Gardens Alive  
The Gardens Alive! Story Gardens Alive! is one of the country's leading mail order companies dedicated to biological control of garden pests. Sales are nationwide and the company traces its roots back to the early 1980's and the kitchen and garage of founder and President, Niles Kinerk.

Environmentally Responsible Products That Work

"Environmentalism wasn't a dirty word when I was growing up on the family farm in Yoder, Indiana. For all intents and purposes, it wasn't a word at all. This was back in the 1950s, in a kind of Lassie-come-home rural America. And though I was growing up in a typical, self-sufficient family farm rather than a corporate-owned agricultural business, we used all of the new miracle pesticides that the so-called "green revolution" had to offer. Fact is, we felt sorry for our neighbors who hadn't yet been so enlightened.

Something in the Air...

I learned through trial and error in my own gardens, some environmentally responsible products worked, and some didn't. I began to wish that someone would take on the job of sorting the eco-wheat from the eco-chaff, and making tested, organic products available to gardeners like me. It was a fairly short jump from wishing someone else would do the job to tackling it myself.

Working on "What Works"

I started Gardens Alive!, then called Natural Gardening Research Center, in 1984, and set about finding products that I could sell and that I believed in. Our first catalogs focused on such now commonplace but then hard to find products as Bacillus thuringiensis (a bacteria that targets specific pests but is harmless to birds, worms, wildlife, and people), rotenone (a natural pesticide derived from the roots of a tropical plant) and, as the concept of using insects to fight insects began to gain popularity, the first beneficial insect species that Gardens Alive! still sells today.

In 1988 we changed the name of the company to Gardens Alive! (try saying "Natural Gardening Research Center" three times fast), and we've continued to search out environmentally sound products that our customers couldn't find elsewhere. Products that work.

And There's More

I've only touched upon a couple of items in the line of Gardens Alive! "environmentally responsible products that work." Whether you want to control fleas in your home, pests in your garden or moths on your fine woolens; whether you want to keep deer from destroying your landscape plants or want to raise spectacular roses without chemicals; or whether you're growing bulbs or vegetables or fruit trees or grass seed, Gardens Alive! has a product that will help you succeed without turning your garden, yard or home into a minefield of chemical worries, a product that can save your peace of mind and soothe your budget.

Environmentally responsible products that work? You bet, and it's about time!