07/28/2026
This time last week the plants you see below were thriving, weeds and all! Every bean plant loaded down ready for harvest. The sunflowers grand and magnificent, full of bees. Tomatoes full and starting to blush. Cucumbers, melons, squash and loufahs developing and climbing the trellis. Okra starting to develop their first buds. Pumpkins vining all over the yard. Hot peppers ripening and close to harvest. Lemon basil ready to be dried for tea. Blackberries ready for harvest. All grown organically to safely feed us and our animals.
Then last Wednesday the fields to the North of us were sprayed with the herbicides made from Glyphosphates. Specifically Roundup and Liberty. According to my weather app that day the wind was 8 miles per hour coming from the North East. To say there was just drift and overspray is an understatement. It obliterated my garden by poisoning it!!! Absolutely none, zilch, nada that has been touched by these herbicides is salvageable for us or our livestock. The amount of chemicals sprayed on commercially grown produce is one of the main factors to why we started growing our own food in the first place.
To spend 6 months of your life building something to have it destroyed in a day is devastating to say the least. I will be pulling everything out and burning it as I can't even compost any of it. We will be relocating our entire 4500sq ft garden to a fenced off section in the pasture and hopefully be able to replant next year. We will also be putting up a row of trees and filling this space with Sunflowers to pull any toxins from the soil. They say the soil is ok to plant my fall garden in, but I'm pretty leary about putting anything in the ground here now. I already have over a hundred plants waiting till it cools off a bit to go into the ground. And this is my only place to put them, so I don't know what to do. Definitely not trying to give us or our animals cancer. What would you do?
I would like to add that the company involved has slightly compensated us for the damage and acted to resolve this immediately. And are taking preventive measures im the future so this won't happen again. So I definitely appreciate that. This is just a hard loss that until I get it all out and gone is going to sting for a while.