Veganic Gardening, Part 2
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 at 8:14 pm
It’s funny, I was just talking to some friends this weekend about gardening, and she was saying today that she never got people being upset when animals ate some of what she planted. They need to eat too, don’t they?
I have so much to learn. I have plants in containers right now, and they’re doing okay, but if I don’t get my raised bed built soon, I’m going to end up not doing it until next year! And I don’t think these plants were really meant to be in the containers I have! It was supposed to be temporary…
In Food Not Lawns, she has really simple instructions for making your garden beds into greenhouses in the colder months. Do you do this or have you done this?
Also, I was wondering if you’re involved in any kind of seed swap in your community, and what your experience has been with that, if so.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:38 am
A timely post indeed! Today in the local hardware store, I overheard a woman asking the salesperson what kind of chemical spray she could buy to kill all the clover in her yard. After she picked out a bottle, I walked over to her - nonchalantly - and told her that I welcome the clover in my yard; it adds nitrogen to the soil. She thought I was joking. I said “No, really, I do.” She laughed and said “That’s a great line,” and she wasn’t being facetious. As though the very thought of letting a naturally occuring, well-suited, zero-maintenance, low-lying, beneficial plant surive in her monocultural lawn was preposterous.
However, at the checkout line, a man was complaining about rabbits eating his plants and was considering buying dried blood. I recommended a) a fence dug down one foot, b) a separate garden for the rabbits consisting of low-maintenance plants they really like, and perhaps some tall plants like ornamental grasses to provide cover and nesting areas - a win-win! He seemed interested, and didn’t purchase any dried blood.
I’m glad you listed tolerance as consideration number one.
June 12th, 2007 at 11:26 am
I’d love to see pictures!
June 12th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Deb, I’ve swapped seeds by mail and have bought seeds cooperatively in the past but this year it’s just me and our helper Christopher swapping seedlings. But that reminds me that I want to do a post on freegan gardening.
Gary, I’m so glad that you talked that man out of buying dried slaughterhouse blood and gave him some rabbit-friendly advice. That story about the woman not believing you is priceless. I’m always amazed by what people don’t know about the plants they so wantonly kill, poisoning the earth in the process. The idea of wanting to kill clover is just stunning to me.
For those who don’t know, all legumes help to fix nitrogen in the soil, which is why it’s always a great idea to grow beans near heavy feeders like tomatoes and also, when rotating crops, to grow some kind of legume anywhere the soil might be worn out. Cover cropping is when you grow something like clover in the off-season and then plow it into the ground to replenish the soil.
Isa, I’ll do what I can.
June 13th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Now I know where “cole slaw” comes from.