Cornerstones of my Kitchen Garden No.5
There’s nothing more potent than vigilance!
Welcome to the final instalment of my Kitchen Garden Cornerstones series. You may have been wondering why I’m sharing all this ‘veg growing info’ now? The answer: Because it’s winter! Winter is a great time, actually the perfect time, to put those little grey cells to good use and plan your vegetable growing for next year.
Planning in winter means you can order your seeds and crack on in spring, the perfect season for creating a garden from scratch, or preparing that little bit of room you’d earmarked for those first tentative steps into growing your own food. Now’s the time! So stop twiddling those thumbs and looking morosely out of the rain-drenched window… Get planning! If you missed the earlier posts, you can start right here 👇
Cornerstones of my kitchen garden No.1
Welcome to a brand new series all about my Kitchen Garden and how to grow gorgeous, tasty, healthy, organic vegetables. It’s easier than you might imagine. Autumn and Spring are perfect times to begin a new garden. We’re starting from scratch, clearing a derelict space, making it ready for veggies!
Defending your patch
And now we come to it at last… the doom of our time! Ok, that may be just a little overdramatic, but when those unwelcome veg-munching visitors arrive, it can feel like an onslaught and everything is a battle. Don’t be deterred!
With a few slow breaths, plenty of well-aimed expletives, then calmly realising that a few nibbled leaves is not a calamity, you can take stock and act. Below you’ll find all the practical steps I take when certain interested parties arrive to gorge on my veggies. Many of them are pre-emptive! It’s not a definitive list by any means, but these are the primary antagonists in my garden.
A multi-pronged approach
Sadly, there’s no one magic bullet that’ll safeguard your crops and harvests. We all wish there was! There is, however, a highly effective, yet very simple approach available to all of us. It’s not expensive. It’s not miraculous. It’s not sensational.
But it works!
My primary tools are Vigilance & Attentiveness. The only products I use are row covers and nematodes. Combine all these with the occasional nocturnal foray for slugs and snails and I have practically all bases covered. I go into more detail on these in the previous post (no.4).
Yawn if you like, I know they’re not thrilling ‘game-changers’, but the results speak for themselves. I have a stress free, highly productive, healthy, kitchen garden, with only the odd minor mishap. Those mishaps only occur when I am… let’s just say ‘unwell’. I am bipolar and have periodic depressive episodes. As a result, I may be absent from the garden for a few weeks and it’s only then that problems may develop. More on that in a future post!
Vigilance is arguably the most powerful tool in an organic growers arsenal. Be ‘present’ in the vegetable garden and you will spot issues early enough to intervene. Be timely in your actions and you’ll prevent the vast majority of problems from developing at all.
If you expect to be able to wander into a productive patch after a month and assume ‘everything will be fine!’, you’re going to be really disappointed. Your garden is subject to the same laws of nature as everyone else’s. There will be pests. There will be diseases. However, almost all problems in the vegetable garden can boil down to neglect and tardiness. Remember the age old idioms!
“Nip it in the bud!”
”One year's seeding makes seven years' weeding!”
”Reap what you sow!”
”So, suck it up, buttercup!” (Hah! That one’s from my lifting coach 💪)
Timely interventions…
Throughout the growing season there are opportune moments that you must seize. They can make a huge difference in mitigating damage and losses from either pest or disease. This is where vigilance and attentiveness pays dividends. Let’s tackle them, one-by-one…
Reducing the impact of slugs and snails
When you’re pottering in the veg garden, doing a little weeding or harvesting, make sure you tidy-up the leaves of your crops. If you have brassica leaves that are yellowing and lying on the soil, these will attract slugs and snails by the barrow-load. Same for all yellowing leaves. Yellowed leaves are no longer photosynthesising and are doing nothing to aid the plant, so remove them.
The initial stress or decay of a leaf acts like a homing beacon for those slimy soil-dwellers. The vast majority of slugs (80% of UK species) only feast on decaying matter and they’re actually beneficial. BUT! If they happen to lay their eggs nearby, those baby slugs are ravenous! You’ve seen those little black ones, I’m sure. They will eat any and all vegetable matter. So, by removing the leaves, you’re removing both the attraction and any cover, at the same time.
