IT IS USEFUL to know that weeds have tremendous benefits as plants and are only weeds because we did not plant them where they are. I shudder at the sight of yellow dock carrying a seed head for a thousand potential deep-rooted dockies, yet know that deep dock roots bring nutrients to upper soil layers.
Our friends bought a property in a country area where everyone appeared to be members of a land care or tree-planting group, so they were expecting to join a community that took care of the environment. This was true only insofar as the neighbors were changing a farming district into a region looking prettier by the year, with flowering natives marking boundaries and daffodils popping up in green grass during winter.
But spring was the neighborhood’s cue to spray weed killers. We saw large brown areas between the greener ones, poisoned and ready for weed-free planting. Our friends found that, although the previous owners had maintained an annual poison program on the property, it still sprouted an abundant crop of multifarious weeds. They decided to abstain from the September ritual, save the money, and get some exercise by controlling weeds by mowing. By not using poisons, they prevented toxic residues running into their dam, creek, and water table.
Weeds are weeds because they are vigorous plants that survive without human interference. The first rhododendron, carefully collected in the wild, became a weed in England! Each weed has unique properties. Some are toxic; others are beneficial herbs. Due to the war against weeds waged by humans for centuries, only the toughest survive. In nature, trees stand in fields of weedy herbs or herby weeds beneficial to their health. If you care to imitate nature, let some weeds and grasses grow in your orchard and just keep a circle 3 feet in diameter around young trees for manure, mulch, and watering. You can still mow the orchard, or have it grazed and fertilized by geese and ducks—see Easy-Care Fruit Trees and Berries.
Start on sunny days in late winter and don’t leave weeding till mid-spring, by which time your chosen plants demand space. Pull one bucket of weeds every day as exercise. A feathered flock living in a run will thrive on these morsels. Chickens, ducks, and geese each have their favorite weeds, and some they all squabble over, turning them into eggs and manure. Poison those weeds, and you get nothing, while creeks and the water table collect toxic residues. Regard weeds as plant food to toss in the compost or liquid manure (see Plant Food and Soil Food) or spread on a vacant plot to dig in. To solve the problem in a few years, always pull weeds before they set seed.
For extensive areas, apply hot water or steam weeds with appropriate equipment. Alternatively, cover temporarily with black plastic or weed mat, making slits to insert plants, and mulch with straw. Buy UV stabilized, permeable, and biodegradable weed mat so the soil underneath doesn’t dry out (consult advertisements in organic gardening magazines).
My friend Gay covered a weed-infested area with telephone books opened in the center, placed in overlapping fashion. Collect them from friends and neighbors. Give the weeds two to three years to die down. Cover phone books with straw and potted plants to make it look pretty. This worked for me on suckering bamboo.
Different weeds pull up minerals from different soil levels: calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, silica, sulfur, and more. Should you be so lucky to have nettles, you may be happy to know that your soil is rich. Nettles love growing near compost heaps and are an excellent fertilizer in a similar way as seaweed. Pick nettles before they set seed, steep in a bin of water, and leave to rot. Scoop off some “nettle tea,” dilute, and use on your vegetables. Dry young nettles to make a velvet herb tea for human consumption. Leave a few stalks going to seed.
That said, weeds going to seed spells trouble. Pull or mow weeds early and don’t let them seed. Don’t let bulb-setting weeds flower, as they set new bulbs at this time. Dig them up and compost. Each area has its own notorious weeds. Some are edible. Talk to locals and find out how the worst weeds propagate themselves—by seed, bulb, root division, or all three? Then eradicate each weed just before it sets seed or forms new bulbs. Most weeds can be composted, but never put dock root in the compost! This sort of knowledge takes the panic out of spring and the weed issue. Suspect seed heads and roots should go into plastic bags, knotted at the top. Growing and managing weeds is part of healthy gardening, and your compost heap makes short work of most of them.
All this good news about weeds should be enough to make you quite relaxed on the subject. In dormant times, spot what is coming up and saunter out for your daily bucket. Pull selectively, according to what needs to be stopped in its tracks rather than weeding a whole area, which is what you do just before the new planting season.
Enjoy your weeds, get to know them. Learn that the pointy, striated leaf of plantain (Plantago lanceolata) is nicknamed “gardener’s Band-Aid” because it stems bleeding should you cut yourself. Simply rinse, crush a leaf, and apply.
The first line of thought is: Leave well alone. Most pests are temporary phenomena.
The second line of thought is: Every critter has a role in the great web of life. Pull one out, and a connection is broken; pull out another and several connections break, until the web collapses. This is what the chemical revolution has partly achieved. Its other achievement is that it made certain weeds and pest species resistant to simpler pest management.
Let your garden accommodate all insects, butterflies, bees, birds, lizards, rodents, and possums. You may be fonder of some than others, and if there are rodents, it is because no one can stop them. Protect vegetables likely to be attacked by wildlife (see Hardware in the Food Garden). Usually, there is but a brief time slot when certain crops become attractive to certain creatures, so why wipe out a whole species because they have your vegetable on the menu twice a year? My early artichokes were chewed by rodents or possums. By placing shade cloches over the globes, I harvested several months longer. The chewed plants grew more stems that produced late artichokes as well. Prolific bearers such as tomatoes and zucchinis may get bugs, slugs, or mildew, but you can still pick a fair crop.
The third line of thought is: Since eradicating so-called pests has not been successful, and they are still with us despite the billions of tons of chemicals bombed on them (rather like humans do to humans, no?), shouldn’t we perhaps accommodate them? Why not make them comfortable by planting their favorite habitat away from the vegetables or fruit we want to protect. The favorite dwellings of earwigs in hot seasons are roses and artichokes—tightly folded, cool apartments where they spend the daylight hours. Planting these may keep them away from your cabbages. Before eating artichokes, soak out earwigs; they never penetrate beyond the outer layers.
