Description
Gardening knowledge is dispersed in all manner of ways: through friends and family, between allotment plots and more recently through gardening groups on social media. It’s great that knowledge can be shared so widely and quickly – but this can come with a sting in its tail. Spurious findings and dubious conclusions can be propagated rapidly and then they soon become accepted as facts by virtue of being repeated so many times. A lot of knowledge is generated through gardeners experimenting and trying things out in the garden, but our judgments are not always objective: sometimes we like to conclude that some practice really had an effect because we believe in it. Garden Organic (or the Henry Doubleday Research Association as it was then) was set up by Lawrence Hills in 1958 primarily to put some science behind the claims made by organic gardeners, and separate assertions backed by scientific rigour from any myths floating around. Here we examine a few common myths.
