Why a Vegetable Garden Needs Pests

Thank you to David The Good for the inspiration. Watch his video here: https://youtu.be/ACDwy4sVVZY?si=HSN7bTF_YAfd8jHr

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hello and a very warm welcome back to the Garden so last night I was on YouTube as I usually am and this video popped up by one of my absolute favorite gardeners David the good but he’s based in Florida but I love to kind of get different ideas and uh the he probably had the best introduction to a YouTube video that I’ve seen for a while but I don’t think David knows how important the top Toc is I well he does know that’s why he’s made a video about it but I don’t think the gardening Community knows just how important the topic is the title of this video was just let it die so this is already going to be quite an interesting one and what I’m going to do now is I’m going to I’m going to play the intro to that video um so you can kind of get a sense and then this is kind of going to be a little bit of a of a response to that and to absolutely back up exactly what David is saying a farmer once visited me and wandered through this grocery real Garden system and he said you don’t spray anything do you I laughed I said no I don’t I don’t spray anything and he said what do you do when you have pests what do you do to control pests I mean let’s say something is just eating a plant and it looks like it’s going to kill it what do you do and I told him I let it die now there’s so many things from the video that I would would like love to unpack and I might save it for another day but I do want to highlight a few of those things that I completely agree with and I also want to make sure that you watch that video because there’s a lot of fantastic things including land race varieties land race varieties are incredibly exciting for the prospect that they offer for producing uh resilient crops but I want to I want to just talk about balance a bit so in front of me here I have Fields beans I adore Fields beans and I’m looking at them now and you know there are these little beans starting to come get ready so I’m very excited for those but Fields beans broad beans F beans they have very often they can get green fly or black fly on the top so this plant here has no top because it had a bit of green fly on and I just pinched that out as a nice preventative measure for stopping the green fly from taking over on the top here I can see the there’s a little bit of green fly so I’m just pulling that off and the other ones are absolutely fine you can actually eat the tops of these which is very nice so this is balanced this is very minimal intervention it is one very simple thing that I need to do and just from this this whole plant is going to be protected from Green flight so that is where I’m very happy to go in and make a change or make an adjustment now over here I’ve got some more fi beans these are a little bit later on at the moment these have no green fly at all whatsoever but what I’m doing here this is like a really important part about gardening or about polyculture is to not put all of your eggs in one basket so I’m not growing all of my field beans together I’m grin them at slightly different stages it’s the same thing with tomatoes this here is a mountain magic tomato this is a actually quite a good blight resistant variety and so if you’re trying to create a garden that thrives you can actually be very clever with the type of varieties that you choose I don’t want things to kind of survive I want things to thrive and very often in the garden I will see something that at the moment I kind of keeping on top of it but if I see something that just doesn’t look happy I’m more than happy actually pulling it out and replacing it with something else and so at the moment there are these empty areas is but these have all been sewn up but I want to show you just another quick example of why kind of poly culture um is so important and not putting all of your eggs in one basket so in here I had quite a big bit of Goosey sfly and Goosey sfly is never fun I did very little about it because every year the plants always seem to come back I had the gooseb Harvest gooseb Harvest was nice but the goose s FL was here and in another location I want to show you how those gooseb are doing so here are our other gooseberries and there is not a single sign of goose spry SF I had the SF in the kitchen Garden around 4 weeks ago and so this is just like a perfect example of if you have a garden even if it’s a small garden you can split things up like I’ll often do a patch of garlic in one end and another patch elsewhere just to reduce the chances of a pest or disease obliterating the whole crop which is what happens when you have a monoculture which is why polyculture is so important but you know what I think is even more important than polyculture okay maybe not more important but i’ would say on the same Level Playing Field is that a garden needs pests so one of the most important things that David says in the video is about how he does encourage pests to be in the garden and I I I completely agree I I say a garden needs pest very often that will raise a few eyebrows when I’m giving a talk at a local gardening group or something but if there is no pests there is no food source or no incentive for the Predators to be there a garden is essentially I I’d like to treat it as its own little mini ecosystem that has a nice blurred line that that links in with the nature and and Wildlife life around the place and so I absolutely want pests in my garden because if I have pests in my garden I have a reason for the Predators to be in my garden as well nature is all about balance I always feel like the the to have like a thriving Garden you have to work with nature as much as possible that is one of the core proponents of permaculture and one of the things that I try and do to