Identify the pests in your garden, then seek remedies that work with nature rather than against it. If you have a problem with grubs and caterpillars, you may have to deep dig the vegetable plot where some lay their eggs and let blackbirds or chickens clean it out. Plant flowering native shrubs to attract small birds for future pest control. Read a book like Jackie French’s Natural Control of Garden Pests, and allow your views to do an about-face. Let the critters have some of what you grow. Learn to take tiny losses.
Snails are the logo of the Slow Food Movement. They love agapanthus clumps. It’s too hot and rough a crawl from the agapanthus bank to the vegetable garden, so they leave the vegetables alone. What works in my garden and climate may not work in yours, but try not to overreact to a bit of damage. It is early days yet for the idea of accommodating other species instead of annihilating them, and the last word has not yet been spoken on the subject. Try out biological methods and observe what works in your garden. Apply coffee grounds, wood ash, sawdust, or lime around plants susceptible to slug and snail attack.
The fourth line of thought is: Pests attack the weakest plants, leaving others alone, at least in a multi-mix organic garden. This is nature’s way of preventing weak plants from having progeny by setting seed. The other thing nature arranged is that even one old broccoli plant full of aphids will attract hordes of predators to take care of pest control. Isn’t that wonderfully organized?
Unfortunately, humans mess up this well-laid, survival-of-the-fittest plan by spraying at the first, second, and third sign of a pest, thus keeping weak plants alive at the expense of the well-being of the whole species and killing good bugs in the process.
My first impulse when spotting a seed-setting broccoli sporting a gray mess of aphids reminiscent of asbestos is to pull the whole plant out and throw it on the compost heap where birds and nature’s processes do what they must do. I don’t like unsightly plants in my food plot. But I have learned to look and see before I pull. Predators will invade the garden to clean up aphids, attracted by flowering vegetables going to seed, of which I leave several standing. If you pull the affected plant, aphids may attack the next weakest specimen. You must trust the organic process to have its way. Leave the aphids and their host. Should the whole garden become infested, you undoubtedly have an impoverished soil that can only produce poor plants. Read again the chapters on compost and soil and this time do it: add compost and manure, grow green crops, start all over again!
Add OF and LS for plant health. Use LS on weaker plants worth reviving—it’s medicine! Rotate crops, plant companion plants, and grow green crops. Strong plants cope better with the vagaries of pests, weather, and climate change. These jobs are done in no time by intelligent gardeners on their tiny plots. Whereas a hundred years ago, the cry was “We must tame nature!”, now it is “We must repair and restore nature.” If we do that, nature will take care of its own. That includes us.
If we repair and restore nature, nature will take care of its own—and that includes us.
One way of assisting natural processes to attract beneficial insects is to plant herbs and flowers in the surrounding garden. Plant feverfew rather than using pyrethrum spray. See List of Common Herbs. You avoid killing beneficial creatures while keeping unwanted ones at bay. Practice companion planting.
According to research at Utah State University, you can attract ladybugs by sprinkling some of your garden area with sugar water. Melt ½ cup of sugar in warm water and top off with 1 quart cold water. Apply with a watering can. Do 1 to 2 gallons at once. Increases of 200 to 1,300 percent were noted in the ladybug population within a few days, which is a lot even if you only had one ladybug to start with. Ladybugs feed on aphids, mites, and cabbage moth eggs, among others. Sugar water also attracts lacewings and beetles.
Alternatively, buy some Hippodamia variegatae. Not a variety of hippos, but a species of ladybug that come through the post as eggs on tape. (See advertisements in organic gardening magazines.)
In our litigation-happy times, it is not wise to give advice that encourages other people to use any substance whatsoever. What is an allowable chemical and what is not remains a contentious issue in government departments that seek to protect us all from harm. Not all substances used by gardeners have yet been classified. At the time of writing, garlic and milk, used by organic gardeners as sprays, are unclassified in some states, although we use them freely in our cooking. You can see where this is going, can’t you? I am not keen to advocate sprays or applications no matter how innocent the substances appear to be, lest you are allergic. I rarely use any myself, preferring to let nature do the healing.
IMPORTANT: When spraying, no matter whether a homemade brew or a commercial product, wear gloves, mask, goggles, long sleeves, and trousers. If there is a label, read it, and follow the directions for use.
THEY COME from everywhere, and most of them fly in or arrive on foot in our space that is the food garden. In whatever space they once made a living, they now set up among our vegetables and fruit trees. Then it only takes weeks for some species to give birth and their offspring is indigenous to our little space. To tell the truth, some were indigenous before birth, because the eggs that contained them simply lay in the soil waiting for the right conditions, which are, of course, the application of water, mulch, and edible plants.
“Aha! A gardener has arrived, so now we can get born—or airborne.” And bingo, we have an ecosystem on our garden gloves, with the first arrivals being the plant eaters and the last those that eat the plant eaters. If only it were the other way around, the first year of a new garden wouldn’t be so nerve wracking.
If they are so inclined, home gardeners can spend more than the weekly food bill on chemicals for their flower, fruit, and vegetable gardens. But even organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, who both supported the chemical “green” revolution in the past to make the world free from hunger, have changed their collective minds and declared that organic farming methods are the only way to go forward in global food production. And that goes for home gardeners as well.
Biological controls are always preferable.
There is a predator or plant-derived deterrent for every pest in nature. Scientists and gardeners are finding them, and we shall, in future, all garden with this in mind. The first thought food gardeners have about insects is that they don’t want them because they eat the vegetables and fruit we are growing for ourselves. This attitude has brought about a century of spraying with chemicals capable of killing everything that crawls or flies. Together with harmful insects, all the beneficial insects go to the grave as well. And so the predators are killed with the pests they could have controlled.
This practice has opened ecological niches for new hordes to enter and wreak damage, for nature never leaves a niche unfilled. Worse, pest insects have developed resistance, so some sprays don’t affect them. It happened with weeds, now chemical-resistant weeds abound. One town had sprayed its roadside for many years with glyphosate only to end up with resistant rye grass and two other resistant grasses. They now have to revert to mowing and slashing at the right times to control these indestructible weeds. GM crops are sprayed with such chemicals, and problems of glyphosate-resistant weeds are occurring in the United States where 80 percent of corn and soya crops are GM, as well as cotton. So, having taken this road in the past, American growers of GM crops now have to try to grow crops without chemicals.
