Pest Control

Maybe you can relate, or maybe you can't, but there is no joy like walking out to your garden, picking some big green leaves of Romaine or Butter crunch, or some of the lower leaves of the head lettuce and knowing that they only need a little bit of rinsing to get some soil off the bottom of the stems and then you can munch away on them.  No need to worry if I'm ingesting some sort of dangerous chemical into my body.  Such is the way of organic gardening.

Please don't get me wrong.  Don't lump me in with the crazies.  I have absolutely no tolerance for the Earthfirst, or PETA people, unless PETA stands for People Eating Tasty Animals.  I also think that the Enviro-Whackos who helped get DDT banned are responsible for mass murder in the millions.  Sometimes chemicals are necessary.  Indiscriminate use of chemicals is stupid and wrong.  Wisdom involves knowing what, when, and how to use things properly.

I didn't spray insecticides last year and so far haven't needed to this year.  Did I have problems?  Of course.  We also raise chickens.  Some of my veggie seedlings weren't caged or protected well enough and they ate a couple of my cabbage plants, severely damaged one of my broccoli plants and totally destroyed my bed of mustard greens.   The chickens aren't free-ranging right now.  Not unless some huge windfall of money allows me to put adequate fencing around all my veggies.  We don't have enough space to grow enough veggies for the chickens to eat what they want and leave us the rest.


 Not long ago, a single cut worm (that's all I could find) destroyed five out of six of my Swiss Chard plants, until I sifted through the soil and found him.  Cut worms really make me angry because they don't eat the whole plant.  They just cruise along in the half inch of soil, just below the surface and when they get to a juicy vegetable plant, they eat just the part that's convenient and the next day you come out to find the rest of the plant that was standing four to twelve inches in beauty now lying dead.

Now maybe some of you are thinking that it would have been smart to use plastic cups or half a tin can or toilet paper roll centers as ring barriers around each little plant.  You'd be right, but I hate having to do any more work than necessary, and if I didn't have cutworms last year, I wasn't expecting them this year.  I have only found two worms and there isn't any more evidence of them now.  We only have a few plants that are in the ground in well amended soil.  All the stuff in straw bales is not in danger of cutworms.  Another big plus for using this technique.

The plants could still be in danger from all sorts of other pests, but I've learned a wonderful thing.  Except for Biblical scale, wiping-everything-out plagues, most infestations are minor and can be dealt with without panicking.  Most of my insect problems are being dealt with even while I am unaware of it, and it's mostly because I haven't used any chemical pesticides.  It's very hard to engineer a chemical that kills only certain insects and leaves others alone, and the ones that make such a claim can end up having other effects years or months later that could be even worse.  Maybe we are just overly blessed by God letting us live in this place; for God leading Twyla to buy this particular property.  I just know that I don't want to mess it up.

A friend from last year on the strawberries

Last year, I seemed to come across a praying mantis  every time I turned around in the yard.  Praying mantids are indiscriminate predators.  By that, I mean that they will kill and eat any and all other insects, including their own species if they are hungry and the opportunity is there.  If you read the stuff at the link I provided you might keep yourself from missing out on them.

Ladybug larvae

Other insects, such as ladybugs, Coccinella septempunctata eat only the bad bugs, such as aphids.  We must live in the Mecca of the ladybug world.  When they first come out, you can see thousands of them in a square yard, but now I just see them here and there.  Ladybugs have a penchant for crawling into warm homes in order to winter over and then come out in a vengeance when the weather starts to warm up a little bit.  Some people are quite vexed by this development and will express their ire most loudly.

 Ladybugs even eat the bad bugs when they are still in the larval stage, not looking anything like adult ladybugs.

I don't know much about them and haven't seen any yet, but green lacewing larvae are also supposed to be great predators of plant harming insects. The adult lacewing flies are harmless to plants, only eating pollen and nectar.  Since they are so small they probably pollinate plants that bees are too big to get into.

Ground Beetle

I actually saw a ground beetle today when I was planting some flox on the back slope.  I'm glad that they are so pretty and easy to spot, since these guys actually kill the darned cutworms that I hate so much.  The one I saw was more on the cobalt blue side.  It was barely big enough to sit on a nickel.

