Pests and Diseases

As soon as I say "organic" (and mean it) I am immediately asked what I do aboust pests and diseases. The answer is not much.

There are products sold in stores labelled organic that some gardeners use. I don't. They cost more than they are worth.

There are "recipes" you can find online to combat specific problems. I can't comment, as the only one I ever tried was soap spray for aphids and it was a waste of time.

There are easy companion plantings that keep some problems to a minimum, and a row of marigolds near the broad beans is much more inviting to the nasty black aphpids than the beans.

I suppose I'm lucky really, we don't have major problems here. When the caterpillars get on my brassicas the numbers are small enough to just pick them off. We've never had cutworms, and the major caterpillar problem went away when I dug up the roses and burned them.

My biggest issue is tomato blight, and that can be minimized by harvesting early, never planting them in the same place twice, and in fact if you grow them in a container with non-affected soil, you can avoid it entirely.

In fact the problem critters in my garden are much bigger. My own chickens stole all my peas one year, and I've had sheep in the garden on a couple of occasions. For the first time ever we've seen rabbit tracks on the snow this winter, so I may get visitors this summer. At least I don't have to contend with deer. They are too shy, thankfully, to come that close to the house.

So why am I writing this at all, if I have nothing to offer as advice?

Well, I'm not absolutely certain, but I think it's possible that our approach works. Perhaps the reason we don't get a lot of pests and diseases is that we don't interfere much with the balance of nature here. If something does look sick we burn it fast before it spreads.

That may not be much help to you if you have inherited infected soil, or your neighbours have created a problem by spraying everything. I'm sorry if you find yourself in that position, it really sucks.

But if you have the opportunity to grow things in a rather more natural way, I recommend doing it. Long-term it seems to yield better results.

While I'm here, I often get asked about the safety of manure. With the exception of rabbit manure, which is a magical garden ingredient if you can get some, all manure should be left to mature before use. Anything harmful in it is long gone by the time you put it on your garden.

What I'm trying to say, is that I have found, that by interfering as little as possible, I have had better success. There will always be exceptions to that, but it reminds one of drugs that cause side-effects that need more drugs, and so on, until there is complete dependency on cures. When it's a human being we don't really have the optrion of tossing them on the bonfire and starting over, but my approach to a diseased plant is to do just that. There are plenty more.