Pest Control & Companion Planting: Love your Bugs

Many people suffer from entomophobia - an irrational fear of insects.  Often, their first reaction is to recoil, or to stamp on them, or to reach for the spray can.  In fact, most bugs are not harmful at all and many are beneficial.  By not welcoming insects into our garden we are making a much harder job for ourselves.

Just a Little Story:  The very first street that that we lived in, when we first came to Sydney, was full of migrant families, like us, and lined with paperbark trees.  I was thrilled to see these exotic trees suddenly burst into nectar-heady flowering that set the whole street abuzzing. Next thing, the sound of sawing!  I rushed out to see my neighbour, and her very elderly mother, felling one of these trees on the nature strip outside their house.  When I threw up my arms and asked them why she replied - too many bees!!  They were not allergic to bee stings - just entomophobic.

This kind of flowering border will attract all kinds of beneficial insects.

Pests only become a genuine problem when there aren't enough predators to control them or if seasonal conditions cause a temporary plague.

So how do we make our patch a haven for good bugs and let nature do the work for us?

1.  Well-fed plants - preferably nourished with compost and good quality mulch - are much less pest or disease prone.  As always, the answer lies in the soil.

2.  Understanding plant families will make you a better gardener. For example, knowing that the cabbage white butterfly only attacks plants in the brassica family (cabbage, broccoli etc.) helps you to understand that mixing this family up with another has a double benefit:

• the critters will be confused and hopefully fly off somewhere else.
• plants from other families will be unaffected by this pest so you will always have some food to eat.
  
  Blended families - mixing up brassicas (broccoli,kale, Asian Greens) with strong smelling plants from other families - like fennel, garlic and leeks.

3.   By integrating flowering plants with vegetables and herbs you are copying the greatest teacher of them all - Nature.

FACT: The DPI (Department of Primary Industries) recently spent a day at our Community Garden in Mullumbimby looking to see whether a large integrated garden like that (i.e. everything all mixed up) had any impact on the insect populations.  
WHAT THEY FOUND - not only just about every beneficial insect you could think of but just about ZERO pests.

The Praying(or preying!) Mantid are useful because they are voracious generalist predators and are able to start consuming almost as soon as they hatch - so watch out aphids and potato beetles!

SO, WHO ARE THE GOOD GUYS? Ladybirds (but not the 26 spotted one, which is a significant pest), dragonflies, damselfly, earthworms, earwigs, lacewings, robber flies, tachinid flies, mantids, springtails, wasps, chalcids, hover flies, leopard slugs, mole crickets, centipedes, millipedes, spiders.  And these are just the insects - don't forget about creating a safe, inviting habitat for birds and lizards.

"Birds eat approximately 40% of garden pests.  It clearly pays to encourage birds"

Jackie French 'The Best of Jackie French'.  My mate Maggie would agree with her - she's never short of a feed in my garden.

HOW TO DESIGN A HEALTHY GARDEN? Go to my previous posts Kitchen Gardens: Top Tips for Getting Started and April in the Garden: Autumn Planting.

FACT: About 80% of caterpillars in Australia never make it to adulthood, thanks to native parasatoid tachinid flies (Source ABC Gardening's Jerry Coleby Williams from Dr. Tim Heard CSIRO entomologist)

WHAT SHOULD YOU PLANT TO ENCOURAGE BENEFICIAL INSECTS: Brightly coloured flowers with prominent stamens - like cosmos, dill, parsley, zinnias, echinacea, gaura, borage, dahlia, basil, cleome, flowering bok choy, marigolds.  Don't forget that all of these will also encourage pollinators for your fruit and vegetables.

Dill in flower - with friend!

JUST ANOTHER LITTLE STORY:  We used to run an environmental pest control company in Sydney - specializing in the novel ideas of education and biological control - so entomophobes were our bread and butter.  I vividly remember an hysterical  woman ringing up one day who had seen a blue tongue lizard in her garden and was screaming at me to 'just come round and kill it' - little realizing that this harmless creature was performing a useful job by keeping down the slugs, snails and cockroaches etc.  So don't forget that lizards are your friends too - they just need a safe place to bed down for the night.

I used to have lots of lizards in my garden before the neighbours got free-roaming cats.

A little pest damage doesn't do real harm to a garden - but the dill with the spray can full of pesticides does.  As Confucius said 'The Wise Man Does Nothing'

April in the Garden: autumn planting

April in Mullumbimby

First, just a little bit about design.

