A pest free garden is a healthy garden and a healthy garden must start with healthy soil. Whether you have clay, sand or loam, if you’re going to grow food crops, you will need to add nutrients and minerals to it.
The foods we grow are wimpy and spoiled. They’re bred to grow in a certain kind of soil under certain circumstances and will wilt, become stunted or even die (or refuse to germinate) under less than the conditions to which they’re accustomed. Ask any weed. Weeds have adapted out of self preservation and can live in soil that modern food crops won’t even sprout in. How many times do you see a weed overcome with a pest? Not often, if ever.
So for a pest free garden, make your soil good. Whatever kind you have, start with good compost. Buy it by the bag or make it yourself, but spread at least an inch of good compost over the garden area and rake it in. Don’t shovel it in, because if it’s buried too deeply, the nutrients will leach away with rain or watering.
If your soil is heavy clay, put fine sawdust in it and let it set for a few weeks, then add compost. If you have sandy soil, add lots of organic matter in the form of finished or unfinished compost. It will take some time for either type of soil to produce well, but you’ll at least have a starting point.
If you’re going to be serious about keeping pests from your garden, have your soil tested and then add the nutrients and elements it lacks. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be precise, but do use organic amendments if you want healthy soil. Most plants will stand a little imbalance and still be healthy, but a badly balanced soil will grow puny plants susceptible to all sorts of disease and damage caused by insect pests.
Use only organically grown seeds and plants. They will be healthier with less care than hybrids, although some hybrids are bred to resist certain diseases. Unless you’re going to put in a huge monoculture field of tomatoes or beans, hybrids are overkill. Healthy plants will beat specialized plants any day.
Pests zero in on plants that are unhealthy or stressed, so make sure to water your garden consistently. Some plants need more water than others, so study up before you plant and put alike plants together to make it easier on yourself.
Study the plants you want to grow to make sure they’re in the right part of your garden. Some like it hot; some do not. Lettuce, spinach, radishes and the like will tolerate and even enjoy shade, especially in the heat of summer. Other things like tomatoes and peppers can stand the heat and the sunshine much better.
If your climate tends to make for extremely hot days, you can shade your plants with shade cloth or make your own shadows with cardboard or cloth, fixed any way you can devise, to keep the direct sun off the plants. A little extra water will be appreciated, too.
Pests won’t be welcome in a healthy, heartily growing garden. Even if a chunk is bitten out of a plant now and then, it will recover and you’ll hardly know anything happened.
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