First crops are ready
June 7th at the farm
It has been a little over 3 months since I started planting and my first crops are finally ready!
That might sound like quite a lot longer than you would expect for most vegetables here in Southern California, with the warmth and bountiful sunshine they have to enjoy. And you would be right! After a steep learning curve, going from backyard gardening to a commercial scale, here are some tips I’d like to share with any budding backyard farmers among you.
a single rabbit can do a lot more damage than you might think! You may have noticed some big gaps in the rows of crops in the image above. That is all the work of a single little bunny, which got trapped inside my plot as I was putting up my fence and who went to town on the buffet of delicious treats I laid out for him. I lost over 80% of my first six rows of crops in a period of 3 to 4 weeks before I worked out that the rabbit was locked inside, rather than sneaking in at night. After that he was pretty easy to catch in a cage trap and release a short walk away elsewhere in the park. If you have rabbits in your area, you really can’t be too careful about closing up any possible gap they could use to get into your garden, or risk losing everything.
Previously in my blog, I mentioned that my compost was very high in nitrogen and I applied too much to the beds, which burned the roots of my crops. Well, the result of this was that the plants which survived were stunted for over a month and just sat there doing nothing. The beets you can see at the very front of the photo should have been ready in 45 to 50 days, but in the end took over 90. However, the good news is that those plants which survived are thriving now, brimming over with life from the rich soil.
Adding a lot of organic matter in the form of mulch and compost can cause a bloom in the insect pest population. Many of the common garden creepy crawlies such as pill bugs and earwigs are useful decomposers, which means they help to recycle and compost dead organic matter by munching their way through carbon rich ground litter and pooping out plant food. However, they breed much faster than the spiders, centipedes and other predators that prey on them and if they suddenly encounter a bounty of food such as piles of compost or chipped branches, their population can explode. This is particularly true in the wet season as many pests are moisture loving species. If this happens to you, as it did to me, these normally innocuous bugs can take on an entirely different character and attack your crops en mass, causing major damage to young plants in particular.
In this situation, you have a couple of choices. There are a number of organic pesticides you could use to eliminate the majority of insect pests, but they will kill some beneficial insects too. If you go this route then you will never allow any balance to develop in your garden ecosystem and you’ll be tied into using those pesticides forever. Predatory and parasitic species that naturally keep crop pests under control will not move in to your garden in significant numbers as long as you are wiping out their prey. This brings me to the second option: being patient and accepting significant crop damage in the short term while you wait for natural control species to move in and balance things out. This is one aspect of a system called Integrated Pest Management (IMP), where you integrate various mechanisms of natural pest control into the fabric of your design. There are many other facets to this system, such as:
planting flowering crops that attract the adult form of some insects that are predatory or parasitic in their infant stages,
growing woody perennial shrubs as shelter or nesting sites for beneficial insects,
leaving the soil undisturbed for ground nesting species.
There are lots of great online resources available to help you take advantage of IPM, which can be a daunting subject to start with, but in the long term is a real time and effort saver. With this method you will always get a few holes here and there in your veggies, but the environmental and personal health benefits of keeping chemicals out of your garden are too numerous to count.
I hope these mistakes I made and the lessons I learned as a result can be of use to those of you looking to start your own gardens. Thanks for reading, and bye for now.
Farmer Andy