What motivates us to grow our own fruits and vegetables? The effort as such of course. The prospect of a harvest, no matter how modest. A green and at the same time colorful garden. Foods without poison. Improvement of the environment.
The fact that the exercise it takes to grow your own fruits and vegetables, in combination with the outdoor work, keeps you fit. Of course, the examples of others also motivate particularly well, because there is no motivation without inspiration.
It’s December at the moment and back in the Netherlands, I would never have to worry about pest control at this time. But over here in Spain, my second crop is in the kitchen garden. And the grasshoppers have a field day on my plants.
Whenever possible I try to avoid killing insects. I prefer them to move over to the woods behind our house or to the campo (the Spanish countryside). But I also want to eat my harvest so if they are very persistent, I take bigger measures.
What are the best ways to control garden pests without using chemicals or artificial toxins? I have listed 10 methods in this article.
Whether you should pre-germinate seeds or sow them directly into the ground, highly depends on the kind of seed, the season, or your patience.
I had a 4th reason to pre-germinate my beans this year because I wanted to show the process to my grandsons. They live in an apartment building and have a balcony that has some pots. I wanted to stimulate their enthusiasm to get started on their own.
Back in the Netherlands years ago as well as now in Spain I had tried several times to pre-sprout beans using methods I found on the internet. Until this year I rarely succeeded, they molded long before they sprouted.
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.
During the past 200 years, humans had a substantial and not very positive impact on biodiversity. Our modern lifestyle, with sprawling cities and infrastructure, with our lighthearted production and consumption attitudes, pushed biodiversity to the brink.
With this, we produced substantial risks. Even our and the planets’ survival is at risk. Burning fossil fuels and spreading around millions of tonnes of chemical poisons jeopardize our existence as a species.
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?
If you fly to Schiphol Airport in the evenings, there is a good chance that you will pass over the horticultural area ‘t Westland. That is not to be missed because the greenhouses light up like a Christmas tree.
Horticultural greenhouses in the Netherlands consume 80% of agricultural energy consumption. So the conclusion can quickly be that a greenhouse is not eco-friendly. Certainly not, as the pesticides used in the monocultures in those greenhouses are often far from environmentally friendly either.
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.