At this time of year, I love chatting with others about their holiday traditions. Every family’s traditions are unique—a combination of family history, ancestry, and geography all mashed together with individual preferences.
Trifle has mostly replaced cookies as my Christmas baking of choice.
And they evolve over time. The Christmas traditions I grew up with are not the ones I practise today. They took a dramatic shift twenty years ago when we moved to New Zealand from Minnesota—northern hemisphere traditions make no seasonal sense here, where Christmas and the summer school holidays coincide.
So my husband and I adapted. Like most Kiwis, our holidays involve travel—we have a tradition of a family backpacking trip the week before Christmas. I always carry a little stuffed reindeer, strapped to the top of my pack, as our holiday hike mascot. We pack Christmas cookies, and usually include one ‘fancy’ camp meal (especially if the tramp extends over Christmas Day).
Our Christmas tree isn’t a pine tree—a cut tree would last about three minutes in the summer heat and wind. Instead, we make our ‘tree’ each year out of whatever materials we have on hand. Making, then decorating the tree is usually a whole-family event.
The LEGO tree of 2019 was one of my favourites, with a motor powering moving parts.
Our big Christmas meal (if we’re not on the trail) is on Christmas Eve—calzones full of vegetables from the garden. We make extras, and enjoy the leftovers for lunch on Christmas Day.
The big day is meant to be a day of relaxation for everyone, so Christmas breakfast sticky buns are made the night before, and rise in the fridge overnight, to be popped into the oven in the morning. After a lunch of leftover calzones, dinner is a big salad accompanied by cheese and bread. Simple as. No slaving in the kitchen on a beautiful summer day.
Boxing Day is beach day for us—along with most of the population of New Zealand—a day to relax with the family and celebrate summertime.
It’s a long way from the hot cocoa, turkey dinners, and carolling of Christmases in my youth, but our traditions do what all good holiday traditions do—they provide opportunities to spend time with family while enjoying seasonal delights.
So happy holidays to you all, and may you enjoy your own traditions, whatever they are! Add a comment with your own traditions!
We’re two days away from the official start of spring here in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the atmosphere is definitely vernal.
The daffodils are up, and I expect them to be in full bloom within a week. The tulips are following close behind them.
Artichoke buds are beginning to form, nestled among winter’s leafy growth, ready to shoot up and deliver gourmet meals for the coming three months, and the fruit trees and berry bushes are flowering and leafing out, despite the fact there are frosts to come.
In the tunnel house and cold frame, vegetable seedlings bask in the sun. The first ones will be ready for planting out this weekend. In the warmth of the living room indoors, seeds germinate by a sunny window. They, too, will end up in the tunnel house and cold frame before long.
The bumble bees and honey bees are blundering around in dandelion blossoms, the ladybugs are out and about, and I’m keeping an eye on a preying mantis egg case which should hatch before too long.
The sounds have become spring-like as well—frogs trilling at night, magpies warbling before dawn, and white-faced herons croaking in the treetops.
Along with the bucolic scenes of flowers and bumble bees, spring in Canterbury brings howling wind. The wind whips up clouds of pine and wattle tree pollen, which settles like gritty mustard powder on every surface. The windows are hazy with it, and I find myself swiping my computer screen clear several times a day.
The wind makes springtime a challenging season—blossoms blown off the trees; fresh growth flattened to the ground; trees (and the occasional camper van or centre pivot irrigator) tipped over; trampolines, greenhouse panels and rubbish bins flying free … A lot of people struggle with springtime wind here. And of course, there will be more frost. There may even be snow yet to come. Plants out in the cold frame will have to be hauled back into the house and out again several times, tender plants will have to be covered with frost cloth. Invariably it will be too hot and dry for the early crops one week, then too cold and wet for the late crops the following week. There will be multiple disasters in the garden due to weather, pests, irrigation malfunction, or any number of other factors. I’ll struggle and I’ll stress …
Moody springtime sky, with rain obscuring the mountains.
But there will be moments when the wind stills, the sun is warm, and I can sit among the spring blossoms drinking a cup of tea and watching the bees and dreaming of summer.
I enjoy winter hiking—I enjoy the crisp air, the opportunity to hike without sweating too much, the snow on the peaks.
One of my favourite winter phenomena is frost heave. This is when moisture in the soil freezes. Since water expands when it freezes, the ice crystals push soil and rocks upward. We get frost heave at home, but in the mountains, where there is both more water and colder temperatures, the phenomenon can be spectacular.
