THEY have sat on those shelves for goodness knows how many years. Added to from time to time, as advertising promises caught the eye - canned chemical killers at our beck and call.

Our personal Weapons Of Mass Destruction, waiting to be unleashed on the unsuspecting environment and inhabitants of our gardens.

But not for much longer.

It has always been one of my better intentions to become more organic in the garden. However, like most other keen amateur gardeners, when something needs my attention I want a quick positive reaction and result.

So I reach high above child level into the back corners of the shed or garage shelves. Delving amongst dented rusting tins and musty cardboard containers, I bring out an apparently appropriate chemical cocktail to apply. If I can't find a suitable solution I make another visit to the garden centre shelves for that "perfect something".

Thankfully since the 1960s there has been an ever-increasing concern about pesticides in the food chain and their possible long-term health effects. Now the British Government and European Union's ongoing pesticide reviews, to ensure the safety of garden products, are about to be felt. DIY and garden centres will have to remove many such products from the shelves or face a fine of up to £5,000 for each breach.

From next Thursday, about 80 amateur garden products and 135 professional products will be withdrawn from the market.

Popular names are set to disappear from the garden suppliers - Jeyes Fluid, Armatillox, Scotts Rose Clear 2 and Murphy Mortegg Winter Wash among others, but the majority are lawn treatments and insecticides containing chlorpyrifos, dimethoate, malathion, permethrin, and pirimiphos-methyl for use as gardening pesticides.

All are going because of the cost to the manufacturers of gaining environmental approval in a small market. Hence some of the "clearance bargains" now on the shelves.

Manufacturers of garden products registered before the early 1990s were required under the reviews to submit additional data to prove their product's safety for use.

However, in some cases it could have cost the manufacturer between £400,000 and £800,000 to do so. The manufacturers themselves cannot justify the costs and are either reformulating or changing active ingredients of their products, or just terminating production.

For more specific details to compare with the contents of your shed or garage go to www.cropprotection.org.uk - the website of companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of garden care products in the Britain.

Though you cannot buy the withdrawn products after next Thursday, you can still use those already bought and on your shelves, until December 31. But we have to dispose of such items before March 31, 2004.

For safe disposal, according to The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, you should turn to your local waste disposal authority and they will advise - because it is illegal to dispose of garden chemicals or their wastes through drains, sinks, even lavatories.

There is an apocryphal tale of a council dustbin lorry exploding after the contents of one late grandad's garden shed were emptied into the rubbish bin!

In the future many of us will have to adopt more organic gardening principles so that, with improved cultivation techniques, our gardens are better able to withstand pests and diseases. We will all have to become more tolerant with a certain amount of pest damage and disease in the garden and we shall have to get to know our "friends": those valuable insect "consumers" of garden pests.

Check the website of "the organic organisation", the Henry Doubleday Research Association - www.hdra.org.uk.

The availability of an increasing use of the natural enemies of pests, including microscopic worms known as nematodes, might be just the future solution that we are looking for instead of what's left on the shelf for the next month. Check www.just-green.com for information.

GRAEME BURN is the senior partner at York law firm Burn & Company.

Updated: 10:27 Thursday, July 17, 2003