Experiment. If one insect does not like a smell, then plant a plant with that smell near the plant you need to protect. On the other hand, if some like a certain smell (such as fish oil), then put some away from the plants to be protected. If snails prefer to live in agapanthus leaves, then don’t plant aggies along the vegetable plot, but plant as a catch crop as far away as possible.
Practice companion planting in the food garden and surround it with aromatic plants to attract beneficial insects. You can buy fruit fly thingammabobs to hang in fruit trees that may attract these destructive flies. Finding out how to protect our food plants from attack is work we can do with our feet up, reading a companion plants book, or looking up a website.
Joy and Ken, friends who have rescued and raised wildlife, were given a fledgling bird that had blown from its nest. Joy doubted it would survive, blind and featherless as it was. But it did and was given its own cage until it was ready to be released. Ken fed it broccoli from the garden, which the little bird gobbled up daily. When the broccoli ran out, Ken bought some, but the bird retreated to a corner of the cage and wouldn’t touch the shop product. When organic broccoli was obtained, the bird ate it again with gusto. This story alone is enough to make me an organic gardener.
Originally, I thought of giving my next book the title Eating Holes after my apparently notorious remark on the television program Gardening Australia about insect damage to leafy greens: “You can eat holes, you know. They cook up quite well.”
When I met Irene, who lives in her town’s original watertank on less than a tenth of an acre and opens her garden to the public twice annually, she said: “I thought of you the other day because my bok choy is being eaten by something. But I said to my friends, ‘Lolo says you can eat holes.’ So I eat holes, and all my friends do, too.”
Holes are evidence of insect visits, sometimes of egg-laying on the underside of leaves. You probably don’t want to eat cabbage butterfly eggs, but you can tear a small hole in the leaf to take them out. For over three decades, I have gardened as organically as possible in five gardens, and biodynamically for a number of years, using no chemical sprays, and applying B&B and other natural fertilizers from as organic a supplier as I can find. Life is a compromise, whatever you do. Gradually, the insect population in a new garden reduces, overcome by the resistance some plants develop through being fed well, especially with seaweed solutions. Only a long wet period increases the slug and snail brigades. The main point is: we eat almost daily from the garden despite the freeloaders.
Holes do not worry me one bit. What concerns me is that my vegetables are looking vigorous and deep green.
One gentle remedy against insect attacks is a collection of mobile herbs in pots, which I place where needed: mint and celery herb either end of the kale patch; mint and chives where slugs are in evidence. Slugs also stay away from garlic—most critters do. Scented geraniums apparently make an anti-slug hedge. Strewing fennel ferns between vegetables also keeps slugs away; for bad cases, lay elderberry branches around. For this, you must first grow your elderberry tree for a steady supply, but they grow pretty fast.
A most unusual warning appeared in the news about a Sydney man who ate a slug for a dare. As a result, he came down with a rare form of meningitis called rat lungworm disease, caused by a parasitic worm carried by slugs and snails. The disease can be fatal. If it does not become fatal, only the immune system can deal with it. Ugh!15
WARNING: For the above reason, always wash fruits and vegetables thoroughly, and wash your hands after handling slugs and snails, or pick them up with a paper scoop. But don’t the French eat snails? Yes, but they cook them. Good hygiene avoids problems.
Collect snails from their hiding places between stones and pots. If you know your garden, you also get to know where snails spend the night. Collect them by the handful and migrate them to a far part of the ornamental garden where they can do little harm. If they have been breeding and suddenly there are minute little baby snails everywhere, make sure to wash your vegetables very well, drain them, and leave in a colander or bowl for half an hour. Any little snails will by then race around the edge of the container and can be migrated as well. Check for snails between the leaves of large vegetables.
Earwigs like fish oil in water. Slugs hate sawdust and like beer. Slaters like damp newspaper. Rabbits apparently regard a line of B&B as a fence not to be crossed. It is also said that they can be deterred by a border of onions or other alliums.
Homemade sprays can deter insects that come in for a short time when a crop is young or fruiting. A homemade garlic spray is about the easiest to make. Boil a knob, sieve the liquid, and use it as soon as possible. Sprinkling with liquid seaweed deters those insects that come in for the kill when a plant is weak, such as aphids, because seaweed strengthens the plant’s immune system.
Unavoidably, at busy times of the growing season, all or part of your food garden may take on the appearance of a mini-junkyard with its little squares and rectangles filled with upturned yogurt containers, plastic bottles, PVC rings, netted cages, and portable shade cloches. Hardware is truly harmless to you and to the insects it deters. See Hardware in the Food Garden. Protecting plants with hardware is a marvelous recycling game, making you inspect all packaging to see whether it might do some good in the garden. Delight in it, because it is all temporary, usually for the duration of the baby to teenage period of the plants. Once they are strong, they can stand what wind and weather sends their way.
A healthy food garden should not be devoid of winged creatures. Have insects and bees buzzing about on their quest to make a living from your flowers. Plant for them. Perennial wild arugula (the one with the narrow serrated leaves used as decoration in restaurants) will flower for months to the delight of local wild bees, who will also come in to pollinate your fruit trees and pumpkin and squash vines. Let a few healthy vegetable plants set seed, as the flowers attract beneficial insects. Learn to live with visitors from the biosphere, even if you cannot accommodate them all.
If you decide to spray soapy water under the leaves, remember that soap kills frogs and probably salamanders as well. Study the List of Common Herbs that can be planted for long-term prevention. Feed the soil to return plants to health. Plant a southernwood in a large pot to shift between vegetables prone to aphids.
Netting may seem drastic but is very possible if you only have one or two squares to protect. Don’t use monofilament netting that snares and kills animals, but buy netting that does not endanger birds and wildlife, like long-lasting, double-knitted netting with holes allowing bee access. Thrown over fruit trees, it has to be clipped tightly underneath or the birds will come in off the ground floor. Netting saves most of the crop for you.
