Most of the requests I get for posts deal with pests and, while I hate to get caught up in a negative spin on gardening, sooner or later the topic has to be addressed.

I am going to handle this by breaking it out into three main subsections and two lesser ones:

A) Garden generalities … principles and procedures that you can follow to ensure a generally healthy garden. This will be further broken out into:

1) discouraging pests and

2) actively eradicating them … two entirely different topics.

If I never write on any other subject, those two, alone, would make for a full career.

B) Plant-by-plant growing instructions which will, necessarily, treat the pests that visit each plant along with other factors of cultivation such as lighting, germination temperatures and so on. I might even toss in a particularly interesting recipe or two.

C) Treating each pest as an individual, paying attention to life-cycle, means of control and factors to weigh before deciding to eradicate.

Organic gardening is a blend of encouraging the positives such as healthy growth, presence of beneficial organisms and reasonable tolerance levels with appropriate levels of control when these are threatened or insufficient.

Keep you chin up. First we’ll paint the big picture with the broad brush and then we’ll home in on the details that stitch everything together. Finally, we’ll try to keep a good attitude and have a bit of laughter at how things never seem to work out perfectly, but they always seem to work out well-enough.

–Bill

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Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.

Most nut trees can take many years to produce their first small crops and, although their lumber is both beautiful and expensive, unless you planted them decades ago your grandchildren will profit; not you.

But hazelnuts (filberts) are technically woody shrubs and can produce in as little as 3 years, with 4-5 being the norm. Since they usually max out around 8-15 ft tall (~2.5 – 4.5m), they are a good height for a windbreak that will never grow tall enough to present a danger – and always stay low enough to produce food where you can reach it.

Plant them in open spaces and harvest them by waiting until the nuts fall from the tree or, if you are in a hurry, give the tree a shake. The ripe ones will fall from the bush … on you! If kept in the shell, they will last up to 24 months, so this is a good “putting by” food.

If you plant them near the edge of wooded areas you can harvest the squirrels, deer and turkeys, too.

In cities, these shrubs are excellent for traffic island planting as they tolerate both dry soil and floods: plant them in the early spring and they’ll have roots of their own when the heat of summer hits. If you can give them some water, they’ll reward the extra effort. As always, put a raised ring of soil around the planting hole to help funnel water from rains to the roots and then mulch several inches deep for two or three feet all around to conserve available water and cut down on weed competition.

Filberts make excellent wind screens to stop drifting snows and soil erosion and provide a lot of wildlife habitat, offering both food and concealment.

They sequester carbon in the woody roots and stems and their dense root systems stabilize topsoil to keep waterways clear. Their slender shoots make good arrows and their stouter limbs make good bows.

Because the nuts are easily recognized and easily processed into food (roasted or raw), they make a good guerrilla gardening planting, offering food for man and beast alike while needing little to no care after the initial planting. Plant them along fencerows, alongside railroad right of ways (several feet away from the ballast gravel, which is sprayed with nasty stuff to keep it clear … and mind the trains while planting!) and at the base of existing shrubby highway plantings.

For pollination purposes, the minimum number to plant is two … and the more the merrier, as they are wind pollinated. Judging by illustrations I’ve seen, actual planting distances tend to be in the range of 10-20 feet apart, depending on whether they are being grown for food or windbreak.

If you join the Arbor Day Foundation (a 501c non-profit corporation) now, they’ll send you three seedlings at the minimum membership level. These are NOT the commercial cultivars you may be familiar with … other than size (these max out at around 8 ft tall), they have been bred for good yields, hardiness across a broad range of temperatures (USDA zones 3-9) and disease resistance (including against the Eastern Filbert Blight). This is a project of the Arbor Day Foundation and three universities to develop a superior commercial strain of the filbert that can compete on the world market (Turkey presently sells roughly 75% of the worlds filberts while the US grows no more than 5%.)

If you want more than three (to plant a traffic island, freeway fence, public park, etc.) Arbor Day Foundation members* can get 50, 8-12”, seedlings for $39.00. More mature plants are about $7.00 each for members. They’ll live about 100 years, so they make a nice living memorial of one day in your life spent with mattock in hand and high hopes in your heart.

