Chemical Free Organic Pest Control: Smoke Your Garden

This is going to be the shortest post in this organic pest control series and very likely one of the most controversial. When I have mentioned it to friends, they either fall in love with the idea or tell me it is pure BS. To me, it is just another way of re-purposing garden waste

Since I haven’t been able to find much either way in my research but have used this method of pest control successfully, in my own gardens, for several years now, all I can say is “I” recommend it and encourage you to give it a try. What I’m talking about is smoking your garden.

Blowing Smoke

First, let’s be clear, When I say smoke your garden, I’m not talking about growing tobacco or ganja. I’m talking about applying smoke to your garden as a way to control the pest.

The process is very simple and best used on days with very little to no breeze blowing and the weather is not too dry. It takes moister for the scent of the smoke to cling to plants and if they or the air is too dry it won’t hold.

1.      Take an old pan, shovel, banana leaf, or anything that won’t burn easily and pile moist but not wet grass, leaves and other combustible waste in it and start a small smoldering fire. If you have been cooking out with charcoal, the left over coals from your pit work great as a base fire.

2.      Place the smoking fire in your garden, allowing the smoke to flow over your plants and trees for 10-15 minutes and then move it to treat another area.

3.      Repeat a couple times a week.

4.      That is pretty much it.

What Pest Smoke Helps With

Based on my personal experience, smoking your plants helps on all fronts, with the exception of ants. All animals from insects to the larger foragers instinctively avoid fire and the smell of smoke is abhorrent to them.

The smoke itself drives the vermin out and the lingering smell acts as a preventive measure.

I would like to add as a note of caution here that if you have a beneficial insectary in your garden to try and avoid these areas as best you can. Predator insects and pollinators will return faster than foraging insects, but they will still be affected.

Mosquito Control

An added bonus to this method of pest control is that beyond common garden pest it seems to be especially effective and controlling mosquitoes. With all of the news we have been seeing about mosquito borne illnesses, this is a benefit that I feel is worth mentioning.

Zero Waste

This method is very simple, though it can be time-consuming. It is zero waste process, as it takes lawn and garden waste and converts it to ash that is a very healthy aid in maintaining your soil quality. Just throw it on your garden when finished burning.

Give this method of natural pest control a try and let me know what you think. As always I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

30% of All Food Produced Is Wasted

It is not often that I agree with the UN or any other government body, but as someone who sees the effects of hunger and poverty every day, I also find these numbers totally unacceptable. There is too much food wasted and too many people hungry in the world for this to continue.

If you notice a major part of the waste is felt to be from transportation. Supporting local farmers, growing your own and eating fresh food is not only healthier for you personally, but for the planet as a whole.

Not only does it reduce food waste due to transport losses and inefficient processing methods. It can have a great impact on the amount of pollution generated by food production.

Personally, I find it very gratifying to say, “Honey, I’m going to get groceries. I’ll be in the yard if you need me.

United Nations Wasted Food Statistics

Diatomaceous Earth for Chemical Free Organic Pest Control

As a continuation of our series on chemical free organic pest control, today we are going to discuss one of my personal favorites, Diatomaceous Earth.

The reason that I am so fond of DE is the simple fact that, despite it having some limitations, it can be

Common Garden Insects

used both in the garden and in the home for a wide variety of pests. Best of all Diatomaceous Earth is completely natural and nontoxic. It is safe for you, your pets and the environment when used with care.

What is Diatomaceous Earth

Diatomaceous Earth is the fossilized skeletons of prehistoric crustaceans called diatoms. Over the millennium these tiny creatures died settled to the bottoms of rivers, streams and seas, leaving deposits from which they are now mined today.

Comprised almost completely of silica and small amounts of calcium, Diatomaceous Earth appears to the naked eye as a white powder and when viewed under a microscope closely resembles a pile of broken glass, which in some ways are exactly what it is and the secret to how I works.

How Does Diatomaceous Earth Kill Insects and Slugs

The mechanics of how DE works is elegant in its simplicity. Above, I said, it looks like microscopic glass shards and it does its job exactly as if it were. The tiny silica crystals act as an abrasive scratching through the exoskeleton of insects and the sensitive exscretionary membranes of garden slugs and essentially take away their ability to hold fluids. They dehydrate and die.

