Ladybugs can’t control the Curly Leaf Plum Aphids on my trees.Once they start moving,in the Spring and the leaves get distorted,it’s too late.So,I have to apply at least,a few preemptive sprays of oil/soap to suppress them.
Also,I’d love nature to find a way to prevent Brown Rot Blossom Blight,which can totally eliminate Cherry and Plum fruit,for the year.
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Do you mean nature does everything without your intervention?
I agree strongly with your beliefs. My statement is not geared at anyone here or any large scale tree farms. But backyard gardeners… There’s two types of people growing. Those that can’t help but to spray chemicals and those that think. I don’t want to die of horrific diseases or anyone I love and I don’t want to support billionaires and big ag/big pharma they have enough people that either can’t read their labels or don’t care, but I bet they will care and regret one day.
We got along just fine for thousands of years without them. From what I’ve seen with people that spray constantly they won’t listen ears are closed even if you show them with their own eyes. I’m not saying there aren’t certain times or situations where it’s not warranted and I’m only talking about mainly poisons on food and ground. I can say from many years of growing my own food it’s so much better to not spray and nuke everything good and bad. My friends and neighbors that spray always have problems and I don’t ever. If something is getting me worried I’ll just wait and the good bugs always come or bring beneficial predators in if I have too. I also always grow a multitude of different plants never just one or two kinds. Watch how you feed and don’t stress the plants I believe helps as well. My hat goes off to all of you who care about good food and fruits as well as the microbes. It’s good to see some people with similar thoughts.
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Milk and whey contains antimicrobial compound Lactoferrin which disrupts mildew fungus.
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Sometimes wildly so.
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All the bacteria, fungus and insects were not in the air thousands of years ago. Unfortunately. No spray, no fruit. Use Kaolin.
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Really?
So bacteria is made in a lab? (Like Coronavirus.)
I believe the first life had bacteria in their stomachs just as humans horses or kitty cats. If not, they could not have digested their first meal.
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Enzymes breakdown food. Bacteria is now vast. Look at the insects coming into the US via fruit imports and ruining our crops.
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With little intervention you can encourage growth of Aureobasidium pullulans to outcompete and induce parasitism for blossom rot fungus. Woodleaf Farm has tried this approach with some success. At backyard grower scale I think it will be more feasible to achieve good results. USDA ARS Online Magazine Yeasts on Plums Have a Plus Side
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Thanks,but their study looked like it had to do with developed fruit.Blossom Blight involves the flowering stage,which probably doesn’t include any yeast species.
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Link to Woodleaf Farm who tried Aureobasidium pullulans for brown rot with good results. They used canned product Blossom Protect, later got the yeast cultured from a leaf sample from their orchard.
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I don’t think you are crazy. you are just living your truth and I think that is awesome.
I have a different prospective. As others have pointed out, what we grow for food nowadays is a far cry from the native species that evolved over eons without human intervention and they are going to require amendments to grow sufficiently the way we have modified them for better food use. if you wanted to live naturally, you would need a time machine to go back thousands of years and just forage what natively grew.
Also I’m not going to disavow all science, including chemical solutions, just because science and its conclusions change as we learn more. that’s kind of one of the best things about science. just because our perspectives have evolved over the years doesn’t mean that its all junk.
I solve the spray issue by growing naturally disease and pest resistant fruits/veg/nuts, and in many cases these are non native non invasive species.
Just my 2 cents.
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I hate to be the negative one here, but do any of ya’ll grow in Texas? Where we have temperature swings left and right? Where it never rains enough if you are west of I35?
Do any of yall grow in the south, where the humidity makes diseases and pests more common, and the soil doesn’t freeze so the insects come back, year after year?
Are you in an area where there are no rocks in the soil, your topsoil is deeper than two feet without hitting a rock layer, and you can just throw something on the ground and it will grow.
If you are, then this makes sense. I like the idea of just planting something and getting a little bug damage, but toughing it out. Why should you use a pesticide for that?
But gosh, out here it’s a fight to grow something here that isn’t native. If the heat and drought doesn’t kill it, the insects will. Anyone who says otherwise, may I introduce pillbugs to your vegetable garden, and see how that goes?
On a sidenote, when I visited Paris, I was amazed to see no insects at their gardens. Just honeybees or bumblebees they had intentionally added. So I guess while I may have more plant harming insects than ya’ll, I also probably have more beneficials.
And that’s my two cents.
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I think the same is true for all of us, including those who justify their spraying regimes because they think they have a larger sphere of information. And yet, time and again throughout human history we have learned only decades or even centuries later that we were harming ourselves and our ecosystems with practices that were deemed safe by the experts of that era who had the widest spheres of information at the time.
