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Earth Friendly Gardening Ideas
by Michael J. McGroarty
When you think of gardening do you think of bugs, weeds, disease, and animals ruining your best gardening efforts?
Sometimes gardening can be a challenge. It seems that there is a significant amount of competition for the crops we produce.
A nicely tilled bed is a haven for weed seeds, and many of the plants we produce are nice and tasty to both insects and animals.
For years the easy solution was to grab a chemical off the shelve and just start spraying away.
Today, we have all become more conscious and appreciative of our environment, and think twice about the chemicals we use.
In this article, well explore some of the options we have when dealing with garden pests.
An easy way to control weed growth in a new garden is to till the garden as often as possible before planting. This disturbs any existing weeds and roots, and brings them to the surface where they will dry out and no longer be viable. Doing this for a period of a 10 days to two weeks before planting is very effective.
Then once the planting is done, you can spread newspaper, about 8 pages thick over the entire area, and mulch over that.
This will keep the weed seed in the soil from germinating. Of course some weeds will eventually grow in the mulch, but you can pull them as they appear, or spray them with an organic weed killer.
One such weed killer is a product called, Burnout Weed Killer, marketed by St. Gabriel Laboratories, a manufacture of natural lawn and garden products. Burnout Weed Killer is said to be effective. Especially if applied to young weeds as they emerge. Older and more established weeds might need a second application to kill the top and the roots.
Burnout Weed Killer is made with vinegar, lemon juice and other safe ingredients according to the manufacture.
Another common pest in our gardens are Japanese Beetles.
These hungry little critters do double damage. Some of the damage is immediately obviously, like when they eat all the leaves off your favorite rose bush. But they also lay eggs in our lawns, and these eggs hatch into larva that feed on the roots of our grass.
An abundant concentration of Japanese Beetle larva in your lawn can destroy a lawn before you realize you have a problem. Then they hatch into beetles, and the beetles eat your plants, lay more eggs, and the process starts over, except now it is multiplied because an adult Japanese Beetle will lay thousands of eggs.
Next year those thousands reproduce. Scary isn't it?
A telltale sign that you have a Japanese Beetle problem in your lawn is the presence of moles, gophers and skunks digging up your lawn. Apparently these grubs are tasty little guys and girls, and somewhat of a delicacy to the varmints mentioned above.
So to really solve this problem, you have to rid your lawn of the grubs that keep the cycle working. An effective organic control is a product called Milky Spore. Milky Spore actually is a spore, that is only harmful to Japanese Beetle grubs. You treat your lawn with this powder, the grubs consume it and die, then their carcasses also help to spread the spore throughout your lawn area.
To fully understand how all this works go to my web site, http://www.freeplants.com, and look for the article "How to Keep Moles, Skunks, and other Critters from Digging Up Your Lawn" in the table of contents.
Then there are the other creepy crawly kinds of insects that eat our landscape plants and vegetables. These include everything from ants and aphids to beetles and caterpillars.
There are insect killers available on the market that are made of natural lemon products. These are said to work, and they are safe to use. Of course always read the labels very carefully.
What about your lawn? Can you have a nice green plush lawn without the use of commercial chemicals? Sure you can!
There are all natural fertilizers available that can actually work better than chemicals.
Most chemical lawn fertilizers give your lawn a quick blast of artificially produced nitrogen, and this gives your lawn one option, and only one option. Grow like crazy and turn green.
The lawn looks great, but deep down inside it's like a rock star on cocaine. Or a country star, I don't want to offend anybody here, and just like when human beings do drugs, your lawn gets tired and burned out.
Giving your lawn a nice even dose of an all organic fertilizer is like giving your kids lots of fruits and vegetables. The lawn just feels better all over, and it will grown nice and green and healthy.
It's a slower process, especially if you've been using harsh chemicals, because it will take the soil some time to rebuild all the micro-organisms and other good stuff in the soil that the chemicals kill.
What else can you as an individual do to help save the earth from harsh gardening chemicals?
When you go to your local garden store, and the big box stores, always ask them for an organic product first, and if they don't have one, ask them why. This is also a slow process, but if the manufactures realize that we as consumers are demanding organic pest control, they will put the money into research and development of such products.
Am I a full fledged, whole hearted organic gardener? Nope.
Too lazy.
I shamefully use pre-emergent herbicides on the plants in my nursery because I have not found an effective organic control.
However, by writing this article I hope I am doing my part to move the industry a little closer to giving us the organic controls we need.
Michael J. McGroarty is the author of this article. Visit his most
interesting website, http://www.freeplants.com and sign up for his
excellent gardening newsletter, and grab a FREE copy of his
E-book, "Easy Plant Propagation"
Gardening articles: by Michael J. McGroarty
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