General Info

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 1980s and the kitchen and garage of founder and president, Niles Kinerk. He started Gardens Alive!, then called Natural Gardening Research Center, in 1984, and set about finding products that he could sell and believed in. The company s first catalogs focused on now commonplace, but then hard-to-find, products like 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. In 1988, the company s name changed to Gardens Alive!