I am quite sure that in 100 years time, if human society has continued to grow and progress, our descendants will be aghast at the way we allowed microplastics and agrochemicals and the even-less-regulated cosmetics and personal care chemicals to be so widespread in our ecosystems and our households and bodies. And I’m equally guilty of much of that, because there’s no way to live in our modern world without buying and using plastics or body care products or food that was sprayed with something (regardless of whether the chemicals are approved for “organic” use, many things approved for organic use are just as untested for long-term effects).
Which isn’t to say all of chemistry is evil, or that all agrochemicals have harmful effects on human health. Of course not. But I think one can say with absolutely 100% certainty that some of the pesticides and other chemicals that are deemed safe today will eventually be proven otherwise when more information is collected about secondary effects and non-obvious low-percentage effects of long-term exposure. History shows this to be the case time and again, and the explosion of new chemistry over the last 80+ years is so unprecedented in scope that surely there’s a pile of dangerous things we have not yet identified in that mix.
So, I do what I can to limit my role in this ongoing global experiment, within reason. If something proves to be impossible to grow in my location without spraying, then I will replace it with something else. When possible, I buy produce from local sources with low-spray practices, which I honestly prefer over “certified organic” where approved chemicals may be sprayed heavily. I mostly use simple bar soap and tried/true body care products similar to those used by people for generations, rather than the latest concoction from the chemistry labs. But I cannot feed my family without buying produce and packaged food from the grocery store, and we all drink the same water and breathe the same air.
We each must make the decisions that feel right based on what we know, or at least what we suspect to be true. But it’s always worth realizing that some of the things you “know to be true” are likely false.
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Not Texas, but eastern NC close enough to the coast that I’ve got a climate more like Dallas than the much closer Mid Atlantic region or even much of the rest of the Upper South. Like Dallas, but wetter and more humid.
Yeah, it’s night and day. It’s hard to explain to folks up north or out on the west coast just how much worse the pest pressure is when the majority of the year is humid and above the 70-80 F minimum temp most bad stuff needs to grow well and the ground basically never freezes so the bugs are all back as soon as you stop getting hard frosts. Like, write off ever growing anything in the apple family, ever, unless you want to spend all your spare time pumping chemicals. Tomatoes, and anything in the squash family, will be stricken by mid to late summer, guaranteed. “Carefree” figs get rust and mites and yellow jackets and fire ants and nematodes. Forget about most grapes, our local diseases literally destroyed Europe’s wine industry for a generation back when they first crossed the pond. And all those awful invasive Asian pests, know what part of America has the exact same climate as east Asia? The South. Guess where those Asian pests are really happy.
And the weeds, holy smokes the weeds. Late December to mid February is the only time when there isn’t some weed or other growing, unless it’s an El Niño year with random weeks of warm, wet weather and ryegrass, wild onions, henbit, and the like all winter long. And then it warms up. Must be nice living somewhere where the turf grasses go dormant in the peak of summer. You’d be amazed how fast Bermuda grass can invade a bed, and how far underground it’ll travel before popping up. And forget about cultivating it, it’ll grow right back no matter how much you till, and mulch just makes it happier. Hand pull or spray, no other options for controlling the #1 most common grass in the South. Then there’s dogfennel, pigweed, thorny amaranth, and sicklepod, all of which can easily top six feet in a few months of neglect. Horse nettle, bindweed, sweetgum, mimosa, crabgrass, senna, etc all have their little tricks.
And don’t get me started on soil science and why organic matter isn’t a cure-all soil builder here…
Don’t get me wrong, I love it here, the land is brimming with live and I wouldn’t want to garden anywhere else, because there are plenty of pros for all these cons, and I just couldn’t stand living someplace where nature is half frozen or half dehydrated most months of the year. But it is far less realistic to be able to grow much without using chemicals to some extent or other. People living in Easy Mode regions are welcome to come down here and try out their idealisms in our climate.
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Don’t forget the hurricanes and tropical storms that dump a lot of rain over eastern NC on the way to me in southeast VA. Have you got Tree of Heaven seedlings coming up everywhere or Japanese Stiltgrass hanging out in the shade down your way?
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You might can feed a few people like that, but around here every organic farmer has gone out of business. Too many weeds and bugs. There’s a reason it is called agri science. We have tried with and without. Produce a lot more with the benefits of modern technology.
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Tree of heaven is extremely common in the piedmont, but it’s not well adapted out here on the coastal plains. Mimosa and chinaberry more then make up for it. Stiltgrass though, yeah, absolutely everywhere in part shade.
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Oh memories of our old neighbor Mr.George growing up in North Florida. Poor guy had the prettiest St.Augustine lawn you ever saw. At the cost of seeing him crawling around on all fours pulling weeds/bermuda. I mostly remember his hind side…lol
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I am about 60 miles from the ocean and 30 miles from NC line. Tree of Heavens come up in sandy peanut fields from seed blown out into fields. They get about 3 foot tall by digging time Oct 1st.
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