On a cold Matariki morning a few weeks ago, I snapped a photo of five-centimetre-long ice needles near Foggy Peak. Each needle was topped by gravel—the whole top centimetre or more of the sloping surface lifted. As the sun rose and melted the ice, every rock fell a few centimetres downhill from where it started. I imagine this process happening daily all through winter—a slow-motion conveyor belt shifting the mountain downhill.
Meanwhile, higher up on the mountain, water seeping into the cracks in rocks and then freezing shatters them day by day into smaller fragments to be added to the icy conveyor belt.
It is such a small thing, frost heave. But its slow action has a big effect.
The Southern Alps are rising at a rate of 10 to 20 millimetres per year—some of the fastest rising mountains in the world. If no erosion had ever occurred, the mountains would currently stand over 20 kilometres tall. Our tallest mountain, Aoraki Mount Cook, is 3754 metres tall.
Of course, when we think of erosion, we think of the big events like landslides and rock avalanches. These events can be spectacular.
On 14 December 1991, a rock avalanche on Aoraki lowered the summit by 10 metres over the course of a few hours. Fourteen million cubic metres of rock and ice tumbled down the mountain at speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour. The shock waves from the landslide were recorded on seismographs as far as 58 kilometres away.
But without frost heave, the 1991 Aoraki rock avalanche might never have happened. Frost heave slowly weakened the rocks, slowly snapped them into smaller and smaller pieces, slowly shifted their weight. Centimetre by centimetre, those little ice needles brought the mountainside down.
I like to think of frost heave as a metaphor. Each of those tiny ice crystals, by itself, can move a pebble, and together they bring down mountains.
Today is Matariki, and like new year celebrations all around the world, it’s a day for assessing the past and planning the future. It’s a day to spend with family and friends. It’s a day to remember and honour our connections with other people, the seasons, and the land.
Spending time with whānau wasn’t an option for me today, so I thought I’d celebrate my connections to the seasons and the Earth instead. Before dawn I drove to Porter’s Pass and hiked up towards Foggy Peak. It was dark when I began the ascent, with just a hint of light to the east. I hiked the first 40 minutes or so with my head torch, before it was light enough to see the track.
Being midwinter, I expected it to be cold. It was actually surprisingly warm to start—the air temperature was above freezing. But the wind was stiff, and the temperature was still falling. Thankfully, there was no problem staying warm on the uphill.
But the wind grew more fierce the further up I went. I stopped frequently to enjoy the beauty of dawn in the mountains, to gaze back at the bright smudges of towns dotting the plains, the pinpricks of light from the cars crawling up the mountain to Porters Pass. I never stopped for long, though.
I’d hoped to catch the sunrise from the summit of Foggy Peak, but as the scree gave way to icy snow, my progress slowed, and I wished for crampons. I watched sun strike the snowy peaks of the Craigieburn Range and decided that that would have to be good enough—I could push on to Foggy Peak, but I wasn’t going to sit there with a cup of tea and watch the sun rise as I’d hoped. Even if I’d been in time, it was too windy and cold.
So I had my tea in a sheltered spot lower down, where I could sit and enjoy the view. It wasn’t the summit, but it was a beautiful way to start the new year.
As my regular readers all know, I spend a lot of time in the garden. I also spend a lot of time thinking about gardens, looking at gardens, planning gardens …
The bare paddock: former forest, future garden
I am fortunate to be part of a local group of keen vegetable gardeners. Of course, we don’t just grow vegetables—everyone has perennial food crops like fruit trees and berry bushes, and ornamental plants as well. All of us take pleasure in planting and maintaining our gardens, as well as relaxing in and enjoying them. Some of us are in the early stages of establishing our gardens, and others have spent decades cultivating one place. But we’re all focused on the future.
I’m reminded of the quote I copied years ago from the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann:
“Gardens are fashioned for many purposes with many different tools, but all are collaborations with natural forces. Rarely do their makers claim to be restoring or rebuilding anything from the past; and they are never in full control of the results. Instead, using the best tools they have and all the knowledge that they can gather, they work to create future environments.
If there is a lesson it is that to think like the original inhabitants of these lands we should not set our sights on rebuilding an environment from the past but concentrate on shaping a world to live in for the future.”