How to Apply Diatomaceous Earth

In the Garden

In your garden DE is used much as you would powdered pesticides. Sprinkle it on the soil to control emerging slugs and insects and use a duster on the foliage of your plants for insect control. Here, though, is where DE’s weakness begins to show up. When it becomes damp it losses much of its effectiveness and in wet conditions is almost totally useless.

The other word of caution I will add about using Diatomaceous Earth is that just like most pesticides, beneficial insects have no protection from it. That is why I limit my garden use, to ground applications or cover plants with nets to protect valuable pollinators like bees and butterflies from coming in contact with it.

In the Home

In your home Diatomaceous Earth can be applied in cracks, crevices even around bedding and behind furnishings. Its consistency is much like talcum powder and non-abrasive to people and animals.

What Insects will Diatomaceous Earth Control

This by no means a comprehensive list, mainly because I am yet to find an insect that is not effected when exposed to DE but it will give you some idea how versatile this stuff is.

•        Ants

•        Bedbugs

•        Carpet Beetles

•        Caterpillars

•        Centipedes

•        Cockroaches

•        Colorado Potato Beetles

•        Crickets

•        Darkling Beetles

•        Earwigs

•        Fleas

•        Flour Beetles

•        Grain Beetles

·         Japanese Beetles

•        Millipedes

•        Pill bugs

•        Silverfish

•        Slugs

•        Sow bugs

•        Spiders

As you can see from this list just about any hard bodied insect is fair pray for Diatomaceous Earth and most soft bodied varieties are.

Why Plant Heirloom/Heritage Plants and Seeds

By Steven Depolo from Grand Rapids, MI, USA Heirloom Tomatoes, Carrots, Potatoes

To be honest, this article almost ended up being part of our series on preventing garden pest naturally. Then I realized that just highlighting how heritage plants and heirloom seeds were a natural form of pest control was doing them a great injustice and decided to expand this piece into a slightly more comprehensive article on the advantages of heirloom plant varieties.

What are Heirloom or Heritage Plants?

There really is no complete answer to this question as it seems that different organizations and almost every farmer and gardener has their own ideas as to what makes a plant variety a heritage plant.

As a general rule, though you can consider any plant variety that has occurred naturally, from open pollination and survived to reproduce itself, over several generations to be a heritage plant.

By Smithsonian (subsidiary of department of education)

Some will argue that hybrids of any type shouldn’t be considered as heritage, but to my way of thinking time and nature are the tests, not the purity of the gene pool. I haven’t verified the history, independently, but a friend with a Doctorate in Horticulture told me that at the time Columbus came to the New World there were less than 20 varieties of chilies known.

Look at the wide variety of peppers that we enjoy today. They all are descendants of those originals and had to be hybrids at one time. Now many of them are heirloom.

Pest and Disease Resistant

One of the biggest advantages that heritage plants have is that they have, over time proven themselves to be both disease and pest resistant. Nature is a wonderful thing and by the simple processes of survival and procreation, it is constantly improving breeds and eliminating weak traits from species.

Plants have developed natural resistance to the diseases most prevalent in their environments and strategies for dealing with pests ranging from toxins to symbiotic relationships with predatory insects.

For the gardener, this means less need for human intervention on every level, especially if you choose not only heritage plants, but those native to your geographical area.

Flavor

As hard as it may be to believe it wasn’t really until the rubber tomato and store bought canned goods were developed that the agricultural focus began to shift from quality and nutrition to quantity.

Until that time most farming was done more on a local level and people were more concerned with the taste of food rather than it having a shelf life that was measured in weeks or months rather than days.

People who didn’t raise their own produce bought it from local farmers and pretty much anything that wasn’t eaten immediately was canned, pickled or otherwise preserved at home, for later use.

Saving Money and the Planet

If you still need more reasons to plant Heirloom Seeds, consider the fact that by restraining yourself, just a little, that this year’s crops will provide you with plenty of seeds for next year and that those plants will be even better adapted to your garden. No more buying seeds each year and fighting the same battles over and over again.

And lastly, by planting and raising heritage and heirloom varieties of plants you are helping to preserve the biological diversity that our very future could depend on. More than once in history, we have been taught diversity is security and that it is foolish to narrow down the options that nature provides us.

Whether from blight, as in the Irish Potato Famine, climate or man-made disasters as we have seen repeatedly, it is only by having a diverse and hardy bios that we can help assure our own future.

