Treating Cause vs Treating Symptom in Your Garden
Treating Symptoms - Supporting Weakness and Disease
Dealing with symptoms makes things look good on the surface, while making things weaker in the long run because you go against nature rather than working with nature.
Treating symptoms looks like this:
You have a mold growing on the branches and trunk of your apple tree. Instead of feeding the soil so the plant gets the nourishment it needs to boost its immunity to remove the fungus on its own... the reason it has this mold in the first place... you spray an inorganic fungicide on it.
Treating Cause - Cultivating Strength and Health
Treating cause looks like this:
This apple tree spoken of, was a tree I worked with in the fall of 2011. I didn't spray an inorganic fungicide on the fungus (symptom) or even an organic one. All I did was amend the soil and fertilize this tree, and by next spring the fungus was completely gone, and come fall the fruit was outstanding.
The ground is the foundation for the quality, health, and taste of your garden!
Delicious produce in your garden, and healthy, colorful plants in your landscape, is directly related to the mycorrhizae and nutrients your soil has feeding the roots that lead up into the branches, leaves, and fruits of your plants. Plants assimilate the food they have from their roots, just as humans assimilate the nutrition out of the food we eat into our cells. When you give your plants the nutrients they need to grow, thrive, be strong, and healthy, they can resist disease more easily. Our job is to steward this by building and working the soil.
If you want delicious apples, berries, and vegetables in your garden, you have to feed them what they need before they will give you this kind of fruit and produce. Go try an apple from one of the un-cared for fruit trees growing near Immigrant Lake this fall. You should be able to taste the difference between these fruits and the ones you helped create by building the soil around your apple tree.
Always strive to find and treat the cause before going to abate symptoms in your garden. When you do this, 95% of the time the symptoms will take care of themselves because you addressed the root causing the symptom in the first place.
I am here to help you improve and maintain your garden and land through this philosophy!
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