To discourage birds from pulling up seedlings, nipping beans in the bud, or shredding the lettuce for you, push in short stakes and crisscross sewing thread above the plants. String aluminum yogurt covers on wire, or clip on folded bread bags with the ends cut into fringes. Make pinwheels on sticks or push thin branches on either side of seedlings and bend together. Evidently, jars and bottles painted red and stuck on sticks do the job. It may look like a carnival, but if it works? Wire cages are my first protection—see Hardware in the Food Garden.
Introduced to this continent by mistake through Montreal, Canada, in 1860, these pretty butterflies have spread like bunnies throughout North America. They feed on brassicas, nasturtiums, and some ornamental flowers. You may find the urn-shaped eggs and greenish larvae and pupae, ornamented with one thin stripe, on the leaves of host plants. Plant brassicas in small squares with stakes on the corners. Cut simple butterfly shapes from white plastic lids and containers and tie these onto thin string at intervals of 4 to 6 inches. Or, use Styrofoam packing fill that has a sort of butterfly shape. String butterfly garlands from stake to stake and diagonally across—they spell out “occupied territory.” Or, try a molasses spray (see here). Plant large pots with thyme and sage, or southernwood with chamomile and place between cabbages.
If you see brown caterpillars on your apple, fig, pear, or quince tree, pick them off because, after feeding on your fruit, they cocoon themselves to turn into larvae that pop up again as moths, which lay eggs and give rise to the next caterpillar population. Interception is the name of this game, as once infected, it may take years to free a tree of this pest.
In deep winter, buy several yards of thin unbleached cotton or similar material and sew a supply of small drawstring bags. In late winter, fix corrugated cardboard around the trunk before the tree starts flowering. Caterpillars shack up in the corrugations. Clean it out twice a week after dawn and dispose of the contents.
When the petals start to fall, make an exception and spray with Garlic Spray. Next, cover fruit that has just set, but has not been bitten by a caterpillar—while the flower petals are still dropping—with the cotton bags and tie the strings above the fruit. Through spring and summer, inspect the fruit and pick off by hand whatever should not be there. Clean out old leaves in the crooks of branches and periodically brush trunk and branches with a steel brush to rid them of loose bark where caterpillars full of apple pulp might want to spin a cocoon. Clear the ground underneath the tree of all fallen fruit, bits of wood, bark, and leaves, and dispose of them thoroughly. Don’t put down mulch, as it makes hiding places, but do empty pots of earwigs as these clean up codling moths—see Earwigs.
Unless you have chickens, under-plant apple, pear, and quince trees with the sort of plants that attract hosts of small wasps, flies, beetles, and spiders which dine on codling moth, such as alyssum, buckwheat, carrot, daikon radish, parsnip in flower, dill, red clover, mustard, Queen Anne’s lace, and yarrow. Mix the seed of a number of these to attract the greatest range of beneficial insects.
Chickens will dispense with codling moth if allowed to scratch under mature fruit trees. Protect them from dogs and foxes by enclosing even a small orchard with a fox-proof fence, or with an apron of wire netting buried outwards around the run and an outward curving overhang at the top of the wire to prevent a desperado vixen digging under or climbing up. Or, invest in a “chicken tractor,” a tiny mobile run to wheel around where you want a couple of chickens to work for a day. Protect that, too, from dogs and foxes. It sounds like a lot of work, especially if you have three or more trees to treat. But you will get results and, once you have these measures in place, it becomes part of a seasonal routine. Write the dates in your notebook for next year.
Commercial products such as a horticultural glue fixed around the trunk to prevent caterpillars climbing up may help, or use petroleum jelly. Sticky traps and pads to render the male infertile are advertised in organic gardening magazines. Other baits that can be hung in jars from the tree are apple juice with a spoon of olive oil, or dissolved molasses with the same—but they could trap beneficial insects also. If you decide to use organic sprays, apply before fruit sets. Spray all hiding places in the trunk, branches, and ground around the trunk, and spread elderberry prunings. Pheromones issue a safe scent that disrupts the mating procedure, said to work on areas of a hectare and larger.
Flowers between vegetables attract beneficial insects that keep pests down and confuse predators looking for a particular crop to settle on.
The bane of stone-fruit growers. The old remedy was spraying with a cup of copper sulphate and a teaspoon of agricultural lime dissolved in 15 liters (4 gallons) of water. This has to be done when buds are just appearing on the branches, or it will be too late.
Bordeaux spray, although organic, contains arsenic and is therefore not recommended. You could try a stinging-nettle infusion or LS before buds open and again a few weeks later. Spray under the tree as well. A more hands-on treatment involves picking off diseased leaves into a plastic bag—easier with espaliered trees than huge canopies. Burn the end points of each affected branch with a cigarette lighter—at last one good use for those!—as the disease starts in the tip leaves. Do this daily for a week. Give tree and surrounding soil a dousing with LS for the remaining leaves to take up. Hang a bag of diseased leaves inside another bag in the sun before disposal. Under-plant the tree with tansy, feverfew, and yarrow to form a dense mat. Hanging mallow weeds in affected branches seems to work. Pigeon manure is said to help. Also, place eucalyptus branches under the tree in spring.
If you can’t plant a “catch” crop like roses away from the food plot, put out pots on their sides, stuffed with moist newspaper. Empty the pots away from the vegetable garden; migrate the little darlings to under the apple, fig, pear, and quince trees to take care of codling moths.
Food growers in warmer states, especially California and Florida, are at risk for this serious disease, which can ruin fruit crops for miles around. It has to be reported to each state’s department of agriculture, which put a ban on any fruit moving out of the affected area. Seek out local advice if you live in an area prone to fruit flies. Check advertisements for fruit fly traps in organic gardening magazines. If your crop is small, tie bags of paper or cloth around clusters of fruit. If you expect fruit flies, sew up a supply of light cotton drawstring bags during winter. Put them on as soon as tiny fruits appear and check regularly. Dispose of affected fruit not collected by local authorities by “cooking” it in black plastic bags in the sun for a month, and find out what combative measures are being taken in your area.
