Monthly Archives: June 2015

IPM: Integrated Pest Management

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Attract beneficial insects with flowers!

Integrated Pest Management or IPM is …

an ecological approach to pest management that combines understanding the causes of pest outbreaks, manipulating the crop ecosystem for pest control, and monitoring pest populations and their life cycles to determine if and when the use of pesticides is indicated.

—dictionary.com

The basic idea is that if you really pay close attention to your garden you can prevent pest populations from getting out of control and if and when they do you can use the least toxic control methods first. The goal here is to impact our natural environment as little as possible and still feed our families. There will always be some pest in your garden and that is okay! They are the menu items to entice beneficial insects to come by for a snack! There is a certain balance in the pest community, that once achieved, is very effective! Mother nature balances things out if we allow her to. Not every leaf or fruit has to be unblemished to have a successful harvest!

Monitoring:

It’s as simple as strolling through your garden on a daily basis! I do this in the morning with my coffee and find it to be my favorite activity of the day! Just walk through looking at your plants and notice any changes in them. Are they beginning to wilt? Turning brown or yellow? Are there holes or spots on leaves? If you catch the problem early you can take the steps necessary to ensure a healthy garden!

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Asparagus and Strawberry: Perennial Match Made in Heaven

So we decided to start some perennial food beds at our new homestead as we plan to be here for quite some time! Two spring foods that our family loves but are hard to find local organic and when we do they are super expensive is Asparagus and Strawberries! We love them! So I was pretty confident it would be a worthwhile investment!

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Asparagus roots.

When we did our big orchard order we got some bare-root dormant plants of both. We got 10 ‘Mary Washington’, 10 ‘Jersey Giant’, and 20 ‘UC 157’ asparagus. We didn’t know which variety we would like best or what would grow easily for us. This mix will help us decide which ones to buy next time we expand our asparagus beds!

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