I don't see the variety of birds up here that I used to see further south and to the west of Atlanta.  The bird we see the most is the ruby throated hummingbird.  In case you didn't know, hummingbirds get all their protein from eating small insects, such as mosquitoes and other pests.  They don't just suck nectar from flowers or the sugar water from my feeders.  The other great mosquito controllers around here are the dragonflies, which can eat up to fifty times their weight in mosquitoes a day and catch them on the fly, er, in the air.  But that's why you primarily see dragonflies where there are bodies of standing water, since that's what's required for mosquitoes to breed.

There is also the actual benefit of having some insects breeding and creating larva on the farm.  When I'm out digging up composted soil or trying to create a new bed for something. I will find grubs from time to time and they are probably of the Japanese beetle or June bug variety.  To my chickens they are candy.  Same thing goes for fly larva that I find in the compost sometimes.  The chickens get to free-range during the winter months and scratch such treats out of the soil on their own.  What a benefit for us.

Hey!  How do I get in here?

Some people may think I'm crazy for not taking a preventative stance by spraying or dusting, but I figure if I'm willing to lose just a little of my produce to keep the predators around and healthy, we will be rewarded for it down the road when there won't be any commercial chemical poisons around to do my killin' for me.  I try to look over everything growing on the farm every day and keep my eye out for any signs that there is a problem.  And because we believe in prayer, obedience to Torah, and the mercies of Adonai, we'll stick with this method until or unless we get hit with some kind of massive infestation.  And then I only have the natural pyrethrin stuff to mix up, in order to keep the damage minimal.  It is there only as a last resort.  I much prefer to be able to reach down and pick a leaf of lettuce or a pea pod, or a really nice, ripe strawberry and just pop it in my mouth.

I don't think I can ride like this.

 Twyla thinks that the reason I haven't seen any praying mantids this year is because of Pickles.  Pickles has killed numerous tiger swallowtail butterflies and just loves to hunt. He's still a kitten and I don't think he'd pay any attention to me if I scolded him for pouncing on a mantis.  Sometimes you just have to accept things the way they are.  I have to look on the bright side.  I seriously doubt that we will ever have a problem with mice or moles.  There are always trade-offs.  I could worry about how much it costs to feed the dogs, but that night a couple of weeks ago when Moxie and Beau chased a full grown bear out of the yard reminded me that they are worth more than just the companionship.

Oh, come on!  I wanna go!

Pickles likes to play hard all day long, follow me around the garden and supervise, and then sleep around my head or on Twyla's hair all night.  He is quite a lovable cat.


To see some other beneficial bugs, go to this site.

Spring Planting

Feeling good.  Feeling fine.  Spring is here and I get to get some sun.  I spent most of the day yesterday in shorts and no shirt, running around the yard doing various things.  We had 100 straw bales delivered two weeks ago and they are ready for planting.  We have our tomato starts and some more Swiss chard and other cruciferous types.  I've got some more strawberries; six more plants.  Most of the ones we had from last year wintered over nicely

Straw bales arranged for planting

I even got a couple of grape vines from the feed store and I'm going to plant them along the driveway.  I will need to put up a fence rail there for them. I got the only two vines left at the store.  One is Concord and the other is Fredonia.  Fredonia. Reminds me of the Marx brothers movie, "Duck Soup," and the mythical country of  Freedonia.

This time we doubled the straw bales side by side to achieve more stability.  Only one little row at the back is still single.  I also kept a couple of bales for the backyard for more herbs.  Then two more bales went under the porch for alternate bedding for the chickens.  Speaking of chickens, there are dandelions and other wild edible greens that are busting out all over and the chickens are loving it.  I will snatch up handfuls of dandelion and feed them through the wire.  I wish I could still let them free to eat what they wanted to, but I have to protect my plants, so we are back to bringing the food to them.  As I was digging out my corn and bean area I must have gathered a dozen or more grubs which I fed to the chickens and, of course, that is like candy to a little kid.

Leafy walkways that will smother the weeds

This season I am doing much better with the walk areas by piling on the leaves in a very thick fashion.  They will smother the grass and other weeds and as they decompose they will help hold in even more moisture between the bales and further condition the soil for next year.  The other advantage in doubling the bales is that we can do more of the companion gardening.  Twyla has been reading up on it and we will be planting marigolds with the tomatoes. I'll post more about that after we get more things planted.