There are many, but when you see the first sign, spray with milk and water mixed 1:10 and repeat before going for heavier antifungal sprays. If the weather is about to change, it may not be necessary.
A homemade spray for use with persistent pests or diseases. Make several days before needed. This recipe is from the renowned Henry Doubleday Research Association of England, reprinted in The Organic Gardener’s Companion. Chop half a head of garlic, mix in 2 teaspoons of liquid paraffin, and soak for forty-eight hours. Add 1 quart of water and 1 teaspoon of an oil-based soap as a disperser. Mix, filter, and store in a plastic container. Dilute with water 100:1, or for persistent cases, 100:2.
Grasshoppers are more likely to swarm in drought-stricken areas. The best controls are biological. Plant shrubs to attract birds, flowers to attract insects, and any of the beneficial herbs named throughout this book. Make hiding places for lizards, create a frog habitat, and keep chickens. Protect your best vegetables with hospital gowns or other covers that prevent ready access to the hoppers. Unfortunately, they lay their eggs in the soil. Try garlic spray (see above). Should they appear the next season, protect crops early in the hope they dine out elsewhere.
Molasses spray: Dissolve a tablespoon of molasses in ½ gallon of warm water. This discourages flying and chewing insects, and maybe even grasshoppers. Being sweet, maybe it attracts ladybugs? There’s still much to discover.
These eelworms suck the fleshy roots of potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, radishes, and carrots, making them look pockmarked. Read up on marigold and mustard in List of Common Herbs. It may take a few years to clean the soil, but damage gradually dwindles. Nematodes don’t like fresh chicken manure, but neither do plants, so apply to soil several months before planting.
Pear sawfly larvae suck the green out of pear, plum, and cherry leaves, leaving leaf skeletons. Douse with water, then with dry sand or wood ash. For long-term prevention, spread oak-leaf mulch.
Plant floribunda roses in the surrounding garden, and the possums will go for the buds. Or install a blinking night-light—see Hardware in the Food Garden. Be wary of ultrasonic devices to keep animals away. These could create an inaudible, interlocking web of ultrasonic beams from many backyards that may also scare off birds—check out thoroughly before using.
Vegetable families host specific powdery mildews that do not cross-infect other plant families. If leaves of pumpkin, cucumber, and zucchini are affected, that doesn’t mean the grapes will get it, too. Mildew thrives in damp conditions where ventilation is restricted. Growing cucumbers and pumpkins on a trellis may prevent it. Sprays of milk and water mixed 1:10 or whey and baking soda have been effective. Where fungal diseases and molds persist, prune affected leaves, and compost in a hot heap or covered bin. Mildew weakens its host, so if productive plants have a bad case, collect a handful of fir needles, boil, and dilute to 2 gallons. Splash this on affected plants every two weeks.
Sprinkle B&B where they have been nibbling.
If you do not currently have rodents prowling your garden, they may come when you start growing vegetables. They love germinating peas and beans, fava beans, sweet corn, melons, and ornamental bulbs. Protect germinating seeds with cages, dish racks, or similar obstructions, or use rings of PVC pipe with screening. Really keen rodents may still uproot these. Raise seedlings inside, because once seeds have sprouted a plant with four to six leaves, the attraction appears to vanish.
They are beautiful creatures. Nice children look on in wonder when snails carry their elegant spiral houses slowly through the grass. They eat certain plants, including weeds, so we don’t want to eradicate them. Organic growers used to make their vegetables unpalatable to snails and other diners by making a spray from wormwood, garlic, or white cedar. There is a withholding time of two weeks after spraying, so this method is not attractive if you want to pick greens daily.
The alternative is to collect snails or place a flowerpot with moist newspaper upside down on a stake overnight. Migrate the snails to another “country” early mornings before they wake up. Oak-leaf mulch or coffee grounds repel slugs and snails and add nitrogen to the soil. After a wet spell with intervals of sunshine—great slug weather—I picked a lovely cabbage surrounded with coffee grounds. Only one slug lived in the outer leaves.
Strawberries test the gardener’s ingenuity. Everybody loves them. We’ve had bandicoots coming to feast, as well as snakes, birds, rodents, millipedes, and lizards. Most objectionable are millipedes that tunnel into big strawberries and disperse their body odor through the entire fruit. Snakes can strangle themselves in netting to get at strawberries. The best protection I’ve used was black shade cloth, as strawberries ripen as much with warmth as full sun. Spread shade cloth, propped up to raise it above the plants, then weigh down the edges with stones.
Strawberries produce from spring to autumn but need netting or shade cloth as protection from birds and lizards.
For infestations that can’t be fixed with exclusion, hot water, or mulches, an organic pine oil product is available.
These sap-suckers attack beans and tomatoes, leaving plants yellow and stunted. Ladybugs, lacewings, and other flying pest controllers clean up whitefly infestations. Try a sugar solution to attract these good insects to your garden (¾ cup of sugar per bowl of hot water; add enough cold water to cool it before sprinkling around plants), and provide a habitat for them of flowering herbs in pots and perennial flowers in borders. My friend Maureen sowed lots of marigolds along her tomatoes and whiteflies disappeared!
For plant health, feed and mulch regularly, know what your water contains, do rain dances in dry seasons, and take responsibility for what you do in your garden. Even so, when making a garden pest-free with all the tricks you know, you and your garden are subject to forces greater than us all. Sometimes, you can do naught but cut your losses. Learn to live with things you cannot fight. You can always sprout mung beans should the vegetable plot fail. But it will never fail entirely. Study organic gardening magazines, as organic growers come up continually with novel ideas and harmless repellents.
By practicing the good gardening methods previously discussed, you find that the war-like terminology other gardeners use will disappear from your vocabulary. No more fighting plant diseases, combating, blitzing, bombing, and zapping unwelcome insects. No more killing sprees. Instead, practice preventive health care in the garden. Protect and plant wisely so that nature can do its best practice. Then, your garden will bring you peace, as well as the best food possible.