What is of especial importance, perhaps, for readers of this blog is the potential for economic growth in filberts. From a growers viewpoint, this is like getting in on the first good deals of 8-track distribution back in 1965. As urban farmers, we can plant the filberts, then plant around them until they mature. Thus we gain an immediate cash / food return while we are waiting for a far larger one.

Source: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference,
Release 17, 2004. Nuts are unsalted and unroasted.

FAT CONTENT OF HAZELNUTS

MONOUNSATURATED 75%
SATURATED 7%

Total Phytosterols 27 mg
g = gram mg = milligram %DV = percent Daily Value mcg = microgram

* Minimum membership donation is $15 for a one-year membership.

“We can fertilize with s**t but will have to sterilise (sic) it. That requires energy. We have to move food from farms to the public and s**t back.”

That’s what I found when I stumbled upon one web site this week. It is representative of wide ranging ignorance about some of the natural processes we relied on to obtain food LONG before Monsanto and Cargill were ever thought of.

Those of you who occasionally thumb through the scriptures are invited to consider how the first couple were supposed to get along without Monsanto. Their job, you will recall, was to extend the boundaries of paradise and fill it with children. LOTS of children. No fertilizers. No GMOs. No mention of tools, either. (It’s called no-till agriculture and we are just now rediscovering how to use it.)

How gullible are you?

That these companies, and others like them, are not only still in business, but “riding high” proves that it is possible, at least for a while, to fool everyone. Somewhere in the 1920s we got hoodwinked into thinking that natural processes which had worked since mankind first learned to plant in a straight row, had stopped working. Greed set in and reasoning went on holiday. We stopped manuring our fields and started fertilizing them. This led directly to the dust belts of the Great Depression as the reserves of humic acids were pulled from our soils. Without humus to bind them together, the soil particles were free to leave the Midwest on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Literally … some of that dust made it all the way to the ocean.

Not coincidentally, by the 1940′s vitamin advertising had leaped “from a little over a million dollars in advertising to two hundred fifty million dollars a year in just four years.” (The Have-More Plan – A Little Land –  A Lot of Living, Robinson, Ed and Carolyn, p.20, 1973, Storey Publishing, MA. $9.95). Why? Because, as Ed and Carolyn also note on the same page, “vitamin and mineral deficient spinach looks about the same as spinach right out of a good garden.”

Friends, these problems were already known in 1945 when this book was first published.

So, are we returning to the old ways? No. In fact, Monsanto is now one of the companies leading the charge toward GMOs and dominating the seed market (to the tune of roughly 95% domination).

We are believing them again.

The wide-ranging discussion on the site was interesting, to say the least. Mostly it was focused on how to survive a government ‘gone wrong’ scenario. The commenter, perhaps intending to lend weight to his opinions, had closed his post with the statement “This is not theory. My machines work.”

Here is my response, altered somewhat for this blog, to that comment:

This is not theory, either.

As a machinist and then die-maker, I made the machines that made your machines. As a railroad conductor and skilled-tradesman, I understand the difference between reliable facts and conjecture. And you, sir, are full of conjecture. Your ‘facts’ are merely guesses and not even educated ones, at that. Only a few more degrees off target and I would have accused you of being a shill for the chemical manufacturers and purveyors of the GMO seeds that go with them. Instead, I think you may simply be someone who hasn’t troubled himself to do his homework. Well, sir, not all opinions are equal, not all are valid. Sometimes we have to rely on guesswork because not enough facts are available. But it is intellectually indefensible to form an opinion before we have at least considered the readily available facts, weighed them carefully, and then, based on the facts available to us, formed an opinion that is honest at its roots. Even then, as new facts surface or as we come to understand earlier facts differently, an honest man is prepared to shuck his former opinion and dress himself in new conclusions.

Wrong on all counts.