I also plan to get some good things done along the steep slope in the back yard to have more things planted in the next few days.  I still have a couple of berry plants that were given to us by an English woman in North Carolina.  I planted a McIntosh and a Gala apple tree in the two front corners of the property and it is so nice to see the little green buds starting to sprout.

Even though it means lots of hard work for the coming days, I'm really excited about getting it done and seeing all of these things growing.  We went out to dinner with some local folks who are also big into gardening and we were talking about how there just is no comparison between the stuff you pick fresh out of your own garden versus the stuff from the supermarket. You have no idea how many days or even weeks that produce has been in transit or sitting in a warehouse or distribution center somewhere.  I wish I had a dollar for every time I've shared one of my own homegrown tomatoes with someone who claimed to not like tomatoes, only to hear them say with surprise, "You mean THAT's what a tomato is supposed to taste like?!  Wow!"  And the same is true for lettuce, spinach, cabbage, peas, beans, and corn.

First Year Success: Straw Bales

This first picture shows our harvest from just one Sunday morning two weeks ago. Cucumbers, from only six plants, tomatoes from about six plants - with many more green ones still hanging - yellow squash, and jalapenos. (Danged if I can remember the ASCII code that lets me put that little squiggle worm over the n.) We have had this wonderful crop from a very small space of ground because we stumbled upon the idea of straw bale gardening. When I get better at inserting that html code stuff here, I'll make it easy for you to just click on the word or phrase to do the linky thing, but for now, if you just google the phrase, you can find several pages that tell you more. However, we want to share with you what we have learned.

If you think it's too late to start this process, you'd be wrong. There are plenty of winter type crops that you could be practicing with soon. I'm going to be planting cabbage, lettuce, mustard, broccoli, and a few other cold hardy plants, plus more spinach. I'll be using the remains of the straw bales that provided the crop you see above. But first, some background.

Why do this straw bale gardening?

Here in the mountains of North Georgia, unless you live on an old flood plain next to a river or a creek, your basic ground is going to be red clay and sand with lots of quarts and granite mixed in. It doesn't make for the best basic soil to grow most food plants. We've only been here for a year. Actually, I didn't move up here to be with Twyla until February, or Febu-ugly, as I like to call it. When we started discussing the garden plans it became apparent that preparing the ground would be slow, back-breaking work, and while I'm in pretty good shape for my age, I'm no spring chicken and I did work my way back from having had a herniated disk in my back years ago, so I didn't like the idea of swinging a pick-axe for hours to get a few square feet of arable land. Twyla discovered this straw bale thing on the internet, and after reading about it and discussing it, it made sense.  No digging, except to level the bales, which means no deep digging.  In the photo above, you see we laid out the bales in single rows.  While it worked out okay, I will not be doing that in the future because as the bales decompose, they do so unevenly and the tomatoes tend to fall over.  Also, the squash plants want to stretch out and put down extra roots, so a broader base would be helpful.  Therefore, we will be doubling the bales together, long-side to long-side, with a bit more space between the bales to walk. This more recent picture shows why.


The tomato plant could have used another couple of feet away from the yellow squash.  That is one huge yellow squash plant in the foreground. There is one zuccinni plant behind the yellow squash.  This one yellow squash plant has provided up to 15 squash and is still producing and blooming. For contrast, I took a photo of the yellow squash plants that were just planted in the soil along the steps on the west side of the house. We've only collected about four squash total from the eight plants that were just stuck in the regular dirt and provided with mulch and fertilizer. The cucumber plants (6) were most prolific. We have harvested at least 120 and there are still more to come and there are still blossoms coming out.

Not a pretty sight, huh?

If you want to try this straw bale thing, get the bales at least ten days ahead of time.  Position and level them carefully, with the understanding that they are going to decompose and collapse. Don't undo the baling twine.  Soak them with water at least once a day, everyday.  Expect to see mushrooms pop up after a while.  I actually got some porcinis come up and ate a few of them.  If you are sure you know what you are doing when it comes to identifying mushrooms, it shouldn't be a problem.  If in doubt, don't.

When the weather starts to turn a little cool, and I know that the existing vines are all spent, I'm going to salvage all the straw bale material and create new beds for growing spinach, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens and more.  I will turn the front porch into a greenhouse with clear plastic sheeting.  That will be after we celebrate Sukkot.(Feast of Tabernacles).

If you have any questions, please leave it in the comments. I'd be happy to help.

Shalom v'berakhot Adonai,

Moshe