work with nature as much as possible is to then create the insect magnets like these kind of and bellice flowers to encourage Predator insects in like lace Wings hoverflies they love these kind of flowers and in the front of me here I’m planting up this border which soon in about a month is going to be covered with color so I’ve got uh Bergamot Korean mint agastache we’ve got yaros achilas uh Nigella Cosmos zenas Kula and of course I had to put a little tumbling Tom cherry tomato in but I’m creating this as like a beneficial insect border and magnet but all of these things here and things like this are edible as well so I I don’t need to sacrifice growing space to bring in the good guys I can also form a hybrid where I’m bringing in the good guys and I’m still producing food and flavor one thing that needs to be normalized are leaves that have little holes in them I have a few examples around here this Noster has a little hole in it I really if I see that I don’t care I just think oh some insect has enjoyed a little bit of nosto that’s fine I’m always on the lookout for when something’s going to like maybe absolutely take over like suddenly the nestum is getting completely stripped and that kind of leads into what is the role of pest and diseases in nature so in nature Pest and diseases there primar apart from things like rabbits or deer which will just is a whole different category but I’m talking about more of like the smaller insect based uh pests they are there to to kind of speed up the decomposition of weak plant so if a plant is really weak really suffering Pest and diseases will help break that back down into nutrients that can then hopefully Inspire something in the future to absolutely Thrive and so for me looking around like with the runner beans and the beetroots and seeing little holes in the leaves I’m totally fine with that one of the hardest skills I think I’ve had to learn regarding Pest and diseases is to actually be patient is is to recognize if there’s a problem but to kind of just closely monitor it and I would say in maybe 20% of scenarios I will actually end up taking action but in most cases nature just needs a little bit of time because there’s a it works in a dynamic equilibrium sometimes it takes a little bit of time for it to catch up and other times if it looks like it’s actually just going to be a total failure I’d much rather just accept the feat than trying to like use all sorts of natural organic sprays to like hope that it’s going to work when I could just plant something else in its place there’s an example here this Rose which was such a beautiful display just before all of the flowers started to pop I noticed every single flower head had probably about 20 aphids on across the whole roads and I was like there’s really not much I can do here I just left it about a week later every single one of those aphids I could see the remnants of the aphids were just dead uh they just just died and I had this beautiful profusion so I just want to give you a really practical way of encouraging beneficial insects into your garden and to create that polyculture feel and the way of doing it is by making sure that you have flowers throughout the garden so this little corner here this was the end of the leak bed I’ve left these leaks here to run to seed because wow do bees and butterflies love leak flowers and then along the base here i’ I’ve got lots of food I’ve got this fennel that is growing nicely this is tree spinach which has the most beautiful top and I also think is one of the tastiest leaves to eat raw I’ve got some half paint peas I’ve got this Nerium underneath and I’ve got some zenas so it’s just little this little kind of triangle of the bed I’ve dedicated to um to creating a bunch of color a bunch of interest and different flower species because diversity Works in so many ways a healthy garden is a diverse Garden but it’s not just diversity as in like you want some vegetables flowers and herbs you want diversity within those categories you want diversity of different flowers over for different flowering times and the lovely thing about herbs is that herbs also flow so that can be added into the mix now this is just a general approach or kind of my my my main attitude or philosophy when it comes to passing the garden like here I’ve got this pass niip that is now upsetting seeds but I use this as a way to attract insects and beneficial insects and I really feel like like if I if I spent less time roaring about all of the little holes and the leaves and this like odd plant here or there that might get obliterated by a pastor disease if I worry less about those and think about the bigger problems like this year for like so many gardeners around the UK slugs were such a massive problem I had to I had to replant these runner beans for example because of slugs but I know that those are a much bigger issue for me than aphids and so for me it’s about knowing where I’m dedicating the time what is like the 20% of pests the category that causes 80% of the damage this year has been slugs and so by not worrying about everything being quite hands off is given me the time to deal with the slug issue which is now being dealt with but it wasn’t fun to start with and you are going to get years where there is a boom of a certain population for example you might have a boom of Vols or you might have a boom of aphids and it’s about being willing to adapt and to respond to that that’s where you do make a nice big difference a thrive healthy kitchen garden needs pests for us to get the Predators but it also needs healthy soil you can watch this video here if you have a healthy soil that is the foundation of a thriving garden and this is kind of my non-nonsense approach to ensuring that my garden soil can be as healthy as possible for healthy plants and healthy plants also make healthy soil it is this beautiful circle of life