Looking at the abundant, beautiful blossoms on a sole apple tree in a suburban garden, the old schoolboy joke came to mind. Which is: "What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a maggot in there?" Answer, "biting into an apple and finding half a maggot." You are unlikely to find maggots or odd creatures in any apple you buy in the shops today. Their super-glossy skin is unbroken or unpocked, the inside, all too often, of an impossibly tough and tasteless nature. You may be lucky enough to buy locally-grown apples, just as unflawed as the stiff, frozen foreigners but tasting, in most cases, so much better. In a way, we shouldn't be too supercilious about all of this. To be able to get, at all times of the year, imported cherries or strawberries or paw-paws or mangos is a great advance in living standards. But at what a price? Rachel Carson, some forty years ago, startled the consumers and certainly manufacturers of chemicals for crop-spraying with her book Silent Spring. In an introduction to the Penguin edition published this side of the Atlantic, Julian Huxley wrote: "It is almost certainly impossible to exterminate an abundant-insect pest but quite easy to exterminate non-abundant non-pests in the process." He does also write: "though chemical control can be very useful, it, too, needs to be controlled."
We have seen since those early days, various chemicals banned or dropped out of favour, but when you read that apples, for example, may be sprayed ten or fifteen times or whatever, are you sure that by peeling them before eating, you are getting rid of all traces of the sprays? We live in dangerous times, and chemical spraying of crops may not be the greatest hazard in the atomic energy age, but there is no doubt that the move to organic farming is no longer regarded as a somewhat crankish or far-out solution. It is, after all, a return to older practices. Young people lucky enough to have gardens are in so many cases taking courses in The Organic Centre, Rossinver, County Leitrim. Day courses, and some two-day.
It's possible to be too scared of chemicals. One friend won't even spray cleevers (goosegrass galium aparine) that awful stick weed, which can grow to ten feet. He just doggedly rakes it out, and rakes it out, and rakes it out; and it just grows, and grows and grows again. Y