The same goes for any logs, wooden boards, pavers, bricks, long grass and weeds… If they’re close to the veg beds, they will harbour slugs and snails. So keep the immediate area tidy. It’s also a good idea to regularly trim or mow any vegetation edging your veg beds, reducing potential cover wherever you can.
Reducing the impact of fungal diseases
Rust on garlic and leeks can be stalled simply by removing infected leaves promptly, thereby halting its progress through your crop. Try not to let it fester and spread. I found that row covers can help. I don’t know how or why, but any leeks or garlic under VeggieMesh® row covers have significantly less rust. It’s definitely worth a try! Mesh will also keep out Leek Moths too.
Powdery mildew on the leaves of squashes, courgettes and cucumbers can be limited by cutting off the infected leaves, but at the same time, realise that it’s also a symptom of thirst, so give those crops a good watering! With cucumbers, it can also herald the end of the plant’s lifespan. If there’s mould later in the season and you’ve already had a good crop, it could be just the plant dying off. As winter squashes ripen in the late summer / early autumn sun, the foliage tends to yellow and succumb to mould. Again, perfectly natural and there’s no need to stress.
Tomato blight can be slowed dramatically by pruning off infected leaves and stems. Early! As soon as you spot it! With tomatoes, prune off the entire leaf or leaves. Ensure your pruning blades are kept clean, so you don’t spread the infection. (I carry a Tupperware pot, half-filled with weak dilution of bleach and dishwashing liquid, to dip the blades in between cuts.) Removing the leaves may give you an extra week or two, possibly longer. However, if you see black marks on the stem, time is rapidly running out. Harvest what you can, while you can!
Potato blight seems to spread more rapidly, blackening leaves and quickly travelling down the stem, reducing those lush green plants to a smelly rotting heap. You must act quickly. If you assume ‘it’ll be ok’ or think ‘I’ll get to it later’ you may lose your entire crop. Potatoes infected with blight are inedible. There’s no need to risk it either. Potatoes can be lifted early and you’ll still have delicious spuds, just a little smaller. I’ll take that compromise any day!
All these leaves - rust, mould, blight - can be thrown on the compost heap. These ‘fungal diseases’ do not survive the heat and microbial process of a compost heap. Fungal diseases can survive as spores on any leaves and detritus left on the ground, so be rigorous in your tidy-up! However, they’re not indestructible. They will not persists beyond a good hot composting.
I’ve composted all vegetative material over the past four years and it has made no difference whether diseases arrive or not. It’s more climate and weather dependent. Remember, these are fungal diseases and spread via microscopic spores. You could keep the most pristine, hygienic garden and spores will just blow in anyway!
Or arrive on the feet of countless winged-insects!
Reducing the impact of caterpillars
The notorious ‘cabbage white’ caterpillars are rapacious little so and so’s. Probably right up there with slugs and snails as the gardener’s least favourite inhabitant of the veg patch. Capable of reducing their favoured brassicas to shreds and tatters, seemingly overnight. But it’s not overnight at all, is it? They’ve probably been there a week at least… Consider this:
It takes about four weeks for a cabbage white caterpillar to become a butterfly. The eggs hatch after about 14 days. The caterpillars quickly munch through your crops and rapidly grow in size, before leaving to find a place to pupate, such as a fence or nearby bush. The pupation stage typically lasts 15 to 18 days, so the caterpillars have sat there munching away for roughly 10 days?!
With just a few minutes to spare, you could inspect your crops and remove the caterpillars as soon as you spot them. They never travel very far. They cluster together, so they’re relatively easy to spot, even when tiny. Remove them to your bird table and your garden birds will love you for it!
Better still, cover your crops with something like a VeggieMesh® row cover and prevent butterflies from laying their eggs in the first place. If you hate the look of covers, try Bacillus thuringiensis, a highly targeted and ‘organic farming approved’ biological control. There’s more detail on this in the previous instalment 👇
Cornerstones of my Kitchen Garden No.4
The one incontrovertible truth in a gardener’s life: There will always be other creatures eating your crops! Unless you’re growing in a hermetically sealed bubble, this has to be expected. It is the real baseline! If you stress over every little nibble and blemish, you’re in for a rough ride. Lower your expectations. Leave your ego indoors. Leave ideas …
At the very least, plant Nasturtiums nearby. To the cabbage white butterfly, nasturtiums are even more alluring than cabbages and that’s saying something! I plant nasturtiums amongst various crops, primarily for bees and other pollinators (bumblebees absolutely love them), but also as ‘sacrificial plants’.