Repelling instead of destroying improves biodiversity.
Chickens lay eggs, produce manure, and are sociable. In suburbia, you can comfortably keep two or three chickens, roosters usually being prohibited for their melodious but premature announcements of daybreak. Chickens foraging around fruit trees keep these disease free, but in the food plot, they cause havoc.
Consider enclosing a fruit-growing area of six to ten trees with wildlife-safe netting on high poles, fencing it off and using it as a fowl yard. The feathered flock fertilizes trees, gobbles up ground-dwelling pests, and provides eggs. Feed mixed grains at dusk as they will peck a confined area pretty bare. Kitchen scraps, fallen fruit, and spent vegetables complement their diet. Twice a week, add a bucket of succulent weeds and a bowl of bran mash. Some gardeners prefer ducks on their gentle flip-flops, foraging for slugs and snails between the greens. Ducks don’t dig.
No matter what animals you choose to inhabit your garden, make sure their quarters are dry in the wet, shady in the heat, and dog- and fox-proof. If you let them range freely during the day, make sure they can find shelter when predators fly over. As for terrestrial predators, secure your fences, and shut your flock in before dusk.
Water makes a garden come to life. Birdbaths and ponds create a more moist atmosphere and microclimate. Although birds scratch up the food garden, they do so in their capacity as pest controllers. Place birdbaths throughout your garden. Earthenware bowls on a tree trunk look good. Place bowls well above ground where birds in flight can see them and the neighbor’s cat and your dog can’t. Birdbaths entice helpful birds to become permanent residents.
In the food garden, fill a bee bath on a barrel or stand. Place a rock in it so bees don’t drown when drinking, and keep a stick nearby to fish out hapless bees. Attracting bees ensures pollination. In hot weather, the bee bath is their pit stop.
A few well-fed and densely planted garden beds also attract birds, insects, and other small wildlife.
At the back of the food garden, hidden among daisies, lavender, sage, and wild fruit trees grown from pips, is my frog pond. Just a deep plastic bowl dug into the ground, it has an 8-inch rim above ground so scratching creatures don’t fill it with mulch. It contains plants such as papyrus and water iris. In the center at water level, there is a brick stack with two pieces of broken brick covered by a flat stone, making a hidey-hole for frogs when predator birds appear. A wire rack covers all. Frogs can’t stay underwater for long when danger lurks, and coming to the surface to breathe could spell death.
To disguise a frog pond, cover it with coarse chicken mesh or two bent poly pipes crossing over each other, stuck on four stakes, and covered with mesh. Alternatively, tie a tripod of stakes or bamboo surrounded with plastic mesh, supporting climbing peas or beans.
Why accommodate frogs? They eat their weight in mosquitoes daily and are an endangered species, no matter which frog we talk about. They are the first to die when the spray unit comes past. Could it be that in countries without frogs, or where people eat frogs, lethal malaria and dengue fever are rife? In parts of the world where frogs are in decline due to spraying and loss of habitat, dengue fever is on the rise. Provide for frogs, and learn to love their croaking concerts at courting time. When you hear a croak distinctly different from the usual ones, something may be going in the right direction.
A frog with lily pads and rocks soon becomes at home.
THOSE LOVELY PICTURES of vegetable gardens featuring colorful rows in beds of heaped black soil may be reality somewhere, but not in my climate and not always in gardens run on clean and green principles. Such ordered beauty is sometimes preceded by spraying the life out of soil and surroundings to keep weeds and pests at bay. In reality, the opposite, an imitation of nature’s chaos, spells plant health.
If you live in an agricultural district where spraying takes place, you may not have many insect problems and you can garden organically by default. Yet, if spraying has been taking place over many years, you may have more problems as insects become immune to the chemicals applied. Find out what happens in your environment.
For a clean and green gardener, protection of vegetables and exclusion of pests, without spraying, is the aim so that the micro-environment can find its own balance. Temporary protection of crops takes many forms, all highly visible and all spoilers of poster versions of self-sufficiency.
Much recyclable hardware aids the gardener’s work. Start by collecting cast-offs and recyclables, and visiting junkyards.
A late-winter garden with hardware.
Braid together three or four strands of differently colored twine from straw bales for a strong rope to stop sweet corn and fava beans from breaking in the wind.
Bamboo makes tepees, trellises, and temporary fences.
Bathtubs can be converted to become worm farms.
We heard that a local sheep farmer had placed a number of amber blinking lights, formerly used to mark a hole in the road, around his sheep paddock. Since then, none of his sheep were attacked by foxes.
As we were having trouble with possums running across our roof at night and causing havoc in the food garden, we thought we would try it. The light runs on a large battery (many of which come with solar-panels made especially for garden lighting), comes on at dusk, and stops at dawn. We placed it on a plank in the food garden. No more possums. We planted 500 trees in our adjoining paddock, and it is my conservative opinion that the possums ought to make themselves comfortable there and leave my vegetables alone.
Since the light blinks on both sides, place it so that it does not blink into your neighbor’s bedroom window or the chicken coop as that may deprive the flock of sleep and affect egg production. Our chickens seem to cope well with the winks being 10 yards away.
Bricks can be used for propping up top-heavy plants, holding down a line of twine pulling a heavy plant upright again, placing under pumpkins to prevent rot, under a hot frame, or under mint pots to prevent “rooting down.”
You attract a lot of birds if you plant densely, plant shrubs suitable for nesting, or plant native trees and nectar-producing flowers. Birds pay rent by keeping your garden fairly pest free. Our river-flat garden was full of nests in fantastic places. Birds don’t eat vegetables but can pull up seedlings as they scratch soil for worms and insects. You can’t have an organic garden without birds, but you can’t always have vegetables with them!
The simple answer is cages. Not for the birds, but for the vegetables! Anything from an upside-down dish rack to a carpentry job of wooden frame covered with chicken wire can be a cage. My cages are 18 × 36 × 18 inches of painted wood or steel rod with chicken wire attached.
