we can’t be sure it doesn’t contain chemical residues from other people’s gardens, we know that at least it doesn’t come from freshly cut forest. (Photo by Nancy Lawson)

Cullina recommends using soft-wood mulches that break open to reveal spongy insides with a dark color that matches the exterior, indicating the product has been composted. Mulch from local landfills is recycled and potentially more environmentally friendly, but, as Cullina notes, this recycled yard waste could still contain harmful mystery ingredients such as persistent pesticide residue: “The problem there, obviously, is you really have no idea what the people that rake up those leaves are putting on their lawns.”

Leaves, grass clippings, and shredded branches from your own yard—or from the yards of neighbors who avoid using chemicals—are the most effective and sustainable mulch, not only suppressing invasive plants and other weeds but providing nesting and foraging areas for birds, small mammals, frogs, toads, and insects.

5. No Re-Peats in the Canadian Bogs

Peat moss comes from sensitive wetlands that have evolved over thousands of years and provide habitat for rare flora and fauna. While industry marketers say they harvest only a fraction of the peatlands in Canada—and that restoration efforts post-harvest help the bogs regenerate—ecosystems are fundamentally altered by such disturbance. For a product that isn’t even as useful as the natural materials already in your own backyard, this scraping of the land seems especially wasteful. Often used inappropriately as mulch, peat moss in the garden dries out and blows away. Mixed into soil, it adds little to no nutrients. Compost and shredded leaves are much better alternatives.

It can be hard to avoid potting mixes containing peat moss, which is added to improve water- and air-holding capacity, but it’s possible to make your own or at least reduce your use of peat-based mix by blending it with compost. Many gardeners have tried coconut coir as an alternative, though the long-distance transport from overseas introduces other environmental issues. Cullina suggests peanut husks as a potentially sustainable alternative sourced closer to home—something I plan to try this year.

Do you have any other tips for alternatives to products that exploit animals or harm their habitats? Share them here!

 

 

13 thoughts on “Growing a Cruelty-Free Garden”

  1. Nancy,
    The more I read your blogs, the more I really, really want your book with all this great information in it! Thanks!
    Dave

  2. Thank you for your post on Facebook !
    I’ve been vegan for ten years, and this year i want to garden veganically, as much as is possible for a suburban dweller. We’ve got a couple of straw bales started in the conditioning process to plant tomatoes and summer squash in June. Here in Boulder, tomato season starts late :/

    1. You are quite welcome! Thank you for reading and being kind to the animals. That sounds like it will be a wonderful garden! Maybe you can edge it with native wildflowers so the bees can help pollinate? 🙂 June would normally be quite late for us to be starting planting here in Maryland, but this year we might be on your schedule — it’s still in the 50s, 15 degrees below normal!

    2. Hi! I just found your website and am so glad I did. Thank you for this informative post. I’m wondering about munching with leaves… how do you suggest shredding them in a sustainable way to use? When are the best times to put the shredded leaves in the garden? How thick of a layer should I apply? Are leaves from a shag bark tree ok to use in a garden? Thank you so much for your help!

      1. Hi Nicole, I generally don’t recommend shredding the leaves because there are many creatures living among those leaves — caterpillars, pupae, cocoons, queen bumblebees and much smaller organisms we might not even see. Many overwinter in the leaves or right underneath. I recommend leaving them under trees and shrubs, and if you are trying to preserve a lawn area, you can rake them into those areas. Or if you want to smother some grass to start a new bed, a thick pile of intact leaves, covered in twigs and branches to hold them down, is a great way to do it. I also leave leaves that fall in gardens, for the same reason mentioned above — some species of caterpillars drop right down from the flowers to overwinter at the base of the plants, and also rabbits and many other small creatures find refuge in there.

        As far as when to put leaves in the garden, really any time is fine! If you follow the natural cycles, they are most available in fall and spring. Shagbark leaves or any other native leaves should be fine. Sometimes people worry about leaves of allelopathic plants, like walnut, but I’ve found that many native plants grow fine in their presence. And leaves of some species, like oaks, take longer to break down, but this can be a great help in keeping out nonnative plants that can degrade wildlife habitat.

        A new project by Heather Holm, a native bee expert, and some of her colleagues is well worth checking out. I love it because it gives guidance on how to create gardens around trees in a way that won’t harm the trees but will allow you to just let the leaves fall in place. Here is a link to it: https://www.pollinatorsnativeplants.com/softlandings.html

        Hope that helps! 🙂

        1. Thank you so much for your reply. I am not interested in power tools in the garden and I will make leaf piles instead. I will check out Heather’s project. Thanks again for the great work you do!

  3. I just love everything you talk about here. We need to be awake when making these decisions about what to support with our hard-earned dollars, particularly when products are animal based. We are also huge believers in chipping our own wood and cultivating our own company rather than buying from the store or wasteful burn piles. We can do this without big companies or even small urine farmers (nasty!) telling us what’s best.

  4. Wow, it’s already been a year since the last comment I left. Still reading your great blogs, Nancy, and still waiting for your book! Please post about it when it’s done. Thanks! 🐝

  5. Wow! Having a squirrel issue big time in our garage. Someone suggested fox urine. Anytime an animal is mentioned in context to anything , I immediately question its origins . I was hoping it was simulated. Further research I discovered it isn’t :(. Then I found you! Wow!! My eyes are totally open and I’m blown away by this article . I feel badly I never questioned the soil etc. I was buying all
    These years . We are vegetarian and vegan and try our best in all ways. Just. Wow. I am grateful I read this. Going to explore more of your site!

    Thank you!

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