Organic Gardening Tips
Posted by tempestodimare under Growing Your Own, Survival, Toxic food, Water, health
Leave a Comment
Drina Brooke, certified community herbalist

Got slugs?
Got leaf miners?

Well, we did have both eating up our chard. The slug holes were all over the poor leaves, which were full of Swiss cheese-like holes. And the tell-tale white eggs on back of the leaves plus the shrivelled look where miners worked their way into the leaf tissue, were an onslaught to these poor chard plants. To boot, they had just begun to grow in good earnest after a slow start from this year’s unusually cool spring weather.

So I removed the affected leaves. Then, I took a small sprayer bottle of water with three drops of tea tree oil, shook it and sprayed the remaining healthy-looking leaves.

Within less than 24 hours—-12 actually—-the leaves looked so deeply green! They *loved* the tea tree oil. I sprayed them again and the next day, I had the same result. Beautifully emerald green!

Two weeks later, there are no slug holes and no sign of returning miner eggs (just yet). I’m keeping an eye on it, but my hunch is that no self-respecting bugs or slugs will go where the tea tree oil has gone before them. The stuff is pretty strongly anti-microbial, and it did the trick.

I could have used our neem oil product purchased at the nursery. While the neem oil in itself would not be harmful at all in small quantities, there were other ingredients in the product that I didn’t want to be eating. The tea tree oil came to the rescue, and seems to be doing the trick. I thought I would pass this on.

Another tip:

Here we go to the trouble of gardening organically…and then we pollute the ground water (and our plants which we eat) with water that has been sitting in the hose. And I am telling you, when our water first comes out of that hose, it positively wreaks. Of plastic. Tastes like the pipes it has been sitting in. Plech. I don’t want that stuff in the ground water, and I sure don’t want to be ingesting it in my vegetables and fruit. After all, as I have posted on this site ad nauseum (sorry for the repeat), PVC’s from plastics cling to fatty tissue and contribute to breast cancer. And there is a male version of breast cancer too. Metals from the pipes will be stored in our hair, bones and brain tissue, contributing to nervous system issues such as learning disorders, ADHD, multiple sclerosis and alzheimer’s. Yay!

So much for organic gardening.

Instead of dumping that awful water on the plants, here is what I do. I run it into a 5-gallon bucket and use that water for washing my car, mopping the entry way to the house, and for washing off our gardening tools if our clay soil is clinging to them. Then I dump it out on the pavement, to let it evaporate (not run off into the sewer).

By the time the water runs into the 5-gallon bucket, it comes tasting and smelling fresh out of the hose.

Better yet would be to have a water filter hooked up to the hose water. But I do not know where such a filter is available (Multi Pure does make a product which filters all of the water in your house, but I do not know if this applies to the outdoor water as well. Worth checking into). With pure water and pesticide-free gardening, using all organic fertilizers, then we can talk about having grown our food organically. With chlorine and other stuff in our water, even our own garden will not be pure. Filtering would not be at all a bad idea.

Can you imagine….once I ran the water into the bucket as described, but didn’t get around to washing my car. So the water just sat there. Beside it was another bucket with fresher water. And interestingly enough, a few bugs had drowned in the fresh water, but there was not even one single bug in the disgustingly putrid stuff from the first run-off out of our hose! Now isn’t that interesting. The bugs knew better than to even go near it, let alone drown in it. If that is the case, think of how it affects the soil bacteria and worms. And our own health. Lesson learned.

Got organic gardening tips? Please post below!
Thank you!

(Photo: Tea tree plant)