Progress - Huh !
9 comments
I have just pruned my apple trees and would like to give them a good winter wash but with WHAT ? I used to use tar oil winter wash which was great and really cleaned up the trees but this has now been taken off the market ! What has replaced it is some useless mixture of vegetable oil and fish oil -no I don,t want my garden smelling like a fish and chip shop !
I am shocked at the number of things that have vanished from the garden shops ! Where is soft soap now ? REAL creosote ? Cheshunt Compound for damping off, and countless sprays and fertilizers. Now, it seems we are just supposed to tolerate pests and diseases and if a plant is badly affected the advice is “Dig it up and burn it”. Sorry, I can,t afford to replace every plant that gets a pest or disease! This approach is like burning down your house to get rid of a rat ! Why can,t we just get rid of the rat !!? Organic gardening has gone way too far now ! Careful spraying does no harm and I worry that if pests are no longer controlled they may breed unchecked and become a major problem ! We would think it was very irresponsible if someone refused all drugs for a sick child but with plants we are just supposed to stand there and watch things die ! (Sorry, but “picking off affected leaves” is a joke when blight is running riot thru your 24 tomato plants !)
If the EEC is responsible for this nonsense it is high time we were out of it !
How do other gardeners feel and is anyone else as frustrated and depressed by recent changes as I am ?
I can,t help feeling nostalgic for the days when you could buy all the “banned” things and our gardens were filled with butterflies and bees, which the bans have done nothing to save !
6 Feb, 2015
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Comments
Totally agree, as a relatively new gardener am getting dispondent with spending on plants/shrubs which then get sabotaged by bugs, its enough to put you off gardening, maybe we are all supposed to have concrete pads covered with purchased ready planted tubs.
Forget wildlife, oops sorry give over a piece and lets weeds etc grow (your natural area) but dont complain
7 Feb, 2015
Forgot to mention I have over an acre and luckily a farmer sprays my lawn for me with as you rightly say, with products I cant buy
7 Feb, 2015
Yep its enough to make you spit feathers, I often wish I could get my hands on the stuff my grandad and uncles used in the past, health and safety gone mad, trouble is its not only applied to whats used in the garden, think a lot and say no more as it makes for a sore subject.......
7 Feb, 2015
Creosote did come off the market, as some dead rats were found in Germany with cancer. They had been nibbling a fence.
I see its back, now we have all learned to buy all the substitutes.
I keep Creosote. Best stuff for getting rid of Wasps nests in the ground, tip it in and run !
7 Feb, 2015
Very fast Diane, lol.....
7 Feb, 2015
Just remember not to nibble your fence then Diane!
8 Feb, 2015
All the banned stuff was probably a knee-jerk reaction to something - that's usually how it works. Only for gardeners, not for farmers who spray a multitude of foul stuff (anyone know how many times rape-seed is sprayed in it's lifetime - wow!) and get exemption.
Somewhere in the depths of my shed I have some weed-killer that went off the market years ago, must find it and use it up on the nettles I don't want to keep.
My daughter paints her fence with old car oil, soaks into the wood and doesn't look bad at all.
As for creosote and cancerous rats Diane - who's likely to go out and have a quick gnaw on the fence? Talk about knee-jerk reactions, glad they saw sense.
15 Jan, 2017
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Lots of fellow feeling here. I still have a very old tin of cheshunt compound (sshh!) but I think its gone all hard now. Does anybody know how tar oil winter wash works? Might give a clue for what to replace it with.
6 Feb, 2015