SuperWeed

I’ve noticed that quite a few people are finding this blog while looking for tips on veganic gardening, so I guess I’d better follow up my post on cruelty-free gardening with a few more helpful hints. In that post, I focused on soil amendments, giving suggestions for alternatives to animal-based fertilizers. Now, I’ll cover the other big difference between organic and veganic gardening: the control of so-called “pests.”

While organic gardeners and farmers do not use the kinds of synthetic chemicals we’ve been talking about in our discussions about Silent Spring, they do sometimes use natural substances and other means to kill insects and other inconvenient beings. Veganic gardeners rely instead on the time-proven tactics of confusion and deterence.

Here are some tips that I have found helpful:

1. Learn to live with some loss

That’s something we all need to do anyway, innit? When gardening, plant a bit more than you need, so that you won’t feel so bad when other creatures eat some of the fruits of your labor. You might even want to plant an extra row of lettuce for the bunnies — outside of your fenced garden. For sure, they’ll eat the greens they can get to more easily. Plant some corn and sunflowers for the birds and maybe something tasty for the deer too.

2. Protect your young plants

Lightweight row covers keep all sorts of munching insects out while letting the sunshine and rain in. Empty toilet paper rolls make nice sleeves to deter cutworms. Big pop bottles with the bottoms cut off act like mini greenhouses while keeping tender seedlings from being munched or trampled by birds. Punch holes in those cut-off bottoms and use them to both mark the spot and protect the emerging seedlings of melon or squash that you’ve sown directly into the ground. Be creative! Whatever or whoever is pestering your plants, you can probably think of a barrier that will serve as a deterrent.

3. Mix it up

Don’t plant all of your cole crops together unless you want the flea beetles to move in to stay. Have several small plots rather than one big garden (I’ve got three this year) and distribute your tomatoes among them so that they all won’t be wiped out in the unlucky event that one of them becomes infested or diseased. Learn the basics of companion planting, so that you can reap the benefits of advantageous interactions among plants. Grow different things in different places from year to year, so that any overwintering insects or soil-based diseases that affect one kind of plant won’t find that same plant the next spring. (This is a good practice for the soil too, since different plants draw different nutrients from the soil.)

4. Sow confusion

Plant flowers and aromatic herbs among your vegetables, so that their scents will confuse the insects. Tuck marigolds anywhere you can fit them — their scent will add to the confusion while their roots will deter nematodes. If you’ve been troubled by a particular insect, grow the plants known to repel them.

5. Attract your friends

Grow plants that attract ladybugs and other beneficial insects. These include the herbs fennel, dill, cilantro, and caraway as well as the flowers cosmos, coreopsis, scented geraniums, and — yes! — dandelions.

6. Choose your varieties wisely

Some heirloom plants are naturally disease-resistant and/or less tasty to particular insects. I’ve also noticed that plant structure can make a difference. For example, I like to grow the Italian varieties of broccoli that have many side sprouts rather than one large central head. Besides providing a longer harvest, the lack of a tight central head makes it less likely for cabbage worms to hide themselves inside the plant.

7. Let the rest of the yard go wild

I’ve noticed that the more diverse and lush the wild plants growing on the rest of the land are, the less interest everybody seems to have in the little bits of land devoted to the vegetables. There are so many good things to eat elsewhere!

June 11th, 2007 | Category: Gardening, Insects | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL