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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Fruit trees watering zones

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  • From: rrandall1 <rrandall1@houston.rr.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Fruit trees watering zones
  • Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 12:33:49 -0600

Doug,

Rather than talk about methods tried nearly 30 years ago, I would rather tell you a bit about what we do in Houston today. We use what we call ecological pest management. The heart of the method is doing everything possible to get adapted plants in proper sites, following up with a major effort to assure plenty of pests for the known pests by providing habitat for the pests' pests (mostly predators and parasites). (Cornell has/had natural enemies of agricultural pests web pages). When these two efforts fail, we try barriers, then doing nothing (pest enemies need build-up time), then trapping, then if absolutely essential low toxic natural poisons. I haven't actually applied any sort of poison to a food crop in 25 years though.

I wrote a chapter on this in my book Year Round Vegetables Fruits and Flowers for Metro-Houston--a natural organic approach using ecology 12th edition available from www.urbanharvest.org and Borders Books worldwide. And we teach classes on this here about every 3 months.

Bob Randall
On Dec 8, 2006, at 12:07 PM, dwoodard@becon.org wrote:

Bob, did you do anything special to combat pests?

It might be really useful to know what you and you ecologist
friend came up with.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, rrandall1 wrote:

Actually, I see by your comment that I probably mislead some of you. That orchard was in 1977 when I was still two years away from even hearing about permaculture, and it was on rented land where the orchard management was controlled by the owner-- a UC Riverside ecologist-- and I just did the work and got half of the crop.

But we did grow many kinds of citrus, bunch grapes, apricots, peaches, pomegranates, and figs without any spraying-- all with Southern California's "limitless" supply of water from the far away mountains. The trees didn't seem to mind 105รป at all.

Bob Randall

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