Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Funny you should mention that. We heard from a nurseryman friend nearby
about his tomato pests. We had given him one of our Genovese tomatoes in a
starter pot. He related that some sort of whiteflies destroyed the plants
he'd bought commercially and had to tear them out. But the single Genovese
we gave him was still producing without harm. We don't start our 4-inch pot
tomatoes in a sterile, unnatural soilless mix drenched with NPK and
fungicide etc.  

We do see lots of bugs, squash bugs, a plague of grasshoppers, Mexican bean
beetles - you name it. But we also see lacewing, ladybugs, praying mantis -
where they came from we have no idea. And there's almost no damage at all
to the plants. People at the market keep asking what we spray with since
we're about the only ones with lots of squashes and lucious red tomatoes.
We spray with nothing. And we don't kill off the predators. As you said,
Make them welcome, and they will come. And like you we see no sign of
dieases. We saw a single tomato plant with blossom end rot but that's not
disease; it's likely uneven watering. 

We have the old Rodale book, Organic Plant Protection but I haven't got
around to opening it yet. I did pick off tomato hornworms in the greenhouse
which was open all summer. They're about gone now and tomatoes are still
producing like mad. Which reminds me I gotta get back out and finish
covering up some openings with frost due this weekend. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 9/27/2007 at 9:31 AM Harvey Ussery wrote:

>Following recent publication of article in Mother Earth News re my use 
>of our greenhouse here, I got a query from a visitor to my website. I 
>got a bit carried away in my response, getting into more fundamental 
>issues of dealing with/relating to/adjusting to insect challenges to our 
>cropping strategies. Thought some of you might be interested in my 
>thoughts.  ~Harvey
>
>> My interest has grown from a home-gardener to my recent enrollment as 
>> a horticulture student. Your article this month is helpful because I'm 
>> working in an IPM project. Everyone else in my class is focusing on 
>> Landscaping so I'm the only one who'll prepare the project for a 
>> Greenhouse (and I don't own one). The project is to come up with a 
>> year's worth of IPM, either by month or in some type of flowchart. I'm 
>> not sure about including poultry...that's probably far fetched for me. 
>> You didn't really address pest or disease problems, or pesticides. 
>> Surely you have experience with each of them. 
>
>Actually, we don't have any pests at all, anywhere on the place, hence 
>no need for pesticides.
>
>
>> While I have a few books it'd be great to hear more about your 
>> tolerance level and what you use. Also, do you ever order beneficials 
>> like lizards etc? 
>
>Okay, okay, that last response was a bit of tongue in cheek: I'm always 
>fighting with my editors at Mother Earth about the use of the term 
>"pest" with reference to problem insects, competitor insects, crop 
>damaging insects.
>
>Here's a challenge for you, if you care to take it up: When you write 
>your paper on controlling crop damaging insects, see if you can do so 
>without ever once using the term "pest" (other than the title of the 
>paper, I guess--after all, it's about Integrated *Pest* Management!).
>
>May I assume you've read on the site what I've had to say about insect 
>control and beneficial insects, insect diversity, and the like? If you 
>have, you will better appreciate why I do not think our choice of words 
>here is trivial, it inevitably shapes our thinking, our values and 
>emotional responses, and the strategies we adopt. "Pest." As in 
>"pestilence." I think it is simply not possible to use the term and hold 
>in mind simultaneously the beautiful vision of a balanced, 
>interconnected community of life which should be our final protection as 
>we try to grow our crops in consonance with the natural systems around 
>us. Utter that word "pest" and we are setting ourselves up as suckers to 
>*buy* something, to buy an agent intended to *kill* certain classes of 
>living beings, ignoring the likelihood that our doing so in the long run 
>makes the situation worse, not better.
>
>Caveat: You are the expert on IPM, not me. I have not made a detailed 
>study of its application, though of course understand the basic 
>concepts. Certainly it is worlds improved over the conventional practice 
>of toxic agriculture where "pest management" is concerned, foremost 
>because of its acceptance that a certain level of insect predation is 
>just fine--tolerable, acceptable, relax! (even, some have demonstrated, 
>actually beneficial to plant populations, since it stimulates 
>strengthening responses)--and its recognition of the idiocy of following 
>a mindless "spray program" (mapped out in the final analysis by Monsanto 
>and Cargill et al, to their enormous profit), whatever the swirls and 
>eddies this particular season of local populations, and utterly heedless 
>of consequences for non-target species, groundwater pollution--okay, 
>I'll stop the rant, you know all this. Anyway, IPM--definitely Immensely 
>Preferred Method, when compared to the voodoo farmers have been conned 
>into applying.