First of all, manure – even human manure – doesn’t need sterilization. If you are worried about the health of its source, it is enough to either compost it aerobically or spread it and allow it to sit a while. The diseases and parasites that fare so well inside a human body generally fare extremely badly outside of it. For a complete discussion of the matter, see the link at the bottom of the page. The book it references has a permanent place in my library.

Second of all, when it decomposes aerobically – whether in a pile or spread on the surface of a field – manure is exothermic and thus yields more energy than consumed. Humans are mammals just as much as horses, cows, pigs and sheep are. This fact provides the thinking behind quite a few hothouse heating systems and more than a couple home toilet systems. Since the stuff needs to rot and since rotting releases heat, why not capture the heat and use it? This isn’t rocket science; it’s economics.

Third, human manure is too rich to use directly as fertilizer, having too much nitrogen to apply directly. A side dressing, when fresh, DOES run the risk of food contamination; but more so of chemically ‘burning’ the plants. However, it is of immeasurable worth as a soil amendment. By the time it has decomposed along with the needed high carbon materials, it will assay out at around 1-1-1 (while being an excellent source of the minor and trace elements that are also needed for healthy plant growth).

Its primary value, then, is as food for soil microbes. It is these, as they release the chemicals from the raw ingredients and the minerals in the soil, who make the fertility of the soil available to the plants while binding up generous amounts of carbon. That is a layman’s way of saying “carbon sequestration” and the more organic material applied to the soil, the more carbon is sequestered (hidden away) there instead of being released into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas.

Fourth of all, this gentleman’s thinking is still locked in the monoculture / agribusiness mode. Suppose that each person simply recycled his/her OWN manure into their OWN garden? This is more than just a closed loop: it is also a means of adding external inputs (the foods eaten that were not grown on that soil). Or, if the manure, etc., from a city was recycled within 20 miles of that city* the energy needs for transporting both the waste and the produce would decline dramatically. Twenty miles is not zero, I know that, but it is a great improvement over the average of 1,500 miles that our food currently travels to reach our plate. I know for a fact that I can grow roughly $3,000 worth of vegetables on the 240 sq ft of raised beds in my backyard per Michigan growing season and this is without the addition of any sort of manure … just rough-finished compost whose ingredients originated either in my kitchen or within 100 yards of my house.

This, too, is not theory.

My machines also work. (Mostly my pressure canner.)

Here’s a link to the book I was talking about in the first exception: The Humanure Handbook. I don’t recommend books that I haven’t read and value … and that means that I read a lot more books (roughly one a week) than I recommend. However, the two mentioned in this post are both well worth owning and will set you back roughly $25 if you buy them both. I think I paid a little more for them, but they were still a bargain.

This planet, whether our production systems recognize it or not, is essentially a closed system. There is no “away”. Your manure and urine, no matter how hard or how often you flush, does not go there.

Simply raising your own vegetables and omitting meat one or two days a week is enough to reverse the global warming caused by humans and also eliminate world hunger (by reallocating resources which is, admittedly, a political hurdle yet to be conquered).  It would also reduce diabetes, cancer of the colon and heart attacks … politics not withstanding.

Seriously.

Simultaneously. It could also reduce your risk of cancer of the colon … but that’s an issue for another day. If you drop your consumption of meat to just one day a week, we can eliminate factory farming altogether.

- Bill

*According to the The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition, some Chinese cities do just this … and are surrounded by circles of green vegetation observable from space. Lots of vegetation means lots of oxygen is being released, helping to keep the city healthier and more livable. I neglected to mention that human manure can be incorporated into the soil in exactly the same fashion as manure from other mammals. Most soils can benefit from the incorporation of generous amounts of manure (as much as the first six inches can contain) from any source available. It can decompose there even more beneficially than it can in a pile because it is available to more earthworms, etc. Get the book (yes, those are affiliate links) and do the thinking for yourself.

Another day, another reason to be glad I’m a vegetarian:

http://donteatdirt.com/2011/04/05/27-tons-of-turkey-burgers-recalled/

Folks, grow your own food. Eat plants, some fruits, little meat.