companion planting - Our Green Health

How to Attract Insects to our Garden and Support Biodiversity?

29/10/2021 by Hannie Mommers

Do you like spiders? Flies? Mosquitoes? Most people don’t. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes because of ancient-old ingrained fears.

Would we want to attract insects to our garden?

It turns out that people hate invertebrates. Bad news for those poor creatures, because they make up 98% of the animal species. And all humans do is try to destroy them.

In the movies, invertebrates come off badly, and in the Bible, too, they are portrayed solely as pests and exterminators. Small children usually have an intuitive fear of anything that has more than 2 legs – spiders, crabs – or less, such as snakes.

Negative Neighbors: Which Plants Should NOT be Planted together?

08/09/2021 by Hannie Mommers

The biggest problem in traditional agriculture is monoculture. Fields full of only lettuce. Orchards with only one type of fruit.

And that while so many plants do very well next to each other. In fact, help each other stay bug-free or grow better.

Yet it is important to pay attention to which plants you put next to each other. Because just as some plants stimulate each other, there are also plants that can’t stand each other. So which plants should not be planted together?

8 Natural Pesticides for Plants that are Useful in our Garden

16/07/202116/07/2021 by Hannie Mommers

There’s no doubt, a few bugs can ruin a great garden. Yet we don’t like the idea of consuming poisons with our fruits and vegetables, so there is no way we will spray our garden with chemical pesticides.

The good news is there are several natural steps we can take to eliminate garden pests, including making our own pesticides. Here are 8 natural pesticides for plants we can make at home.

I often hear people say they don’t want to use biological and organic pesticides because they don’t work. What they mean by that is, organic pesticides don’t work instantly and they don’t kill every living bug or weed in the garden. Sustainable living demands patience and knowledge.

Organic Companion Planting for a Healthy Kitchen Garden

06/09/202125/03/2021 by Tom van Oosterhout

Organic companion planting is the key to a healthy kitchen garden. When toxic herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides aren’t allowed, as they aren’t in organic gardening, companion planting is the only solution.

From our following short introduction, you will get a limited grip on the ins and outs of companion planting. It requires knowledge of plants, plant diseases, insects that threaten and insects that benefit plants, which plants can be combined, and which not, etcetera. However, on a small scale as a kitchen garden, everybody will be able to manage the mutual dependencies.