The day before Good Friday and the comforting smell of a batch of hot cross buns cooking in the oven fills the house. 

The weather is getting cooler, daylight saving is over, the rain has stopped and it's time to get out in the garden.  It's the beginning of the most productive time of the year in the vegetable garden that stretches from now until November.

NOTE:  Although, it will probably start raining again tomorrow morning because the Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival is on and it always does.  The raincoat and rubber boot people make a fortune.

MAKING USE OF SPACE
(Or how to have a Cottage Garden without really trying)

• If you are lucky enough to be free of vegie garden BIG pests like wallabies, brush turkeys, rabbits, dogs, possums etc you can integrate your food plants throughout the garden beds without fenced protection and create a lovely natural feel to your food, herb and flower garden.
• The denser the planting the less weeding you have to do.
• Regular organic feeding and mulching pays great rewards.

WHAT IS IN THIS BED (starting with foreground and moving back)

• Gardenia 'Florida'
• Dhalia, burgundy pompon (unknown name - gift)
• Cosmos, pink, self-seeded
• Oregano, golden
• Tamarillo
• Turmeric
• French tarragon, yellow
• Sorrel
• Gaura
• Parsley, flat-leaf
• Iris, blue, winter-flowering
• Yacon
• Salvia,purple perennial
• Lemon verbena

ENCOURAGING WILDLIFE

I woke about 6am the other morning to a metallic tap-taping sound and thought "crikey, someone's up early", promptly turned over and went back to sleep.  A little later in the day I heard a repeated thumping on the roof, and then I saw the tail of this magnificent fellow hanging over the edge that he/she was banging it on the guttering!  The tap-tapping went on all day too.

This is the Pheasant Coucal, a marvellously brown bird that looks like it has been dusted with cocoa.  Then I remembered that I had seen them around (they always seem to be alone) about this time last year either scurrying across the lawn, dragging its tail, or dodging cars on the country roads.  They make the metallic tapping sound plus a loud oop-oop-oop that starts very early in the morning!

It's a ground-dwelling bird native to Asia and the northern parts of Australia and feeds off small mammals, frogs, lizards and eggs etc.  Boy was I happy to see this one because over the next few days it kept me entertained with it's flamboyant behaviour while feasting on the grasshoppers and locusts that were devastating my vegies.

Baby coucal (photo from web, unknown source)

Late one afternoon I heard a racket coming from this clump of bushes then the coucal emerged followed by what I can only describe as a little, brown, fluffy Ewok - it had a baby and was nesting in this undergrowth (check out the hair-do!). I was not quick enough for a photo.  Mine was a little larger than the one in this photo and had a black 'party wig' instead of this white one and a wonderful waddle when its scurried across the lawn behind parent.  Please show this to any of your neighbours (including mine!) who let their cats roam/leave them out at night/have an inordinate amount of concern for domestic pets and seemingly none for native wildlife.  Sorry, but I have just found my box of beautiful lettuce scratched up with a pile of cat poo where once were nurtured salad leaves-grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Dense shrubby planting in parts of your garden will encourage the ground dwelling birds, like wrens, silvereyes and finches who, once common, are now becoming rare sightings.

WHAT IS IN THIS BED? (from left to right and then back)

• Bauhinia galpinii, orange
• Heliotrope sp.Cherry Pie
• Helichrysum tomentosum, silver
• Fine leaved grevilliea, pink, local (unknown species, gift)
• Megaskepasma erythroclamys, red (try saying this without your teeth in!)
• Tibouchina granulosa

Seed Saving - harvesting bok choy seeds

WHAT TO PLANT IN APRIL?

• Broccoli
• Broad Beans
• Brussels sprouts (take eight weeks to mature before picking)
• Bok choy and other Asian greens
• Bush Basil
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Chard
• Coriander
• Garlic
• Kangkung/water spinach
• Leeks (they take ten weeks from seed to planting out)
• Lettuce
• Mustard Greens
• Onions
• Parsley
• Peas
• Potato
• Rocket
• Rhubarb
• Spinach
• Strawberries (prefer a patch to themselves as they spread)
• Tomato (in sunny, north facing spot)
• Watercress

NOTE:  As much as you can SAVE YOUR OWN SEEDS or SWAP with others GROWN LOCALLY


Footnote:  We were with some friends in our local fabulous pizza place, Milk & Honey and got chatting to the nice young guys on the table next to us.  The conversation turned to dogs.  They said they had two huskies.  My border collie owning friend asked if they were hard to maintain and keep groomed in our climate.  Here is their reply.  "Not really, we have an air-conditioned room for them and when the weather gets too hot here in January we take them to Queenstown in New Zealand for a month"

