The question I see come up more often than any other in garden forums is how to deal with pests. And I get it. Watching the aphids arrive right when your beautiful broccolini get to the stage where you don’t know if you want to eat it or photograph it is hard, especially in a small garden. It takes nerve to hold fire.
Striped Marsh Frogs moved in of their own accord. They don’t mind urban environments except that, like all frogs, they are highly sensitive to RoundUp ®. Use RoundUp to get rid of your bindii-eyes or lantana, and you end up having to use insecticide on your skin to ward off mosquitoes. And then snail bait. And then whatever it is they use against malaria plasmodiums and rat lung worm.
It’s spring. The white cabbage moths have arrived, en masse. But they don’t seem to be doing much damage. So here are some of my speculations about why.
My broad beans have aphids. Judging by my social media, everyone else’s broadbeans have aphids too. The trigger with little insects stealing my food is they must die! But must they? Most of the ways of waging war on aphids involve either pollutants or a lot of effort. Is there something easier?
Aphids have discovered my broad beans. Best way I’ve discovered yet to deal with them is to tap the broad bean tip onto the palm of my hand, which gives me a handful of aphids easy to squash (and a handful of squashed aphids).
Usually I leave the slugs to the bluetongue. I’d hate to starve him (or her) into deciding to live somewhere else. But he’s a bit too well fed, and I’m not. A cup with an inch of beer, buried so the rim is at the soil surface, overnight collected all these. The chooks will feast on beer marinated slugs.
But the cabbage moths have arrived, and I think that’s about the end for this year. We’ve had a good three months of harvesting broccolini, cauliflowers, kale, pak choi, napa cabbage, mustard. But from now on it’s not worth it, at least not here in the sub-tropics.