Organic pest control outline for Living Smarties Melville.

­­Organic pest control talk.

How to reduce pest problems without using chemical sprays?

IMPROVING CULTURAL PRACTICES IN THE GARDEN

Stop using chemical pesticides and herbicides

Choose appropriate plants

Plant early and/or late varieties

Grow lots of flowers

Crop rotation

Improving the soil

Garden hygiene

Avoid monoculture

INCREASING BIODIVERSITY

Biodiversity increases predators and plant diversity allows some plants to survive when others get diseased or eaten. 

The four main ideas to consider to increase biodiversity in your garden are :

PLANT LOCAL SPECIES

PROVIDE FOOD

PROVIDE WATER

PROVIDE SHELTER

OBSERVATION

Why not to use chemicals in the garden and how to encourage biodiversity and use cultural practices instead to reduce pests naturally.

Beneficial insects and what they do and how to deal with pests in a non or low toxic manner.

WHAT'S A PEST? (My definition): An insect or other animal becomes a pest when it causes economical damage. This may be due to there not being enough diversity in the surrounding ecosystem to support the predators, which keep the pests in check.

WHY NOT TO USE PESTICIDES

Encouraging diversity in your garden is the best way to control pests.

How to reduce pest problems?

IMPROVING CULTURAL PRACTICES IN THE GARDEN

Generally the worst problems will occur in new or neglected gardens or those with a history of chemical abuse.  It can take 3 years for balance to occur as it takes  awhile for predator populations to increase.

Stop using any chemical pesticides and herbicides. They kill far more than the target species; even the 'safer' ones can be dodgy.

Chemicals can kill non-target species of beneficial insects as they are extremely sensitive to any chemical use at all.

Resistance: Insects can become resistant to certain pesticides, making the surviving ones harder to kill may be hereditary resistance to common toxic sprays.

exposed eggs of an insect can show signs of resistance as an adult.

Soil organisms are sometimes affected by biocides.

Choose appropriate plants for your climate, time of year and soil type.  Certain varieties will be more locally adapted than others, if they've been grown there before.  Look around at other gardens to see what does well and isn't being bothered by pests. 

There may be disease resistant strains of the plant you like.

Plant early and/or late varieties: works to avoid pests such as Med fruit fly. You might just miss the time when the pests want to bother that crop.

Grow lots of flowers: Asteraceae family (daisies) and the Apiaceae family (dill, fennel, carrots, Queen Anne's lace, yarrow, angelica, coriander, parsley). Salvias and gone to seed veg and herbs are great too

Crop rotation stops a host plant being in the same place when eggs hatch the next year from adults that fed on the last seasons crop.  There can be problems associated with nematodes or other soil diseases when crop rotation doesn't occur.

Improving the soil and feeding plants well will grow healthier, stronger and more pest resistant plants.  Overuse of nitrogen fertilizers makes sappy new growth. Kelp seems to increase leaf strength.

Garden hygiene: some weeds harbour pests. Chickens can dig over the soil.

Avoid monoculture...Plant similar things or groups of things around the garden not altogether or in rows that a pest can easily follow and decimate or if some get diseased they won't all pass it on to each other.

Which leads to BIODIVERSITY..

Biodiversity increases predators and Plant diversity allows some plants to survive when others get diseased or eaten. 

Balance is easier to attain in a diverse environment.           

wildlife needs food, water and shelter. Providing places for fauna to shelter is a great way to improve diversity in your garden.

Increasing biodiversity is key.

PLANT LOCAL SPECIES: more appropriate for the soil type and climate and will provide food for local birds and insects. Prickly shrubs and grasses are important for birds.

Planting local species can help as this feeds local insects and small fauna such as beneficial insects, skinks, spiders, parasitic wasps.

Structural diversity is important too for birds to be at diff heights. Different levels of vegetation so that small birds can hide. Posts and sticks in the air give birds a place to rest before they hop into a bush or birdbath.

FOOD: Provide food: long flowering shrubs and herbs

It is generally the young of beneficials that do the pest control. It is important to have flowers at all times of year so nectar is always available. 

Herbs, daisies family and parsley family are great, gone to seed veges and salvias, mint etc.

Attracting birds by planting shrubs they can use will control pests then poop, redistributing nutrients around the garden. Never feed birds seed,

Leave some pests as food for the birds in your garden.

Mulch gives invertebrates a place to shelter providing small lizards and frogs with something to eat.

