When Gardening in Poland Became Ecological Again

While I was in Amsterdam for the GRI Conference in May, I met Katarzyna Dulko, a freelance journalist who is also a sustainability manager for a leading European conglomerate.  I thought I’d ask her to share her interests—in some ways she is like a Polish Rachel Carson.

I remember times when I was a young girl in the mid-1990s and I was working on my grandmother’s nursery. We grew trees including thujas, gharqads, and pines for hedges and decorations. The business did  well because Poles were extremely eager to improve their gardens and homes better to keep up with the neighbors.  What we discovered was the gardener’s miracle: Roundup. You surely know the Monsanto herbicide, am I right?

So, about Roundup: we all know (having at least a little bit of ecological knowledge) it ... works. It works so good, by the way, that while making unwanted weeds disappear, it also makes all animals, microorganisms, frogs, earthworms, bees and just about everything else disappear as well. Of course you cannot see the results immediately--the ground becomes weaker after some years, and your garden has fewer and fewer varieties of plants.  Though my grandmother died from cancer, it took me a while to realize that I would not like to sell “chemical gardening” anymore.  In fact, it took me many years to understand that maybe it is time to return for ecological gardening. In Poland that used to be the standard practice anyway, but was forgotten with the “miracles” of the 20^th century.

Together with some friends (all ecologists but from different areas of practice) we run an internet portal about ecological gardening and consumption. The main task is to make people understand, that gardening--especially balcony and city gardening--can in fact change their lives. What we are focused on is growing vegetables and herbs in small flats (some time ago we were on TV show telling about how to plant herbs on window, you can watch it on YouTube, but it is only in Polish). While many citizens in Warsaw, Wroclaw or Krakow do not have any access to public gardens, and meanwhile, food offered in supermarkets seems to be very expensive and not healthy, it is crucial to promote other ways of cheap and reasonable production of own food.  It is all possible, when willing, to get some knowledge as to how to live better. As we, on www.moj-ogrodnik.pl (Polish for, “My Gardener”), grow every day I guess, the education and awareness truly works!

Katarzyna Dulko

Moj-Ogrodnik.pl