March 11 Column: Organic Gardening

In today’s garden column, I talk about organic gardening. This is something that is very easy to do by using good cultural practices. Here is a link to it in The Spokesman-Review: Investigate different ways to control pests.

By the way, I hope you’re not getting tired of hearing about floating row cover! I think it is such a great tool, whether used for season extension or as a physical barrier to keep certain damaging insects away from the more susceptible crops I grow.

I do want to emphasize that I only need to use it for a) beet family crops (beets, spinach and Swiss chard) to keep the leaf miner adults from laying eggs on the plants’ leaves, and b) cabbage family crops (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, etc.) to keep aphids from getting on the plants and cabbage butterflies from laying eggs on the leaves. Those are really the only troublesome insects I deal with in my garden. Note that NONE of these crops require pollination so they can be covered for the entire season.

An alternative cover I use over cabbage family crops is tulle, which is more commonly known as bridal veil netting (see photo at left). You can find it at fabric stores and it comes in wide widths. What I’ve found is the tight mesh keeps insects away from those crops, but because it’s more “open” than floating row cover, it provides more air circulation for these cool-season crops as well as allows me to better see what’s going on in that bed, just in case there’s a slug problem starting up or something else along those lines. I heartily recommend it, and am so glad my friend Jane mentioned it to me several years ago!

Also, remember that I created an Organic Pest Control guide on this website, under the Guides menu. That has a lot of information on dealing with pests without resorting to the use of chemicals.

This week’s video is also about organic gardening, in order to further clarify how easy it is to garden without chemicals:

In my video, I referred to my “weed strategies” video from last summer. It’s packed with ideas for preventing and dealing with those pesky weeds. Here it is:

If you’re curious about the colorful plants in the photo at the very top, those are ‘Bright Lights’ Swiss chard. They are so pretty and so tasty. And they definitely need to be covered with floating row cover during the whole season because of those pesky leaf miners.

I hope you are enjoying the columns and videos so far. I have a lot of useful topics planned for the entire season!