Creating a 'Mini' Insectary in Your Gardenm (3rd article in our organic best control series)

The idea of intentionally inviting insects into your garden may sound a little crazy to some. That is because, most of us have been raised in a chemical-laden world, where new and improved (sic), man-made has been praised and the natural demonized as inefficient and wasteful. The funny part of this is that the exact opposite is true. Man has never developed a system that worked with the elegance that we find in nature.

Chemical pesticides not only poison and kill insects indiscriminately, they wash into our rivers and streams causing environmental damage and leech into our groundwater supply where they have been found  to contribute to Malignant lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma and many other forms of cancer.

By learning to work with nature using methods like building Insectaries in our gardens we not only protect our plants in the most natural way possible, we protect ourselves and the planet that we will leave behind to our kids and grandkids.

What is an Insectary

For our purposes, an insectary is a small area of your garden, set aside and planted with plant species that will draw and hold beneficial insects. 

The idea is to invite these predator species into our gardens and then let them do what nature intended them to do, eat the pests that eat our plants.

How to get started

The best method that I have found is to alternate small islands of insectary plants with your normal crops.

If you garden in traditional rows, set aside a portion of every second or third row for a few feet of predator drawing plants or plant them in islands throughout your garden.

If you have beds of plants like a herb garden or traditional flower beds found around most homes, reserve a 4 sq ft area, every 15 to 20 feet around your beds or in the center of larger beds.

What Insectary Plants to Choose?

Every geographical area and type of crop has its own set of damaging garden pests to worry about so it is very difficult to give a blanket answer to this question.

What we can do is supply you with the information you will need to make your own choices.

Garden Pest	Prey Insects
Aphids	Aphidius, Aphidoletes, Hoverflies, Lacewings, Ladybugs, Pirate Bugs
Caterpillars	Ground Beetles
Fungus Gnats	Beneficial Mites
Grubs	Ground Beetles
Insects Pest Eggs	Damsel Bugs (Nabidae)
Mealybugs	Hoverflies
Mites	Lacewings, Ladybugs, Pirate Bugs
Moth, Beetle And Fly Larvae	Wasps (parasitic)
Scale	Pirate Bugs, Lacewings
Slugs	Ground Beetles
Soft bodied Insects	Lacewings
Spidermite	Beneficial Mites, Dicyphus
Thrips	Beneficial Mites, Dicyphus, Pirate Bugs
Whiteflies	Dicyphus, Pirate Bugs, Wasps (parasitic)

Beneficial Insect	Plant
Aphidius	Achillea Filipendulina, Lupin, Sunflowers
Aphidoletes	Lupin
Beneficial Mites	Helianthus Annulus, Shasta Daisy
Damsel Bugs (Nabidae)	Fennel
Dicyphus	Digitalis
Ground Beetles	Amaranthus
Hoverflies	Convolvulus Minor, Queen Anne's Lace, Iberis Umbellata, Statice, Lupin, Parsley, Pincushion Flower, Yarrow
Lacewings	Alyssum, Dill, Angelica Gigas, Coreopsis, Cosmos Bipinnatus, Queen Anne's Lace, Fennel, Tansy
Ladybugs	Achillea Filipendulina, Dill, Convolvulus Minor, Queen Anne's Lace, Fennel, Tansy, Yarrow
Pirate Bugs	Helianthus Annulus, Shasta Daisy, Sunflower
Tachinid flies	Alyssum, Lemon Balm, Parsley,
Wasps (parasitic)	Coreopsis,  Cosmos Bipinnatus, Dill, Statice, Lemon balm, Parsley, Pincushion Flower, Sunflower, Yarrow

Insectary Secrets

Different insects are obviously attracted to different types of plants and have different environmental requirements. Ground Beetles need to have ample ground cover and low growing plants to thrive and Lacewings like to have high, shady, protected areas to lay their eggs. Because of this, it is best to plant a variety of plants in your Insectary Plots.

Mix and match ground covers like clover and vetch with low-growing herbs like thyme, dill and various mints and then add taller composite flowers such as daisies and chamomile. The more variety you have, the better.

Patients

The other secret to growing an insectary and using predatory insects to keep your garden pest free is to remember that you are working with a natural process. Even if you order bugs or eggs online you are not going to see a dramatic change overnight.

Nature takes time to work. The best you can do to hurry it along is to seed and provide a proper environment for your little pest control agents to live in and then wait.

On the good side, once you have your Garden Insectary in place, all you have to do is maintain it year to year and your plants will stay protected without any further expense or work. As long as you provide them a good home, your little worker bugs will keep your garden pest free and even help enrich your soil with their waste.