They Garden Best Who Garden Least

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I have found corn stalks hanging around in the compost pile not completely decomposed when I'm looking for some nice potting material. I have decided that the best place for the corn stalks is right where they grew. They took something from the soil during the growing season. Why not leave them where they grew so they can replace much of what they removed? So how is it that I leave the corn stalks in the garden over winter and through the spring until they either get turned under the soil or covered with mulch and yet have no trouble with corn borers? I've been doing it for too many years for it to be just luck.

I think the reason is that I make sure the corn has a healthy soil in which to grow. I think it is because insects that eat plants prefer unhealthy plants to healthy ones. That is certainly the case with insects' taste in animals. "Bugs and people have dissimilar appetites, as can be seen elsewhere on the homestead. It is the weak, underfed, rough-coated calves—and not the suckling, fat, smooth-coated ones—that are eaten up with lice.

A weak, sickly hen in the flock will always carry most of the lice. Trees weakened by drought, leaky gas mains, or loss of roots due to excavation are more heavily attacked by borers than nearby healthy trees of the same kind. Cinch bugs tend to collect and breed more heavily on corn or wheat up on an eroded slope rather than down at the foot of the slope where eroded soil minerals and organic matter pile up to enrich the soil."

(Organic Plant Protection, edited by Roger B. Yepsen, Jr., Rodale Press) Someone visiting my garden once asked if I could show them what a Colorado potato beetle looked like. I was having a better-than-usual year with the potato bugs so I wasn't sure I could show her what they looked like. I looked down the row and saw one plant that was smaller than the others. It was struggling. Believing that to be the most likely plant to have collected potato beetles, I went to it and, sure enough, on the undersides of the leaves there were three yellow egg clusters that would soon hatch into those brick-red grubs potato growers know so well. After she left I checked all of the plants and found only three or four additional egg clusters.

I read a study, I believe at the University of Missouri, in which corn was grown in adjacent plots with various nutrient imbalances. Corn borers attacked the plants with the unbalanced diets and for the most part left alone the plants that were properly nourished. My approach to insect damage is that the insects are trying to tell me something. If a crop is destroyed, I figure the insects are protecting me from eating an inferior food. I try to figure out why the plant was stressed and thus attractive to insects. This philosophy is difficult for some to embrace. All I can tell you is that it has been my guide for over 20 years of gardening and I have never felt that it led me in the wrong direction. As far as preparing the garden for the winter then, I am simply not concerned with any insect pests that may find winter cover in my garden. I have yet another reason for not cleaning up and tilling the garden in the fall. Not only is the soil life left exposed but the soil itself is made vulnerable.

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