>
>Caveat: I'm not meeting a bottom line, so it's easy for me to wax poetic 
>about the beauty of the great balanced community of life, the rhythmic 
>dance of the species, etc. I'm not going to tell anyone whose livelihood 
>is on the line how to deal with insect threats to their family's 
>financial security.
>
>". . . more about your tolerance level and what you use . . ." As made 
>clear in a couple of places at least on the site, I do not use *any* 
>purchased input, and I do not adopt *any* strategy to *kill* insects. My 
>"tolerance" is total: My fundamental strategy is to say to the insect 
>world, "Come on! Welcome! The more the better!" The highest diversity of 
>insect life possible on my bit of the landscape, that is my goal. And 
>before assuming that that approach is lunacy, remember that I grow more 
>than I can eat, every season.
>
>You can see more about my actual approach by doing a little searching on 
>the site. Let me clarify: I still do have problems with some damaging 
>insects, and I adopt varying strategies adjusting to (note that I don't 
>say controlling) them--cabbage worms, Mexican bean beetles, and squash 
>bugs are at the top of the Insect Hall of Fame for establishing their 
>own agenda in a muscular way. (These guys are sort of like 
>groundhogs--you can call them pest, varmint, you can cuss 'em, you can 
>shoot 'em--but you ain't *ever* going to get rid of them, and you have 
>to admire and respect their tenacity and grittiness.) At present my 
>arch-nemesis is harlequin bug--for three seasons now, I have been unable 
>to grow many of the crucifers because of HB. (I can grow the brassicas 
>okay, but the members of that broad family that are *really* tasty to HB 
>like turnips, summer radishes, etc., I simply cannot grow these days. 
>We're talking *zero* production for my efforts. Which means, I guess, 
>that since I will not use any toxins even in the face of such 
>provocation, my "tolerance" is 100%.)
>
>It's important to realize that I'm not supinely ignoring the fact that I 
>cannot currently grow certain crucifers (damn, I sure love turnips, and 
>miss them!). But to me, the important question is not what product I can 
>find to kill HB's, but: Why is it that there was this big surge in HB 
>populations, when before I saw them only rarely, and grew radishes and 
>turnips like weeds? Why is it I'm having this problem, when gardening 
>neighbors all around are not? Why is it that, when I carefully sow 
>crucifers in the garden, they get creamed--yet when I just scattered 
>turnip seeds out over my orchard as part of a cover crop seed mix, they 
>*thrived*?! (First time I'd eaten my own turnips in more than two 
>years.) As sophisticated (and indeed welcome) as IPM is, it is clumsy 
>and bungling in comparison with the vision and intelligence needed to 
>resolve questions like this. (I'm saying that admitting that I'm not 
>close to that level of wisdom and insight at present. But I'm trying. At 
>present I'm mulling over a chicken connection. The chickens I put on the 
>garden space to eat slugs before the garden season eat the pill bugs/sow 
>bugs as well. The sow bugs eat the HB eggs. Something like that, maybe.)
>
>Now, I always get challenged in my public presentations when I say that 
>any strategy based on *killing* insects is bound to get it wrong. "But 
>what about when you see a potato beetle munching on a potato plant?" The 
>answer is: "Squish!" Some hand-picking of insects is an excellent 
>strategy. I have found Colorado potato beetle one of the easiest of all 
>insect competitors to adjust to--my attempts at encouraging more 
>flowering food/habitat plantings on the place seem to have assisted some 
>righting of the balances, and CPB is really not much of a problem 
>anymore. However, it is unquestionably true that, if I ignore those 
>first eager (apparently highly sexed) beetles a free hand at starting 
>families, they sure know how to take advantage of the opportunity. At 
>that point, I too become part of the balance. At that point, my 
>tolerance is *zero*. At that point, my intent most certainly is to 
>*kill* insects that could cause me grief. *But*:  (1) I am not making 
>any additional or special effort--I am simply doing what the smart 
>gardener is doing every day anyway--strolling through the garden to say 
>hello and see how everybody's doing. (2) My doing so is a purely local 
>event. It is not tearing great rents in the fabric of the web of insect 
>life in the environs. It does not represent a war on insects which 
>inevitably has a negative impact on non-target species. ("Collateral 
>damage" is the euphemism we use to tidy up the phenomenon when we choose 
>to practice war on other humans.)