Each covers almost half a square, and two cages fit on a square with space between them where I can plant something without much chance birds will go there. When planting seed or seedlings, arrange them inside an imprint of the cage edges. When the first plant pokes through the top of the cage, you can remove it as they can stand on their own at this point.
A protective cage kept company by fava beans.
Carpet is the best cover for a compost heap. Clean with strong detergent, hot water, and a broom to remove residual chemicals. Ask a carpet dealer for odd pieces. Underfelt—without plastic coating—makes good mulch and is easy to cut. Lay along plots or around fruit trees to suppress weeds, or use to line wire cylinders (see here).
This is a tip from Chris Watters, who taught in the Strathalbyn square-yard vegetable-growing course. An old cane chair placed upside down makes a great frame for a sprawling cucumber or cherry tomato. So do old kitchen chairs. As for a cane lounge—wow!
Cloches are as old as farming itself, and they look better than cages. A cloche protects an individual plant from heat, cold, or birds. In England, they make them from bamboo. Use cheap baskets with enough gaps for bees to get through, but not mice. Bottomless baskets past their use-by date can be given a cheesecloth bottom to start an upside-down life as a cloche. As long as air circulates and bees can go in and out, most wicker ware can be used to make a cloche.
Fashion cloches for early seedlings from plastic food containers, bottoms cut out and replaced by clear plastic with breathing holes, fastened with rubber bands. Push into soil over bean seedlings for warmth and protection. In spring, when insect populations explode, you can’t have enough tiny cheap protectors like these.
A plastic colander is great for spreading lime, B&B, or gypsum if you are preparing more than one square. Or, use a flowerpot with just the right array of bottom holes.
Egg cartons (pressed paper) provide twelve biodegradable seed-growing pods for tiny plants of lettuce, chilies, lamb’s lettuce, and tender herbs. Pierce draining holes in each pod. Set the carton on a tray of compost and fill with soil. Plant seedlings in their paper pod, after cutting each off the carton. There is no root disturbance and the pod disintegrates.
During hot weather, earwigs like damp, crumpled newspaper in upside-down flowerpots on sticks. Place pots under apple trees so earwigs can help control codling moth.
In a hospital clinic, you may be handed a gown made from a kind of paper, white or blue. The gown is thrown away after one use only, but if you ask, hospital personnel are happy for you to take it home. Many people wear these paper gowns when painting the house or a canvas.
The material can be used in the spring garden to make row covers over bent wire. Use it whole or cut it into wide strips, weighing down the edges with stones. As long as seeds germinate underground, the gown can lay flat on the earth. When seedlings come up, push the fabric up with short sticks, like a Bedouin tent. Once seedlings have four to six leaves, they are of less interest to wildlife and you can take the gown off.
Paper gowns facilitate germination by keeping the soil a few degrees warmer. Sew the material around a wire cylinder to keep a small citrus tree or tropical herb warm. The blue ones look good amidst the greenery, and rain does not dissolve them instantly. One gown protected my infant citrus tree through the wettest winter on record.
Wrap a firm foam rubber pillow in plastic, then an old sack. Or stuff leaky hot-water bottles with sand—they hang nicely in the shed on their ringed lips.
The waterproof insides have obvious gardening possibilities, especially for the balcony gardener. Wash empty milk cartons in soapy water and cut two bottom corners for drainage. Stack a box ful of milk cartons, fill them with potting soil enriched with a sprinkling of B&B, and put one or two seeds in each carton. Grow lettuces, beans, carrots, chives, garlic, radishes, or anything small. Stacking them together avoids drying out too quickly, and the extra height of the milk carton allows roots to go deep. Raise native shrubs and trees in milk cartons, too.
Another use for milk cartons is to make plant tags. Cut each side through the middle and again diagonally. Each side yields four tags, sixteen in total. Write on them with a ballpoint pen, and they should last a season.
Wildlife-safe fruit tree netting is also useful on vegetables if you have lots of munchers. Our little black dog likes to crawl under the net protecting the apple tree to eat one apple a day. From inside the net, she stares at her bigger mate, who isn’t so smart. But she can’t always get out when she wants to and sometimes has to be rescued!
Net bags from store-bought oranges and nuts are useful to pop over three sticks to protect a small plant, or to wrap around ripening fruit. You can also make netting hoods with elastic to pop over large pots and seed boxes.
Onions, garlic, and butternuts can be stored by hanging them in pantyhose in a dark shed. Alternatively, use orange bags.
Hills gardener Percy McElwaine built the roof to protect young plants in spring when the nights were still cold. He found that wherever he placed the roof, young plants grew faster compared with those left unprotected. Pumpkins and spring vegetables benefited especially. He transfers the roof on his back by stooping under it, but two people can shift it with ease. Made of corrugated plastic sheeting on a metal cross frame, it is something gardeners in cooler districts may find useful. Make a few in smaller sizes.
Percy McElwaine extends summer or brings spring forward with his homemade portable plastic roof.
Fill plastic bottles with water and dig them in as edging around vegetable plots. Scratching birds don’t like reflective obstructions, although mice will still go in. In late autumn or early spring, the water absorbs the warmth of the sun and, at night, the bottles give off this warmth, keeping plot temperatures more even. In a region prone to night frosts, this can help plants survive. See Seeds and Seedlings for a seed-raising table turned into a mini-hothouse with plastic bottles.
A dozen water-filled bottles placed around a plant in strife or danger will save it. In autumn, my lemongrass gets a bottle fence to “overwinter” it. Bottles placed on their sides make a safe area for small plants. You will find other uses.
When a bottle after some years of service starts to deteriorate, dispose of it immediately. You don’t want plastic breaking down in your soil. It is said that plastic breaks down invisibly, giving off gases we could do without. If you feel strongly about this, collect glass bottles and keep all plastic out of your garden.
Plastic juice bottles filled with water regulate temperatures on winter days and summer nights and function as edgings.
