No Pesticides?

In anticipation of this Sunday’s market, I prepared an answer for a popular question.
“If you don’t use pesticides, how do you keep the bugs off?”


TOP TEN ANSWERS


1.  Organic farms use age-old methods to feed their soil and to provide environments for strong healthy plants that are less susceptible to bug and disease epidemics.  The natural microbial life in soil, often compromised with conventional farming methods, plays a big role in the complex balance between bug and plant life, so organic farmers make a point out of keeping the soil as alive as possible.  We feed our soil with carefully monitored compost created from local and on-farm sources.


2.  Each vegetable sold at our stand really derives from two seed purchases:  the plant seed itself plus the seed planted the prior season as green manure, the organic fertilizer of choice.  Green manure can fixate nitrogen in the soil while building the soil structure.


3.  We plant crops that attract beneficial insects.  These are bugs like lacewings and parasitic wasps.  They eat the eggs of the destructive bugs, so we like them.


4.  We plant crops next to other crops.  Certain pairings discourage certain bugs.


5.  We plant trap crops, which are never meant for market, just a distraction.


6.  We protect crops with row covers.  For example, arugula and mustard greens are very attractive to flea beetles, so as soon as we can in the spring we plant and immediately cover the bed with a thin white fabric only to remove at harvest.


7.  We pick bugs and/or eggs off by hand.


8.  We minimally use organic-approved (OMRI-approved) products such as diamataceous earth for really bad outbreaks of things like cabbage loopers.


9. Organic farmers, especially on small farms, often integrate pasture livestock into their field rotation.  Chickens are great to pasture on next year’s garden because they eat bugs in the ground and fertilize at the same time!


10.  Finally:  The truth is that we sometimes simply CANNOT keep the bugs off.   Organic farmers generally know that the natural world will sometimes win.  To hedge our bets, we make sure to maintain a diversity of crop families.


We do not use chemical fertilizer, chemical pesticides, chemical herbicide, chemical anything.