Why Organic Insect Control

by Doug
(in my garden)

I know it seems easy to look at something creeping across the garden and whack it. Or take a look at your newly planted perennial with the newly lacy leaves courtesy of some unknown insect and decide to wipe out the entire insect family - good, bad or just visiting - they’re toast.

But take a deep breath.

Let’s look at this in a more objective way. (yeah, I know it’s hard when your favourite plant has just bit the dust).

The first thing to understand is that the vast majority of insects are actually doing something very positive in your garden. It’s only a very few that are problems.

And when you see something crawling over a newly eaten plant, you likely assume that’s the problem-one. When the odds are that that insect is trying to find the guys who did the damage so it can eat them. Yeah, it’s tough world out there if you’re a plant destroying bug because the majority of other insects are trying to eat you.

Now here’s something you may not have known.

Stressed plants tend to produce sugar in their leaves - that makes the leaves sweeter. Plant eating insects love sugar (just like we do) so they attack those leaves first.

Mother Nature has designed a system where the plants indicated they’re sick - she sends in the insects to weaken them further so they can die quickly and be recycled (thus feeding the other plants with their composted leaves)

Ever notice that there’s always one plant that’s getting eaten more than the others. Always one tomato that’s covered with aphids while the rest are unscathed? That’s because that plant is the weakest in the bunch and those signals have gone out - lunch!!

So the organic gardener understands this cycle and the first response is to improve the garden health and soil health so that as many plants as possible are going to be healthy and live.

Plants Fight Back

I also am willing to bet that many of you don’t know that plants fight back against insects.

As soon as many plants find themselves being eaten - they produce hormones in the leaves that make themselves “bitter” or less attractive/palatable to insects. It’s a natural protective response that plants have.

And here’s something else we don’t understand. When one plant in a group of similar plants is under attack and starts producing hormones, all the other similar plants in that area start doing the same thing (even though they’re not yet under attack!). There’s some form of communication between them. (Kind of interesting to know that plants have some measure of communication skills)


So between the weak plants because of nutritional difficulties and the insect-fighting abilities and the fact that most insects in the garden are eating other insects - what’’s your response to plant problems.


Well here’s the deal.

If you decide to use a broad spectrum killer (many chemicals) then you wipe out the bad guys for sure (or most of them) but you also wipe out the good guys trying to eat the bad guys.

And guess which population recovers faster ? The good guys or the bad guys?

If you said bad guys - you’d be right. There are more of them and they produce faster because they are the prey in the garden. They’re the food for many other insects so natural laws say they produce faster (the same reason there are more gazelles than lions).


Think about it - when you spray a broad spectrum insecticide the bad guys recover first and they’ll start eating your garden without any other natural controls around to pick them off. You’ll have a population explosion of bad guys.

How cool is that. Kill off all insects with a spray and you get more insect damage in the long run.

And the Solution Is

OK - gardeners who use organic methods believe several things.

We control pests in our gardens as well. We don’t want plant leaves laced with insect damage. We don’t want vegetables wiped out by slugs and caterpillars. Contrary to the propaganda of chemical proponents, we don’t just let the insects have their way with our gardens.

But we use controls that have important characteristics.

Limited duration. Instead of lasting all season to wipe out everything in the garden, many organic controls only survive 24-36 hours in the garden. Sunlight and/or bacteria break them down very quickly.

Limited exposure. Organic gardeners don’t spray indiscriminately - we spray to control specific pests on specific plants because we don’t want to wipe out the good guys with the bad guys.

Mechanical controls. Organic gardens use mechanical controls such as horticultural glue, and hormone traps to attract and control pests.

Patience. An easily misunderstood component of gardening, we know there will be damage and we develop a sense of what the level of damage we can handle will be in order to keep our gardens healthy.

We don’t panic at the first sign that slugs are in the garden. We start a trapping or control program but we understand that slugs feed birds and that attracting birds might indeed control a great many slugs.

We don’t panic when we see aphids, we’ll wash them off plants with a strong jet of water so the beetles can eat them on the ground - instead of nuking the garden to kill aphids and beetles.

We learn. Over time, we figure out what’s doing the damage and we decide how much or if we’re going to control. We learn our insects and we figure out which are the good guys and which the bad.


Bottom Line

Insects tend to attack plants that are “less-healthy” than the norm. The first line of defense is to create a healthy garden.

The second line of defense is to figure out what pest is doing the damage and apply the least intrusive form of organic control you can. It’s either that or you’re going to actually make the problem worse (by killing off the predators).

Chemical safety. I assume if you’re reading this that you’re concerned about the absolute safety of using chemicals in our homes and gardens. The history of chemical gardening is filled with emerging problems of one kind or other (from supposedly “safe” products) and I for one would simply like to make my environment as clean and healthy as is humanly possible.

So what do you think?