Ice-cream tub lids are useful to put under growing pumpkins and squashes to prevent rotting where they touch the ground. Use margarine lids under baby squash, cucumbers, or low-hanging tomatoes. Zucchinis grow too fast to rot.
Cut the bottom out of yogurt tubs. Push into soil over a just-planted pea or bean in its toilet paper tube, to protect it from birds’ beaks or cold nights. Seeds sown directly inside tubs have less chance of being scratched up. Have a dozen on hand in spring and autumn when things pop up.
The traditional bean-pole structure is two rows of poles or long stakes leaning toward each other and crossing over a 1-yard width of soil. Place one pole in the crossover at the top and fasten with string.
One of the best inventions by do-it-yourself gardeners is the poly-pipe arch. Choose poly pipe of a diameter that fits over a dropper or non-rotting stake—ask your hardware store. Set stakes 3 feet apart across your square plot. Or buy enough poly pipe and four stakes to make two diagonally crossing arches, tied in the center. Either grow a quick growing vine or clip shade cloth over the top. Peas, beans, cucumbers, small squashes, and melons can be trained up the stakes. Or connect stakes with wire netting for vines to climb up themselves. Make poly-pipe arches to create height in your food garden. Place three in a row or in an L-shape.
If you don’t have a greenhouse, set up a few makeshift green tunnels of bent poly pipe, plastic-coated wire, or trellis held down with bricks or stones. Short pieces of corrugated PVC sheeting bent into tunnel shapes and held in place by stakes take little time to set up. As you have to crouch down to stick your hands in, keep these tunnels short. You can close them at night with plastic and open up in the morning for ventilation, but even tunnels open on either end will help plants grow. They function as temporary cold frames for seedlings or late-summer plants when cold weather arrives.
Push into PVC rings to protect germinating beans.
Large vegetables like cabbages and cauliflowers need more space than a cage provides. Plant them in individual rings of PVC water pipe with a diameter of 4 inches, cut about 3 inches high. Or, make collars from tin foil or milk-carton strips, or simply staple cardboard into rings. Push the rings into the soil around seedlings; they won’t be bothered by any but the most brazen bird.
These are useful protectors. Place them across a few bricks to give head room to seedlings or over a Styrofoam box. No birds will crawl under such contraptions, although rodents may.
Push into PVC rings to protect germinating beans from rodents.
In hot weather, protect seedlings or tender vegetables such as beans from the worst rays. Use a 10-inch strip of open square wire with long spikes at the ends, with shade cloche fastened to it with clothes pins or sewn on with fishing line or strong thread. Bend in a U-shape. These little shade houses can be placed over groups of bush beans or seedlings. A slightly larger affair can be made of bent poly pipe. Put short stakes into the ground to stick the poly pipe on for a moveable installation. Or pin shade cloth over cages.
Stakes are needed for climbing tomatoes, beans, and peas, although peas are happy to wind tendrils up a bunch of twigs stuck in the ground. Goldenrod twigs can support peas. Basic stakes are straight tree branches. Collect these, as wood products are expensive. If you know of a stand of bamboo, you are in clover. Thin out carefully and trim to size. Bamboo is the hardiest and cheapest wood in the world and grows sustainably. Your garden may grow ready-made stakes: sunflower stalks and buddleia branches.
Use for a balcony or condo garden, and in small gardens. Use boxes to grow chives, shallots, onions, lettuce, parsley, sorrel, and varieties of garlic. Their portability is an advantage. Two form a nice backdrop for your Magic Square without new ground having to be dug up. Six will enclose the square on three sides.
Styrofoam boxes are perfect for small crops like radishes and garlic.
Carry soft ties, such as pantyhose or cotton underwear cut into strips, in your pockets when gardening. You always see something in the food garden that flops when it shouldn’t. Beans and peas need initial ties to the stake before they get the idea. If you grow heavier plants on stake or trellis (like cucumbers, butternuts, or tomatoes), tie them progressively as they grow. Wire and plastic ties will cut into stems as they thicken.
Much the same as bean poles, but placed in a circle and tied at the top. Useful for beans, cucumbers, small melons, or peas.
So what’s wrong with a digging stick? Seriously, a square plot can be dug over with a borrowed garden fork and thereafter with a hand trowel and fork. Should you extend, a small hoe is useful twice a year. An old table knife stuck in a brick with a hole is handy to whip out weeds or seedlings. So is a hammer to pound in stakes. Your best tools in a small food plot are your fingers, which don’t hurt the worms.
Make one from wood, wire, or branches, held by upright posts or attached to a fence or shed. Or use posts with strings attached for climbing vegetables. Use strong wire when espaliering fruit trees.
Tubs filled with manure, soil, and compost provide depth to grow carrots and daikon radish. For potatoes, see here.
Tie them to stakes or saw off the curved handles and stick them in the soil to protect vegetables during heatwaves. Put up the garden umbrella to shade a bean bed when temperatures hover around 100 degrees and the beans are being cooked on the stalk.
Use as cages over a seed patch or young seedlings.
You need at least 2 yards of chicken wire or green plastic wire. Make cylinders about 3 feet high for composting (see Compost Compositions), and 18 inches for growing carrots, daikon radishes, or potatoes (see Part Four). Stake cylinders with three stakes or tent pegs. Line with wads of wet newspaper or underfelt up to the height you want to fill. Layer the bottom with wet newspaper, followed by pea straw, CMC, and straw mulch. Cylinders dry out quicker than ground soil, so don’t forget watering.
Form a 6-foot-high tower by bending a yard of open square mesh into a cylinder. The green plastic-coated type is best. Some wire has graded spaces, from narrow to wide. Wide spaces at the bottom of the cylinder allow hands in to cultivate. Secure the wire tower with one stake.
In spring, plant one squash inside the circle to ramble sideways, and six climbing beans around it. Or try romaine lettuce inside to shade two cucumber plants. Or pumpkin vines. After harvest, sow nasturtiums. In late winter, put in tall snow peas. Some garden centers sell wire towers for tomatoes.