I usually spot a few caterpillars on my lettuces, but when you look at the nasturtiums, they are literally heaving. The entire plant is crawling! Hundreds and hundreds! Obviously, the nasturtiums are shredded to stalks. So, I cut off each plant at soil level and put the whole thing on the ‘long’ compost heap - leaving the caterpillars to wriggle away and eat the vegetation on the bank. No harm done. Quick. Easy. I then plant more nasturtiums.
Reducing the impact of carrot flies
The carrot fly comes in two waves. Overwintered pupae hatch in spring and adults are on the wing from April to June. They lay their eggs on the soil, near your carrots. The eggs hatch and the larvae wriggle their way downward and burrow into the swelling carrot root, leaving those telltale blackened grooves and bore marks as they go. They then pupate and hatch, with a second wave of adults abroad in July through August.
However, those adult carrot flies are really lazy fliers! By all accounts, rarely rising above 60cm (2ft) off the ground. So, you could avoid them altogether by growing carrots out of reach, sowing carrots in deep pots and putting them on a table. Or use something like a VegTrug, just for your carrots.
Evidently, the thing that lures in the adults is the ‘smell’ of carrot. When you’re weeding the carrots, or thinning them out, the damage to the leaves is filling the air with carroty scent! As tempting as it is to sow thousands of tiny seeds, if you sow relatively thinly to begin with, then there is less need to thin them out. You could also leave them to grow, like I do. Then any later ‘thinnings’ are removed and savoured as super-sweet baby carrots! Yum!!!
I’ve read all sort of miraculous planting combinations to ‘confuse’ the carrot fly: Plant carrots with garlic as the smell confuses them; Plant carrots with herbs because the smells confuse them; etc. Feel free to try them, but if you really want to be sure, cover your carrots with a VeggieMesh®, or something similar.
Cover them from the very day you sow them. And keep them covered! They’ll be spared the unsightly blemishes. I know they may look nasty, but most of the damage is only skin-deep and can be easily removed with a speed peeler.
Always remember, you’re growing food not perfection. It really does save a lot of stress.
Reducing the impact of black bean aphid (blackfly)
If you’re growing broad (fava) beans, you might spot the arrival of sap-sucking blackly (aphids). If you spot them early, you can either scrape them off with a gloved finger and thumb or blast them off with a hose. Easy!
They commonly arrive well into the growing season when the bean plant has already set flowers and forming the first pods. So another easy option is to prune off the lush growing tips, removing the aphid’s landing pad and favourite ‘sucking’ point in one fell swoop.
If you can tolerate the aphids, please try. Aphids may deform a few pods, but broad beans are prolific croppers, especially ‘Aquadulce’ (besides you’ll be sick of eating them soon enough!). Left to her own devices, nature will take its course and the cavalry will arrive in the form of ladybirds and lacewings, then their voracious larvae will gorge through the rest.
Parasitics wasps, earwigs, wrens, robins, blue tits and great tits, all predate on aphids. Let’s not forget swifts, swallows, and house martins that hoover them up on the wing.
As tempting as it is, if you remove all the aphids early in the season, you remove all the reasons for all those aphid predators to remain. Then, as the aphids inevitably multiply in summer, there’ll be fewer predators to eat them all. That’s when the aphid infestation becomes a more serious issue… and all because of an impatient gardener. It begins a viscous cycle, leading many gardeners to reach for the toxic chemicals, that in turn only exacerbates the problem.
Reducing the tiny impact of ants
Garden ants only appear to be a pest. Yes, they can excavate the soil in your beds and disturb plant roots on a minimal scale. However, if you look closer, you’ll notice that ants really love the dry soil! So you can use ants as a moisture-gauge.
My raised beds almost dried out in a summer heatwave and the ants moved in immediately. They were everywhere! But, with regular watering, they simply moved out again. No need for wholesale slaughter with boiling water. No need to add detergent to kill them all. Just regular watering. No fuss. No drama.
Just the way we like it!
Coming up…
Gardener, know thyself! As winter ticks by, it’s the perfect time for planning a new garden and this next post is all about those consideration and pitfalls you need to take into account, especially, if you’re designing the garden yourself!