Pest Control & Companion Planting: Cabbage White Butterfly

The problem with being on holiday in springtime is that I am thinking about the garden the whole time - if you didn't know it by now I am telling you, gardeners are obsessive!  I don't know if you have noticed but gardeners never sit in their gardens - they are always doing something.  No sooner so I sit down with a cup of tea and a the paper and I am up; pulling out that weed, marvelling at something that has just begun to flower, harvesting beans that need picking and pulling off caterpillars.  In fact, that was the first thing I did when I returned from my holiday - walked out into the garden and did a health inspection.  Because, after all - early intervention often saves a whole crop of food.  The rest of it can wait; dead-heading flowers, pruning shrubs, weeding, mulching, mowing - unimportant compared with my food plants.  Mostly everything looked pretty healthy apart from these!

Caterpillar of the cabbage white butterfly

WHAT: I only had to look at my kale plants to see that they were being devastated by the caterpillar of the cabbage white butterfly.  Tell-tale holes, munching of the new growth and it didn't take long before I spotted those well-fed green culprits camouflaged along the mid-rib of the leaves.  

I  turned over a few leaves and saw the little patchwork clumps of eggs waiting to hatch out into the damaging caterpillar stage.

Look for clumps of eggs on the underside of the leaves.  These were on my kale plants and are already hatching out into the damaging caterpillar stage

WHO: The adult cabbage white butterfly(c.w.b.) is a small creamy/white butterfly with two black spots on it's wings and it is only interested in plants in the brassica(cabbage) family.  This is where an understanding of vegetable families, and companion planting is going to make you a better gardener.  

HOW:  The cabbage white butterfly is not attracted to any plant that is not in the brassica family.  So what do smart gardeners do?  They interplant with those from another family because the c.w.b. will leave those alone. They may be so confused that they don't even settle on your brassica plants and fly off to someone else's garden where they have conveniently planted their cabbages in neat rows!!  (Does nature ever do that?)

Understanding how your garden works is a lot about observation.  Follow a c.w.b. around the garden and see that it has to land three times on a brassica plant before it settles and starts to lay it's eggs.  If it is confused by other plants of a different smell, size, shape, flower - it will head off somewhere else - this is what companion planting is all about.

What do you notice about the beetroot leaves in the above photo - not one munch hole - that is because beetroot is in a different family (chenopidaceae) - it is not a brassica so the c.w.b. will leave it alone.  In fact most of the plants in this family are pretty pest free - this is a good reason to interplant them among your brassicas - it helps confuse the c.w.b., assists with passive crop rotation and means that you always have something to eat.  Let's start with these two families and watch the whole companion planting story unfold from here!

BRASSICACEAE:  cabbage, broccoli, kale, radish, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, rocket, swede, turnip, bok choy, chum soy, mustard greens.  (You will notice that the stronger smelling and hairiest of these almost never get attacked by the c.w.b. i.e. mustard greens, radish and rocket)
CHENOPIDACEAE:  beetroot, spinach, silver beet, chard, sorrel, amaranth, quinoa.

Being cabbages.  Students at a workshop in Bali role playing the cabbage white butterfly and companion planting story. Who said gardening was boring?

• Control of the cabbage white butterfly:  Try fooling the butterfly by placing pieces of eggshell  around the garden (the theory is that they will think that there is already a butterfly there and fly off). 
• Interplant with lots of strong smelling herbs like basil, fennel, parsley, dill and tall flowers like cosmos, zinnia and marigolds - this creates confusion to the c.w.b.  When they flower they have the added benefit of encouraging beneficial insects that wants to do a lot of the work for you.  Do this first - don't reach for the spray can because you will be killing off the goodies too!
• Make your garden a safe haven for their natural predators - birds and lizards - and don't keep domestic pets that will scare them off.  I have an opportunist magpie that follows me around the garden waiting for me to pick off any caterpillars I find.  Provide areas of ground-hugging shrubbery and lots of shallow bird baths to encourage them.
• Last resort-spray with Dipel. This is a bascillus that only affects the gut of caterpillars and is safe to use for organic gardeners.

MOST GARDEN PEST CONTROL IS UNNECESSARY - some cause more problems than they solve - be patient - let's grow things, not kill them.

Holiday reading - gardening magazines!