With the Aero Garden becoming more popular, the word organic is being tossed around. But, what does organic mean?
According to Wikipedia, organic foods are produced according to certain production standards. For crops, it means they were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing radiation or food additives.
Now, organic foods are becoming much more widely available — organic food sales within the United States have grown by 17 to 20 percent a year for the past few years[3] while sales of conventional food have grown at only about 2 to 3 percent a year. Read more...
Organic produce is still quite expensive compared to non-organic produce in the stores. One way to combat the high prices and still enjoy organic produce is to grow your own using the Aero Garden.
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This is very much a question of the semantics of the word "organic." OMRI listed hydroponic plant foods include Earth Juice, BioGrow, Nature's Nectar, BioBizz (also certified by EKO)... there are many others.
Aerogarden product literature simply says
"The AeroGarden® nutrient tablets are organic, according to current AAPFCO (American Association of Plant Food Control Officials) standards."
However, the National Safety Council web site says
"Each state has its own requirements for what can appear on fertilizer labels—usually based on boilerplate language set by the Assoc. of American Plant Food Control Officials. AAPFCO considers only the chemical definition of what constitutes an organic substance (composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen): David Terry, 859-257-2668, Dterry@ca.uky.edu, http://www.aapfco.org
This practice allows products such as Milorganite which is made from Milwaukee's sewage sludge, to be touted as "organic" label—even though municipal sludge is not acceptable under federal organics rules: http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop. Milorganite: Jeff Spence, 414-277-6364, jspence@mmsd.com, http://www.milorganite.com"
It is plainly obvious that you can still use OMRI listed organic hydroponic products with the aerogarden device. Such products normally include feeding charts showing the dose to give different kinds of plants as well as what other products to use with them. One could go as far as to introduce beneficial microorganisms such as Bacillus subtilis and friends to the system.
I have some reservations about how organic the aerogarden vegetables are depending on how one wants to interpret the semantics of the word. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that it isn't very a very biologically active way of growing plants.
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