>
>As for other strategies, many are possible, though not all may be 
>practical for those having to meet that bottom line. With regard to 
>Mexican bean beetle, I start with bush beans, and simply let them 
>succumb to the MBB after I've gotten the first (many) pickings of the 
>bean season. By that time, the pole beans are coming in, and they are 
>usually able to give me an ongoing crop despite massive pressure from 
>the MBBs. Similar strategy with squash family: I harvest plenty of 
>yellow squash & zucchini while the squash bug (another insect with 
>reproductive potential to admire) proliferates. When that group 
>succumbs, I start a succession planting (*maybe* using row cover) to 
>start the game anew. This year I didn't even plant an earlier crop--just 
>planted later in the season, when pressure from SB is likely to be less, 
>and am eating squashes every day, and only seeing a lonely SB 
>sporadically on the vines. My guineas are keeping SB in check in the 
>winter squash plot (they practice zero tolerance). With squash bug 
>again, to me the important question is not: "How do I *kill* those 
>guys?!" but "Why is it they give me the devil of a time, when Joan and 
>Ann and Irv do not have nearly as much problem with them as I do here (a 
>few hundred yards or a few miles away)?"
>
>As for buying beneficials: Never even heard of buying lizards. I have 
>(earlier, in my beginner's enthusiasm) purchased beneficials to release 
>here--tricogamma for the orchard, lady beetles, nematodes. The only such 
>purchase that ever did anything much for me was Pedio wasp--they really 
>can be quite effective controlling Mexican bean beetle. But my main 
>conclusion re purchased beneficials is this: Make them welcome, and they 
>will come. Fail to make them welcome (with habitat enhancement, 
>diversity of flowering plants, etc.), and your purchases will be a great 
>investment--for the CEOs of the companies from which you purchase. They 
>will be virtually irrelevant to changing the balances in your own local 
>ecology. (Since I stopped using any toxins for insects--rotenone, more 
>recently Bt--and emphasized habitat enhancement, I have been amazed at 
>the increase of insect populations--mantises, assassin bugs, lady 
>beetles. [And yes, lizards.] My wife and I have gotten kind of addicted 
>to sitting by a cluster of flowering plants, drifting off into a kind of 
>dreamy intoxication as we watch the dozens of insect species working 
>them. They're so busy, so purposeful--so happy.)
>
>Wow, you never imagined your innocent query would bring all that down on 
>you, did you?!
>
>Hmmm, my apologies: On re-reading the above, I see that the main thrust 
>of your query re "pests" and disease was with regard to the greenhouse. 
>I don't grow in the g h in the summer (other than, sometimes, some cover 
>crops and a few tomato plants)--if I did, my experience would doubtless 
>be different. But in the seasons I'm growing there (fall, winter, early 
>spring), the conditions are not conducive to a lot of insect 
>populations. I have had some problems with the afore-mentioned harlequin 
>bugs in the g h, but they have never risen to the damaging levels as in 
>the garden--a minor irritant rather than devastation. The only other 
>major insect problem has been aphid in the late winter/early spring g h. 
>Last year I planted patches of yarrow in the g h (perennial). I think 
>maybe that encouraged lady beetles--in any case that period this year, I 
>was seeing more of them than ever before, and virtually no aphid.
>
>As for disease, again, have had no problems at all I can remember. 
>Again, if I were growing vegetable crops there in summer, probably 
>different story. In the cold-season g h, I don't get diseases. I might 
>if I didn't ventilate sufficiently, but I keep g h opened up as much as 
>possible, and haven't had any disease problems. (Hmmm, maybe a bit of 
>isolated leaf disease that never rose beyond trivial levels.)
>
>-- 
>Harvey in northern Va
>www.themodernhomestead.us
>
>"How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." 
>~Wendell Berry
>
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