A Few Ounces of Prevention to Insure the Health of Your Plants
Guest post by master gardener and organic grower Michael Simmons.
You’ve improved your soil, planted correctly, and now await the fruits of your labors. Here are a few simple steps to take to make the harvest live up to your expectations.
The strongest defense your crop plants have against competition from weeds, attacks by pathogens, and predation by insect pests is their own good health and vigor. By planting on a well-drained site with appropriate sun exposure, by amending your soil to address deficiencies, and by selecting cultivars resistant to diseases present in your area, you’ve already given your plants a good foundation for success. With a little more work you can make you initial investment of time, money, and effort pay off with a bountiful harvest.
First, do no harm.
With the best of intentions, gardeners sometimes do more harm than good. While it’s true that being in the garden often will help you spot problems before they get out of hand, there are some times when it’s best to stay away. If your garden has a high clay and silt content, you can destroy the wonderful tilth you’ve achieved through hard work and a lot of organic matter with a single footstep on saturated soil. It’s always best to avoid walking on planting beds or at least to spread the weight by standing on boards, but when the ground is soaked, it’s best to restrict your presence in the garden to mulched pathways. Most compaction happens with the first footstep, and we all know how hard on roots compacted soil can be.
It’s also a good idea to avoid handling plants when they’re wet. The thin film of water on plant leaves and on our hands provides a perfect vector for the transmission of pathogens from one plant to another. Even in dry conditions, we should wash our hands after handling diseased plants in order to avoid spreading diseases. We should also take precautions with our tools. It’s easy to transfer problems from one part of the garden to another by the failure to clean our tools and shoes of soil that can contain pathogens or weed seeds. So if you’re working in an area that has had problems with pernicious weeds or soil-borne pathogens, be sure to clean your shoes and tools before moving to an area in the garden free of those problems.
When pruning diseased or damaged plant parts, it’s a good idea to disinfect pruning tools with alcohol before moving on to the next plant in order to avoid inoculating healthy plants with pathogens. Unlike bleach solutions, alcohol won’t cause tools to rust. Individually-packaged alcohol swabs are convenient to carry in a pocket so they’re there when you need them.
When rainfall fails to provide adequate irrigation for our plants, they will wilt and experience stress that will reduce their vigor and compromise their productivity. Drought stress can also make plants more susceptible to attacks by pathogens and insect pests. Providing adequate water through artificial irrigation will get your plants through those dry spells, but improper watering can do more harm than good. Always water plants in the root zone. This assures that the water goes to the crop plant’s roots and not to help dormant weed seeds germinate. It also assures that water will stay off the foliage where it can provide a moist environment for harmful fungi. Watering between 5:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. will give the water time to soak into the soil with minimal loss to evaporation. Watering slowly, deeply, and infrequently will encourage deep rooting and avoid water loss and soil erosion due to run-off. Overhead sprinklers not only waste water through evaporation, they also provide water to weeds in areas where crops are not growing and wet the foliage of crop plants, which can lead to disease problems. Overwatering is just as harmful as not watering enough, causing excessive leaching of nutrients and drowning plant roots. Frequent shallow irrigations encourages plants to develop shallow root systems, which makes them more susceptible to drought stress in periods of inadequate rainfall or if you forget to irrigate.
Nurture the soil.
As Wendell Berry has taught us, soil is the most important crop we produce. If we take care of the soil, the soil will help our plants take care of themselves. Organic mulches do more than suppress weeds in the garden. They protect the soil from water and wind erosion, they prevent the formation of impermeable crusts at the soil surface, they cut down water loss through evaporation, they moderate soil temperatures, they provide nutrients as they decompose, and they protect earthworms and soil microorganisms.
Encouraging the microbial life in the soil is essential to a successful garden that will not only produce a good harvest but will also leave the soil healthier every season. Side dressing with compost during the growing season is just as important as incorporating compost into the soil when planting. Compost not only provides valuable nutrients, improves tilth, increases water-holding capacity, and buffers pH, but also inoculates the soil with beneficial microorganisms that facilitate nutrient cycling and help protect plants from pathogens and predatory microorganisms.
Most garden plants perform best in a soil dominated by bacteria rather than by fungi. An easy way to encourage bacterial dominance is to drench the soil with actively aerated compost tea engineered to encourage bacterial growth. Five cups of compost placed in an old nylon stocking and immersed in a five-gallon bucket of dechlorinated water to which is added two tablespoons of fruit juice or syrup will, when aerated with an aquarium pump and an air stone for 36 hours provide five gallons of bacterially dominated compost tea. You can apply the tea with a watering can at full strength or diluted with dechlorinated water. The results are readily apparent in the improved health and vigor of your plants. The increase in the number of earthworms in the garden also will show that the soil food web is healthy and functioning properly.
Be vigilant.
There is a reason that the success of the garden decreases as its distance from the kitchen door increases. Looking often at the garden is not only a pleasure, it is the first line of defense against things going badly wrong. There are few things so disheartening as to return from a vacation to find the garden hidden by weeds, or to find tomato plants defoliated by hornworms, or to find that rabbits found a way through the fence with predictable consequences. Regular inspections of the garden and its plants will enable you to catch problems and address them before they get out of hand. I find looking carefully at my plants as often as I can one of the least onerous of gardening chores. In fact, there are few things as relaxing as looking at beautiful plants and knowing that you’ve helped to make them healthy.
Michael Simmons is an experienced master gardener and co-teacher of the Grow Organic Educator Series taught through People’s University in Bloomington. This training program teaches individuals how to garden organically and encourages them to share their knowledge with others, which has led to the creation of the Bloomington Organic Gardening Association.
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