WATER: Provide water: birdbaths - kept clean and full with sticks to escape on; lizard and bee bars  - shallow trays with water and pebbles so they can't drown. 
Ponds. Many birds and insects use ponds in  summer. Birdbaths are also frequented by bees, wasps and other flying things.

SHELTER: Prickly shrubs for birds, piles of wood and or rocks for lizards, spiders etc. Leave wild areas for small fauna, eg gabion walls are great. Ideally these areas should never be disturbed.

Observation is important in all stages of pest control, to make sure you won't kill more than just the pest.  Use a magnifying glass to aid identification and if you can't id it get some help. 

Most pests have a particular time of year when they will be at their worst. Spring is ideal for cabbage white and aphids. Some will overwinter in weeds waiting for conditions to be right. By spending time looking at your plants you can catch pests before they get too bad. This can help decide what needs doing, if anything..

Yabbietat tank

The tank has lots of yabbies, a few tadpoles and a couple of small fish to help control mosquito larvae.

These little fish are minnows. They have tiny mouths, so they can only eat mossie larvae but not tadpoles or frogspawn.

Inside this roll of shade cloth there may, hopefully, be lurking baby yabbies. When we unrolled it to have a look there were tiny babies up to about 5 cms.

Since taking these pictures more bits of pipe have been added so there are more spaces for the crustaceans to shelter so they don't attack each other.

It’s good to share, but beware. Plants and personal responsibility.

This article will also appear in the PermacultureWest enews.

It’s good to share, but beware. Plants and personal responsibility.

Plants are amazing things. They can fix most of the world’s problems if used correctly and are the source of a huge amount of what we need in our daily lives.

As permaculture folk we want to fix degraded land and create complex ecosystems and we do this with plants as they can do it quickly. Unfortunately their speed of growth can sometimes also be a negative thing. Thousands of dollars and volunteer hours go towards removing escaped vegetation; lots of poison, too.

Plant selection and use is a complex and controversial subject and is a reason why permaculture has sometimes been denigrated . Having studied and worked in both environmental restoration and permaculture I have some conflicted ideas about plants out of place aka exotics aka weeds. Some plants are brilliant, having multiple uses but some are just so good at propagating themselves they become rampant and have been banned from growing in certain areas, despite how useful they might be.

Personal responsibility is a strong ethos of permaculture, so I am going to outline my concerns with the trend of sharing seeds without clearly considering the consequences.

Novel ecosystems

The term novel ecosystems (Hobbs, 2006) encompasses the many habitats on earth that have been altered in some way. Most habitats have been changed by the inclusion or removal of species, on purpose or accidentally; we can never go back to having pristine landscapes of purely indigenous species. Naturalised plants, that is introduced species which need no help to survive in a new place, have varying degrees of influence on bushland ecosystems, areas that are important repositories for endemic species including invertebrate populations. Earth care would have us protect remaining pre-settlement areas for health and wellbeing reasons.

Through clever design we can integrate a lot more food plants and other useful species into our environment but we need to be careful not to accidentally reduce biodiversity by letting many species be overgrown by one rampant one.

Using naturalised plants

There are many reasons to use existing ‘weedy’ or naturalised species in an area; biomass production, shelter and insect habitats for instance. When trying to improve degraded sites the idea may be entertained that any plant that will grow in a place  should be encouraged. If a site is degraded it needs any plant to grow there to protect and improve the soil. However some newly introduced plants can settle into an area too quickly, becoming costly to remove if they turn out to be a bit more voracious than one had hoped or expected.

Ideally, before planting, the permie designer would look around and see what is already nearby to fulfil their needs for vegetation before introducing new species to an area. if a plant is a declared or environmental weed in another place it is worth researching to make sure the same thing won’t happen on your site.  There are always plenty of choices for all but the most marginal of conditions.

While I agree with Holmgren in his “Weeds or Wild Nature” essay that there has been demonisation of certain species, we should be careful not to dismiss the fact that some plants do escape into otherwise healthy bushland, changing the ecosystem structure.  Many naturalised species are not encroaching any further than they have done since they settled in however I would suggest that there are some species recommended in permaculture readings that reproduce a bit too successfully where we are and as with all things, the better educated we are before we start, the less costly mistakes will be made.

Why are some plants more problematic than others

This depends on the plant’s life cycle, method of propagation and their self defence mechanisms.

Self-seeding is good, sometimes.

