Container-grown vegetables; organic or not?

[Johnboy]

Hi NB,
I read with interest the website about Organic Potting and Seeding mixes
but the trouble is that at a stroke the Soil Association can make every word of that website redundant. They keep on changing the goalposts.
This is quite typical of them over the years and this quite frankly why I gave up organics and became Pragmatic. I try exceedingly hard not use anything but if all else fails I refuse to scrap a crop on the grounds that it would not be organic and thus unfit for consumption.
The largest followers of the Soil Association are those who rely on bought-in produce and for pretty obvious reasons but do they really care a hoot if the Tomato was grown in a growbag or a pot because it is the principle that it is grown under and not the method of production that they care about.
There are a great many people who class themselves as organic who have no option but to grow in growbags or pots so why do the SA have always to make fools of themselves by alienating these people.
As you say, you, like myself, grow your produce in compost of your own making and nothing could be more organic. To me that is the end of the story. But the SA are making things very difficult on their accredited growers quite unnecessarily. If the system ain't broken why try to fix it.
JB.

[Geoff]

NB : I hope your "giving up" post wasn't a response to my "Who cares?".
I was responding to Alan's original post of :
In the latest edition of The Organic Way there are a couple of opposed responses to the question whether organic guidelines can apply to container-grown plants.

The "yes" response suggests that if the growing medium is organic then what is grown is organic.

The "no" response insists that organic plants can only be grown in the earth as only then will their "roots have had access to the mysteries of the earth. Plants can find these mysteries without scientific understanding."

Any views on the matter?

If the criterion for labelling something Organic (which I consider a totally discredited and irrelevant label anyway) has sunk to the level of discussing plants having access to the mysteries of the earth the term has been even further devalued to the point where I for one have no interest in the answer.

I am interested in safe and healthy food, in preserving and enhancing fertility of the soil and in feeding the world (if you have followed my other posts you will know I think this should start by controlling the size of the problem) but philosophical meanderings without scientific method do not address these issues.
The peat argument is one example. We are told digging peat allows it to break down and release its stored CO2 so we should use alternatives. Whatever organic matter we use will surely break down in the same way and release the same amount of CO2. There is an argument for using the peat that works and burying all these alternative materials that don't! If you increase the carbon content of a soil I guess you inevitably increase the amount of CO2 it emits but you have a net gain if the carbon content is maintained at a higher level. I would also expect if you keep that carbon content nearer the surface by reducing the depth of cultivation you increase the rate of oxidation to CO2 so carbon capture efficiency is reduced. These are my philosophical ramblings so are of no value because I have no proof just like the concept of earth mysteries.

[Mike Vogel]

Geoff, your logic is magnificent and makes me even more glad that I am using a lot of newspaper and cardboard as mulch, which eventually simply deposit their carbon content back into the soil.

[Nature's Babe]

Hi Mike, well I agree about the regulations, daft, most convert to organic because they believe in it, so why police them
I am open to the ideas on these links but I test them out with empirical research, I believe what I see - at the moment I as I am trying to get edible fungi to grow in my garden too, I am just learning how to multiply my own mycelium , using plugs that I bought, they're in wet corrugated cardboard, and at the moment, there are three test ones on the go, one in flouridated water, one in filtered water, and one in spring water - I want to see for myself if there is any difference. I also buy from an organic box scheme for what I can't grow, mushrooms are one of the things I hadn't mastered yet, and I want to be able to save spawn as I save seeds, and only pay once !

[Tony Hague]

Hi Mike, well I agree about the regulations, daft, most convert to organic because they believe in it, so why police them

If you did not police it, those who did not really believe in it would just use the label to get the extra profit margin. If we are talking about commercial growers, a proportion of organic growers do it because they believe in it. For quite a lot though is the result of a hard-nosed business decision based on the cost of producing organic produce and the price premium. Quite a bit of organic produce comes from large growers who also produce conventional product. Some comes from growers who try to do the minimum they can get away with whilst staying within the rules...