Growing up around gardens and the people who created and tended them, I became accustomed to backyard gardening as a way to save money, get exercise, and provide tastier produce than was available at the supermarket. The garden was a fun place even though as kids we were expected to help out there. I remember friendly competitions to harvest the earliest ripe tomato, and there's a family legend of my grandfather buying potatoes at the store and burying them in a bid to win a potato growing contest.
Being a child I was blissfully ignorant of how much work my parents and grandparents put into their vegetable patches, but the garden never seemed a source of stress even to them. Reading social media posts in the present day, I get the idea that gardening is like a season long gauntlet to be run, one crisis following another from extreme weather to wave attacks by insects to stealthy incursions by fungi and microbes. Gardeners “go to battle” against invaders, and hope to succeed by upgrading weapons (pesticides!) and armor (landscape fabric!) It all seems so stressful and frustrating that it makes me wonder why they do it. Of course, this was my main impetus for starting a blog: to present cheaper, easier methods for low-input (and less stressful!) gardening.
The first step to successful gardening via the Turtle Paradise method is ditching the war mentality, viewing the garden as an ecosystem, and learning to work with nature. I'm not advocating a pie-in-the-sky fantasy method adopted on an ideological basis, as is often popularly portrayed when ecologically friendly gardening is discussed. I use certain techniques because they have proven themselves to work, and they can work for others too. It's hard to transition overnight to a completely different system and mindset, so I'll offer some ways to ease into low-input, permaculture-based gardening.
No more insecticides (no, not even neem oil)
The hardest part of adopting a low-input, ecosystem approach to gardening, for those used to having an arsenal of weapons, will be giving up insecticides. It is crucial to do so however. Even natural and quickly degrading insect sprays and powders kill beneficial and neutral bugs and therefore reduce the complexity of your garden ecosystem. In order to foster the most complex ecosystem possible, insecticides have to go. Cold turkey is best. Yes, using pesticides is akin to an addiction in that the more you use, the more you need to use. (Also witness the hysterical squeals and protestations in on-line gardening groups if the suggestion is made to stop using.)
Learn as much as you can about your resident arthropods
In conventional gardening wisdom, insects are neatly divided into two groups, friend or foe. Many gardeners have no interest in the identity of a bug, only whether it is considered good or bad. Overcoming this simplistic outlook is crucial to success. Download an insect id app to your phone, and start identifying bugs you photograph in the garden. If you have very few insects to identify, that's even more reason to stop poisoning your garden. In real war the enemy is turned into the “other” and demonized in order to facilitate killing. In the battle against bugs, it's easy to justify offing them indiscriminately if you know little about them and view them as an undifferentiated mass of creepy crawlies. As you learn the identities and lifecycles of more and more bugs, you'll be more hesitant to eradicate the amazing diversity of life in your garden.
Stop growing problematic plants temporarily
Many will protest that the garden will be decimated and the harvest reduced to nothing if pesticides aren't used. I have taken such beliefs as a challenge to find creative paths to success, and so can you. Do you really want to be forever dependent on products that must be purchased and whose future availability is unknown? Do you really believe it is impossible to grow food to feed yourself as our great grandparents did? They succeeded before there were store shelves filled with pesticides (and before there were stores!) If certain crops are regularly destroyed by bugs, stop growing them, at least temporarily. Figure out what you can grow without poison and focus on these plants. You can gradually add more difficult plants as your garden ecosystem and your expertise progress.
Grow easy and diversify your plot
Do some research to discover the plants that are considered easy to grow in your area. Garlic, onions, and other allium family members are often untroubled by pests and are a good place to start. The same goes for most herbs. Potato leaves may suffer insect damage but still produce a crop of tubers. Use hybrid seeds and plant starts, at least at first. These aren't GMOs, merely cross pollinated veggies that have hybrid vigor and often more disease resistance. You can always switch to heirlooms later on if you want.
Rather than grouping each veggie type together, mix everything up. If insects are eating your cucumber plant, make them work harder to find the others by placing them in opposite corners of the garden. Add flowers, both annual and perennial, to attract beneficial insects, and aromatic plants to confuse destructive ones.
Chill out
Once you stop reflexively reaching for the spray bottle at the first bad beetle sighting, you can chill out and just see what happens. I observe Japanese, Mexican bean, and Colorado potato beetles, as well as many other “bad guys” daily in my garden; many leaves are ravaged, but the final harvest is largely unaffected. Otherwise healthy plants can withstand some munching from bugs. I was recently peering through summer squash leaves to observe a large wound from squash vine borers when suddenly two roaches emerged from the hole. The plant was surviving even with a roach motel in its stem!
Sometimes plants are so damaged that I give up and remove them completely. This can be a difficult decision to make for gardeners who have nurtured their babies from tiny sprouts. However, after a point it makes more sense to compost them than to put lots of energy into saving them. Having to remove hopeless plants doesn't have to be a huge tragedy. I'll explain why in the next post.
Not that I'm an expert gardener or anything like that, but in the gardening I've done, it seems that insect pests have had little effect on size of harvest. One exception is Squash Bugs which can get so abundant I just assume they must affect the harvest. Still, I've rarely sprayed and when I did, it didn't seem to help much...this year we're pretty much keeping on top of them by search and manual destroy of adults and eggs on our 5 squash plants, nearly daily.
Plus, observing insects in the garden is part of the pleasure of gardening. I remember well when my Dad first showed me pupae of a parasitoid wasp on a tomato hornworm in our garden...another thing that pushed me toward a career in zoology and a lifelong fascination with insects.