My daddy says that "organic gardening" means you split the garden with the wildlife 90%-10%, and guess who gets the 10%?

My daddy is pretty smart.

But I want to be an organic gardener; I really do. So as I walked down the rows this morning spewing white dust on everything, I lamented yet another failure on my part to produce food without resorting to chemicals. I read the label on the bag of dust with dismay. "Do not inhale. Do not ingest. Do not use near pets. Do not use near children. Absolutely lethal to fish and frogs." Oh, please God, somehow keep this out of the creek and out of the river.

So you dust, I say to daddy, this chemical on your plants and it ends up in the soil; won't it end up inside of your cucumbers and corn and potatoes, and then inside of you?

Look, he says, do you want anything to eat out of this garden or don't you? Because if you let the bugs and the groundhogs and the worms keep eating the plants right down to the ground you won't get anything. And I mean nothing.

I blame that mid-June hailstorm. Everything looked lovely, albeit a little peaked from the drought, until the hail beat the tarnation out of all the plants and buried them in two inches of ice. I dug all of the ice balls from around each individual plant. But once all the leaves in all the plants were punched full of holes, the smell of them wafted abroad and every mammal in the county moved in for an all-night buffet. Suddenly my garden looked like an expanse of crooked stems, bent over like 100-year-old men. Broccoli stems, potato stems, corn stems, bean stems. The cabbage looked like lace doilies with the edges badly gnawed.

Then it began to rain, and rained for 2 1/2 weeks solid. As much as my plants tried to recover, they kept being nibbled to nothing on a nightly basis. The corn is dwarfed and deformed, and putting out pathetic little munchkin ears for the deer to enjoy. The pepper plants threw in the towel a long time ago. The butternut squash wisely decided not to come up at all. I did manage to save the salad bed and the herb garden.

So what's an organic wannabe gardener to do? I have 20 hours of back-breaking labor in this 20 square yards of garden plot, and my $80 worth of plants are almost all dead or unproductive. The onions and carrots look decent and I have a slim chance at salvaging some beans and potatoes if I can win the war with potato bugs and Japanese beetles. I do not have the time or money for organic remedies, and my father just handed me a free ten-pound bag of dust.

The bag of dust says it eradicates cutworms, asparagus worms, cornworms, pickleworms, hornworms, Southern army worms, and anyworms. There seems to be a specific worm for every plant, and if the plant-specific worms don't completely destroy their assigned plants, there will be a charge of Southern army worms in grey uniforms playing bugles. If the Southern army worms leave anything behind, anyworms attack. Any old worms that haven't been dining in your garden already, that is. Other critters killed by this dust include the cucumber beetle, the potato beetle, the japanese beetle, and the asparagus beetle. Also the leaf miner, the leaf borer, the leaf roller, the leaf hopper, and the thrip.

Good gracious heavens. I had no idea what I was up against. Judging from the looks of my poor plants, the leaves have indeed been mined, bored, rolled, hopped upon, and thripped all to heck. There is also something called the fall army worm. They, I'm guessing, are Yankees, leaving a wide swath of destruction from the north (tomatoes) to the south (rhubarb) under the command of General Squirmin.

I feel terrible about my fall from organic grace in a cloud of dust, but I'm desperate to get some return on my investment in this garden. The thought of getting no cucumbers or beans or potatoes, after all the work and money I've put in, is unbearable. All in all, the garden has been such a washout (hailout?) that I would have been better off spending 20 hours cleaning house and buying $100 worth of veggies from my neighbors. Except for the salad, which is worth $10 a week, every week. Happy thought, that. And let's get real--I would have spent the 20 hours on the computer, not cleaning house, and my butt and thighs would be that much bigger. At least I got some exercise and fresh air. I got to meditate upon whether my exalted position at the top of the food chain is somebody's idea of a cruel joke. And with any luck, I will get some nonorganic, contaminated food 'round about early October. And hey--it's local!