Does anyone react to potato starch?

[tex]

Brenda,

I've never been concerned about commercial fertilizers, because they're made from natural ingredients, (even though they're "manufactured" by chemical processes) - it's the pesticides that are risky. Frankly, I much prefer to eat food produced by the use of commercial fertilizers, rather than food produced with "organic" fertilizers, because organic fertilizers are loaded to the gills with pathogens, and often heavy metals, (after all, it's manure). That's the mechanism by which most e-coli outbreaks in vegetable fields occur, for example.

Unless the farming is drastically different in your part of Texas than it is here, though, it's extremely unlikely that any pesticides are used on any hay fields. Around here that almost never happens, unless something unusual, such as an extremely high grasshopper population comes along. Most hay fields here are never treated with pesticides - there's no reason to waste any money on such a treatment. Cotton is the biggest risk, because it requires many applications of potent pesticides. These days, many corn fields don't require any pesticides, because GMO seeds are resistant to rootworms and earworms, so there's no runoff risks from those fields.

Tex (who has lived on a farm most of his life)

[draperygoddess]

FWIW, my husband usually has a vegetable garden (we didn't this year because we moved in May). We compost our kitchen scraps for fertilizer (no manure!), and we try to be as organic as possible, though if you get a bad infestation of potato bugs, you either kill them or give them the plant! I do love tomatoes from the garden! Unfortunately, some of the veggies we love the most, we can't grow in our area.