Grow Your Own
(Page 5 of 13)
May/June 1970
By Jeanie Darlington
By January 30, I had already made a crude cold frame for starting seedlings and I had cut the grass once. The rains were warm and my fingers were itching.
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A few weeks later, I was digging manure and lots of compost into the vegetable garden and flower border gardens. The vegetable patch looked pretty good although it still needed plenty more organic matter. It was a vast improvement over last year's clay patch.
On February 14, I planted some snow pea seeds. The snails ate them all when they were one inch high. The snails were really thick, due to a very wet winter. But I planted some more seeds and devised a cheese-cloth cover. Soon after, my beets, carrots and parsley seeds went in. As the weather warmed up, I started a lot of seeds in peat pots for the cold frame.
Meanwhile I had been thinking about how I could try to restore the ecological balance in the backyard. The birds had come back and were already busy eating lots of insects on the fruit tree branches. One night while out snail hunting, I encountered a lizard. It scared the wits out of me, until I remembered that they ate slugs. And I knew I could order lady bugs and praying mantis egg cases.
In this case, when I speak of "restoring the ecological balance," I mean that I wanted to cut down on the plant eating bugs without resorting to bug sprays. To do that, you invite certain predatory, carnivorous insects into your garden, such as ladybugs and mantids. This is a little hard in a small backyard, because a neighbor's spray program could defeat the effort. But it was worth a try and it only cost me $4.00. The lady bugs and mantids arrived in early April. After eating their fill of aphids, the lady bugs mated, layed eggs and died because it was the end of their life cycle. By the end of May, the baby mantids had hatched and the new ladybugs had come out of their larvae stage.
The lady bugs ate aphids, mealybugs, scale and many other tiny insects. There were plenty of them around. We never did figure out exactly what the mantids ate, but they looked fat and well fed and were very tame. I only saw one or two Mexican bean beetles, and it is said that mantids like them. All I know is that my bean leaves weren't eaten to a lacey remain of veins like they were the year before. And every once in a while, little pint-sized birds would hop amongst the rose bushes and gobble all the aphids off each new shoot.
The peas grew 6 feet high, despite the fact they were dwarf grey sugar peas (2 and 1/2 feet maximum said the package). We were eating them from the middle of May through the end of June. Beets and carrots soon followed. Then broccoli and chard; italian and Kentucky Wonder beans; white corn, artichokes, zuccini, greyzini, italian cocozelle; oak leaf and ruby lettuce; escarole and endive; shallots, onions and leeks; and finally Spring Giant, Pearson and yellow pear tomatoes. The tomatoes ripened very late, but that was because I had rotated the crop from last year's spot and it wasn't as hot and sunny in the new place. Now I know that rotation isn't really necessary as long as you replenish the organic matter in the soil. The soil bacteria working on the humus will destroy any disease organisms connected with tomatoes if they are there.
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