Organic Living

My gardening experience is build on trial and error. I search for information about plants I grow, consult with books and the Internet whenever I find problems. As I learn about plants, caring tips start to make sense. When behavior and characteristics of a particular plants is understood, I expand my consideration to the relationship with other existing plants. For an example, beans add nitrogen to the soil, so it’s wise to plant nitrogen-loving plants around them. Nitrogen encourages leaf growth, so something like lettuce would be a great companion. I love this natural way to make plants thrive because it’s environmentally friendly, setup-once-and-forget type of win-win situation. Who won’t love that!! Lately, my interest is extending this win-win situation to control garden pests. If I have plants that are growing naturally beautifully, then I want to protect them naturally too. The organic gardening sounds something hard and expensive to do because it sounds like (to me) spending lots of time in the garden to spot pests before they spread instead of easy once-only application of toxic chemicals. As I learn the natural way to controlling pests, I discovered I was totally wrong. I was even wrong about the concept of gardening. What I found so far is that the organic gardening is not time consuming or expensive especially once you get the control of pests naturally because it happens ,,. ah ,,, naturally. More importantly, what I realized that I’ve forgotten is this concept, ‘we need to coexist with pests to keep the balance on the planet right’. This may be a hard concept to accept as a gardener. You don’t want all your home grown veggies eaten by pest just before harvest. You’ll be tempted to use spray to kill insects before they get your food. The thing is, you might remove cabbage moth with a commercial spray, but you don’t realize how much damage you’ve done to yourself and the environment. Spraying toxic chemicals are obviously not ideal to use on our food. They could kill cabbage moth, and the predators of cabbage moth could also be killed by eating the intoxicated cabbage moth. This vicious cycle could go as far as the natural food chain goes. And the next year when cabbage moths start to appear again, there is much less natural predators so moths outbreak in numbers and we are tempted to spray,,, to create the cycle again. It can only go worse every year. What I have came to understand is ‘it is healthy to have some pest in the garden. It is OK to let natural livings eat my crops. If I have 80% of the crops to eat for myself, don’t worry about the other 20% that have been eaten or damaged by pest because I’m feeding the environment as well as myself. What I should be looking for is the natural prevention of pest, not chemical cures because the chemical cure is often murder of natural lives and the murder often leads to a situation much worse than the initial problem.

I decided to not to use chemicals as much as possible. I said ‘as much as possible’ because I know that the vicious cycle was running in my garden previously. I’ll use the prevention from this spring to see how they work and what works better in my garden on trial and error basis. I don’t throw away chemicals in my garden shed just yet in case of the out-of-hand situation where the cure is only the option.

First thing first, I worked around my garden and checked garden pests that already exist. There were three main pests in my garden. Fruit flies around the compost bin, aphids and black spots on my rose bush. For compost bin, I can reduce the fruit fly by turning it more often. That’s easy. The roses are little tricky. I set up a aphid trap to see how it goes. I placed a cup of water with yellow food coloring near rose bush. It’s supposed to attract aphids and they are supposed to end up drown in there. I guess the water and dead aphids can be buried in the soil. I’m also thinking about planting various kinds of what’s called companion plants to see how they work. Plants I picked are: marigolds, wormwood, nasturtium, garlic and onions. I probably set the aphid trap at the bottom of each rose so I can hopefully measure the amount of aphid. With the rose with onions, I’ll plant some pansies next to the onions since I read that pansies are beneficial to onions, and compare onions I have in the different area with no pansies.

Here you go, that’s my gardening experiment this spring. I have no idea what’s going to work. I found lots of sources that say marigolds are beneficial to roses for aphid control, but I also found the opposite opinion. After all, there are so many kinds of aphids in the world, so I just have to find out what works for aphids in my area. I’ll update my experiment here every now and then.