Organic Pest Control for Beginning Gardeners & Upcoming Garden Workshops

When I first started gardening,  I found pest control to be the most vexing of all challenges in the garden.  I've never been willing to spray my garden with pesticides so there were seasons when the bugs had a better harvest than my family. I remember coming in to the house one day and exclaiming "pests have no values!"  Really -- its true.  I was always willing to share with them, but they greedily took a bite out of every tomato.   Luckily, my good friend Leslie Kurtz (Kurtz and Sons Dairy) introduced me to the topic of organic pest control and helped ease my frustrations with those pesky pests. 
The principle of understanding nature is at the heart of all organic gardening. Your very first step in creating an organic pest control program is in understanding the nature of pests.
If you spot Colorado Potato Beetles on your plants, for example, try to interrupt their life cycle. Colorado potato beetles pupate in the soil during the winter and emerge in spring to mate and feed on host plants. The female lays about 2 dozen orange-yellow eggs on the underside of leaves for several days. She can lay up to 500 eggs in a months time! Larvae hatch and begin feeding on foliage about a week after eggs are laid. In 2-3 weeks, larvae return to the grown to burrow. They emerge as fully grown beetles in about 7 days. The adult beetle feeds on roots for several days before the female begins laying eggs and begins the cycle anew. The effects on your plants will be dramatic stunting of the plant and skeletonizing of the roots.

What's an organic gardener to do to stop this cycle? Be as aggressive as the beetle at every stage of their development!

-Dig trenches at a 45 deg. angle and line with black plastic between garden rows. This blocks the beetle's journey from the soil to the leaves. Beetles have difficulty navigating on an angle.
-Use floating row covers, such as Remay, to provide a physical barrier in early spring. I have found this method to be the most useful. You'll need to remove the barriers when it is time for your plants to pollinate.
-Inspect leaves for eggs when weather warms. (Be careful not to remove the eggs of beneficial insects.)
-Remove any plant debris that might provide cover for the beetles as they make their journey back down into the soil.
-Manually remove adult beetles.
-Encourage predatory insects by planting pollen and nectar host plants.
-Last resort: If the infestation is threatening the majority of your harvest, apply Neem or Pyola at the dilution rates specified for vegetable plants on the bottle.
Note: Container vegetable gardeners do not face as many challenges with pests as growers who garden in the ground. For more information about organic vegetable gardening, see my book: Container Gardening for Health: The 12 Most Important Fruits & Vegetable for Your Organic Garden.
The bottom line: Know your pests! Study the little scoundrels and get between them and your plants.
In my next blog, I'll cover organic prevention and control of disease in the garden.
For my local readers, I'll be giving a workshop on herbs at the Madison Garden Club on Saturday, March 13 at 11 AM. Then I'll be off to Borders Book Store in Gainesville to give a seed starting workshop/book signing at 4 P.M. It will be a busy day. Hope to see you some where along the way.