They Garden Best Who Garden Least

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Well, I look upon the garden as a living entity. It is many living things, the insects just mentioned being a small part of this community of life. The insects that call attention to themselves in our gardens because they eat the same things we want to eat are actually in the minority.

Cynthia Westcott, in The Gardener's Bug Book (Doubleday), reports an estimate of about 10 percent of all insects as potential problems to agriculture. Most are benign and a few are decidedly beneficial, most notably lady bugs. Considering that ratio, wouldn't it make more sense to treat the garden as a residence of good life? When we pull the plants and till to disturb the habitat for some of the insects that feed on garden crops, aren't we also disturbing the habitat for many of the insects that are not a problem? I argue that the benign insects are actually beneficial. Many are converting organic materials to plant nutrients.

Each one of them becomes fertilizer when it dies. What organic gardener can help but smile when watching a flycatcher like the eastern kingbird fill up on flying insects from a perch on the bean pole and then convert dinner into fertilizer neatly deposited at the base of the pole, where rain will take the nutrients thus gathered down to the root zone? When I look at my garden as a living community

I see a community that is in balance, everybody going about their job: the earthworms working at aerating and fertilizing the soil; billions of microorganisms working symbiotically with the plant roots, binding loose soil together and breaking tight soil apart, decomposing organic matter into nutrients, and doing jobs that we may not even understand; 90 percent of the insects in the garden doing who-knows-what in that complex community; and the plants themselves sending roots deep and bringing minerals to the surface, spreading their roots to hold the soil in place, providing good living conditions for other creatures. How can I think of churning that all up just before the ground freezes? It seems to me that would be devastating to that wonderful community.

Think about a tornado or hurricane devastating your town just before the onset of winter. A cruel trick, wouldn't you say? That isn't the only reason I rule out cleaning and tilling the garden in the fall. If you clear the corn stalks out of the garden, you are removing a considerable amount of organic material. Seems kinda silly to me to cart organic material away from the garden in the fall and then haul in some other organic material in the spring. I could, as I have done in past years, compost the corn stalks. If I get the compost pile hot enough it will kill any insects. I'm not the best composter in the world so I seldom get the pile really cooking.

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