What keeps your plants healthy? Take a look at the following factors for healthy plants.
Soil fertility
Healthy soil produces healthy plants.
The care of your soil is the most important duty of every gardener. It is the most effective method of preventing a pest or disease outbreak.
The ideal soil is a loose, moist humus-rich soil full of worms and other soil life with a balanced nutrient content, including all the trace elements.
It may take a good few years to achieve this, but even the poorest soil can be made very fertile using organic methods.
Biodiversity
A garden with good biodiversity is a lot less prone to sudden attacks of pests and diseases as there is a balance of pests and predators.
Increasing the biodiversity in your garden is probably one of the most rewarding pleasures in gardening as you have the opportunity to create habitats and homes for many living creatures that have been pushed to the edge either through the destruction of their habitats or chemical poisoning.
Beneficial habitats include: – Pond – Log or branch pile – Dry stone wall or stone pile – Native hedgerow and include fruiting shrubs – Native trees – Clump of nettles in the corner of your garden – Wildflower patch
Apart from creating specialist habitats, you can also increase the biodiversity within your vegetable patch through:
– Crop rotations: Where pests and diseases are eliminated by prolonged periods without their hosts.
– Polycultures: by growing different crops next to each other (inter-cropping) or undersowing with a green manure crop (under-cropping).
– Variety mixtures: by growing different varieties of the same vegetable in a plot. This technique has been very successful with potatoes and lettuce and there is a lot of scope for further experiments.
Hygiene
Hygiene in and around the vegetable garden is very important for pest and disease control.
This includes weed control and the removal of damaged or diseased leaves or plants from the garden. If your vegetable garden is messy it is much easier for pests and diseases to spread much faster.
Your wildlife areas should be positioned a fair distance away from your plot as the beneficial creatures usually travel further and faster than the pests.
Good seeds
You should always start with good and clean seeds. They should always be stored in a cool, dry place and not for too many years.
I usually keep seeds for only two years and then buy new ones. New seeds are a lot more vigorous.
Healthy transplants
The same applies to transplants. It is very rare that all transplants in a tray are of the same quality and you should only plant the best. There is no point in starting a plant hospital.
Right plant, right place
Plants that are not suited to your climate and soil conditions will never thrive and therefore will be the first ones to be attacked by pests and diseases. In Ireland, you can’t grow good cucumbers or tomatoes outside.
Some may survive and you may even get a few ripe tomatoes on it if you grow them on a south-facing wall in a sheltered garden somewhere in the south or east of the country. However, the same plant may produce a hundred fruits if grown in a polytunnel.
Resistant varieties
If you find that every year your parsnips get canker and your potatoes blight you should consider using a variety that is resistant or tolerant to the relevant pest or disease.
Examples:
Potato: Bionica, Sarpo Mira, Orla and Setanta are very resistant to blight
Pea: Hurst Greenshaft is very resistant to mildew
Parsnip: Javelin F1 have some resistance to canker.
Timing of sowing
You can sometimes avoid outbreaks of pests and diseases by adjusting your sowing or planting dates.
The best example is to sow your carrots in late May or early June. This avoids the first generation of carrot root fly in May.
Another example is to sow your peas only in mid-April to avoid foot rot disease.
Breaking the cycle
You could have brassicas (cabbage family) growing in your garden all year round. This makes it very easy for all pests and diseases to survive and re-infect new crops. I always clear my cabbage patch in mid-January and only plant the first brassicas again in early May.
I’ll never get nice spring cabbage but at least I hope to get fewer problems.
Adjusting the spacing
If plants are spaced too closely they are a lot more susceptible to fungal diseases such as grey mould or mildew.
If you want to lessen any potential problem you can always space your crops a little bit further apart. This increases the airflow through the crop and reduces the incidence of fungal diseases that thrive in more humid conditions.
Proper sowing and planting
Good care should be taken when sowing seeds and planting vegetables. The better they start off the more likely they will do well.
Source: greenvegetableseeds.com