Part of a good permaculture garden involves finding some edibles that will self seed. For some plants this is fine, we water and look after the soil so it is good enough to support self sowing vegetables. Lettuces, rocket, parsley, and a range of other vegetables are a fantastic set of foodstuffs to happen on their own. Other plants self sowing isn’t so beneficial for suburban gardens, though. This is due to their size, rate of reproduction or some other behaviour.  An example would be some extremely useful trees, Albizia lophantha and Acacia saligna. Both species kept coming up each year for a number of years in our garden and we would let them grow where they wanted. But only ever one at a time would come up and they are short lived and easy to prune. We knew we could manage them. Of course, in South Africa the Acacia saligna has become a big problem, changing ecosystem structure and fire regimes in the fynbos.  It grows better there than it does here.

Weediness potential depends how the plant produces seeds.

Some plants will behave within their natural range and be controlled by natural seed or leaf eaters however outside of that, where soil or rainfall are more favourable, and no biological controls exist, there is the chance of over population.

There are a variety of ways that a plant can produce seeds that can escape.

Windblown- plants in the daisy family make thousands and thousands of seeds, which then blow away on the lightest breeze. This includes lettuces and globe artichoke, closely related to prickly thistles.

Pods - some seed pods can throw seeds many metres away from the parent plant, or make hundreds of seed per tree. Leucaena, I’m looking at you.

Suckers - may be prickly and hard to remove, Robinia, a nitrogen-fixing deciduous shade tree is renowned for this.

Prickly and spines: Blackberries, cactus. Ouch. They can be spread by animals eating them and dropping the seeds or they may have seeds that attach to an animals fur, and spread that way.

Berries and fruit - birds carry seeds away and drop them off with a little free fertiliser. Olives easily spread into bushland this way. Blackberries - spread by seed and by sucker and are really prickly as well. Triple threat.

Bulbs: some can reproduce two ways, ie gladiolus makes bulbs and seeds.

Plants that creep and climb: kudzu, really useful, really buries houses.

Be aware of what seeds you are sharing.

I am not saying no weedy plants should be used in permaculture systems because any plant can be a weed if it is in the wrong place and we love weeds. What I am stating here is that there are a FEW really bad plants in terms of how readily they spread. I think we need to consider these plants and be aware of what we are sharing. If you are handing over seeds be honest about how hard that plant might be to keep under control; if they are in a different part of Australia definitely check that the plant isn’t a weed.

It is too easy for people to swap plant propagules and there isn't always a description or warning of any sort whether the plant has potential issues. Indeed, the plant may behave totally differently in the two places, especially if the rainfall or soil is better in the new place.  Some plants can outcompete all others, reducing your carefully designed food forest.

WHAT can we do as responsible gardeners?

Be aware of who you are sharing seeds with. Do they live near bushland? Is there a less invasive plant they could be using instead. I am very unlikely to pass on seeds of a plant I know can make hundreds of seeds.

Also, be careful at swap meets, as sometimes people can be selling plants that are potential weeds and they may not even know.

There are still thousands of species and plenty of responsible food growers out there.   Just have a little think before you give seeds away to that thing you’ve been battling to control in your own garden, eh. 

References

Holmgren, D. 2013. http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/12/weeds-wild-nature-permaculture-perspective/

IUCN, 2010.  http://www.issg.org/database/species/reference_files/acasal/acasal_man.pdf

Reed, Sue. 2012. http://nativeplantwildlifegarden.com/permacultures-internal-contradiction/

UCDavis IPM: http://ucipm.ucdavis.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74139.html

Fire Site Design article

I wrote an article for the permaculturewest enews recently about how to improve the safety of a home on a rural site by thoughtful placement of where to place the home and infrastructure so it is less prone to fire incursion.
Here is the link to it.. Property fire safety design

Slug and snail control- the easy hands-on method.

The designated slug collecting spoon.

Snails and slugs can easily build up in winter where there is lot of vegetation, mulch and manures lying around. They congregate beneath pots and pavers or rock edges. When the first rains come suddenly the snails are out, marauding and chomping the little seedlings we waited so long to plant after the heat of summer.

Lots of different remedies are suggested by organic gardeners and I have tried many but really, the best way to get rid of them is to collect them. I don't squash them. I scoop them up and drop them into a small container of water with a few drops of washing detergent in it. This breaks the surface tension and the snail or slug drops straight to the bottom. I have a special, easily identified teaspoon that is used to scoop slugs up, too. Oh and a headlamp is handy, too so you can collect the slimy little beasts with two hands.

A few nights of obsessive snail collecting can make a huge difference to the numbers of hungry mouths out there, including the people who get to eat the vegies that the snails would have eaten!