I look at the 3000 square metres of land my husband and I own. For thousands of years, this land was covered in forest and periodically scoured by the Waimakariri River, which deposited around 300 metres of rock and clay here on top of the bedrock. When Māori arrived in the region, they burnt the forest to flush out moa and other game birds. European settlers later brought in sheep and cows and planted European pasture grasses. From the mid 1800s to 2019, our little block of land was used to pasture sheep, and later, dairy cows. When it was subdivided to develop as residential housing, the topsoil was scraped off, leaving bare, highly compacted clay studded with rocks. Even weeds grew poorly (in places where we have done nothing to improve the soil, there are still bare patches, where nothing has been able to grow in the past 5 years).
Flaxes provide food for native birds, currents provide food for us.
There was no restoring or remaking what was once here, but when we bought the land, we envisioned a place rich in native plants that might attract native lizards, birds and insects. We envisioned a place full of plants that would provide food—an orchard, berry crops, nuts, herbs and vegetables. We envisioned a place that was beautiful, and bright with flowers.
A volunteer lancewood.
We cannot erase the fact that the soil here has been sorely abused for nearly two hundred years. We can’t erase the fact that we sit over an old river bed full of rock and clay. Not everything we plant flourishes, and other plants have done so well, they’ve become weeds. Some insects and birds have returned, but glaring absences remain, and non-native pests still dominate.
But like all gardeners, we look to the future, our imaginations filling the gaps in what we see today. We do our best to collaborate with the natural forces at work here in order to shape a little pocket of plenty for ourselves and others.
The netted ‘room’ is excellent at keeping birds out, but does nothing to thwart rats.
With a third of my garden protected with permanent bird netting this year, I was pretty smug about pests this spring. Silly me …
2023 may have been the year of the rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac, but in my garden it was year of the rat, and it seems to be continuing in 2024.
In the spring, rats ate all my pea seedlings … twice … On one of those occasions, they plundered the seedlings in the three hours the tray sat in the garden before I planted them out. I was working (planting other things) just metres away while the rat collected all the seedlings and tucked them away in its nest (I found them later when I uncovered the nest).
The rats also did good work on my first planting of corn, melons, cucumbers, and pumpkins, eating the seeds and uprooting the seedlings.
I went through three cheap rat traps (none of which actually caught a rat, and all of which quickly broke), before spending an excessive amount of money on a DOC 200 trap. This terrifying stainless-steel beauty caught its first rat within 24 hours. It has nabbed 3 rats, a hedgehog, and an English sparrow in the three months I’ve had it, which I’m quite pleased about.
Unfortunately, it has not solved my rat problem. Last week I discovered a rat (or rats) had tunnelled straight down my potato bed, eating nearly every potato in the entire bed, and damaging some plants so badly they were dying. Yesterday, I went to pick a gorgeous Black Brandywine tomato that was ripening on my now bird-protected tomato plants. I found the tomato on the ground, half eaten by little rat teeth.
I’m beginning to wonder if I will get anything off the garden this year. So far, the rats don’t seem to like courgettes or cucumbers, but my beans are planted right next to the compost pile where the rats seem to nest. Once they start plumping out, they’ll be primo rat food. And the corn? You know those rats will be scampering right up the plants to gnaw at the ears. Makes it hard to lure them to a trap when the garden is a smorgasbord of delicious food.
Makes me wish I still had a cat—the rats didn’t start to become a real problem until he was gone.
I’ve also got my first ever infestation of whitefly this year. Pretty embarrassing for someone whose Master’s degree was on greenhouse pest management. Whitefly wasn’t even on my radar, so I missed early signs of the infestation. They’re not only in the greenhouse, but outdoors as well. The key to effective integrated pest management is paying attention and catching infestations before they’re a problem, and I failed spectacularly at it. Now I’m playing catch up. My only consolation is that it looks like lots of other people are, too, because both suppliers of whitefly biocontrol agents in New Zealand are sold out. Serves me right, I guess.
So as we enter 2024, officially year of the Dragon, I’m wondering if there’s a dragon that eats rats …
The family’s pre-Christmas tramping trip this year was to the Thousand Acre Plateau in Kahurangi National Park.
Last time we were in Kahurangi National Park was to hike the Kepler, our pre-Christmas tramp a few years ago. On that trip, it poured relentlessly, and we hiked with few breaks, for fear of hypothermia.
This trip was exactly the opposite. With sunshine and temperatures reaching 29℃ (84℉), we took lots of breaks, for fear of heat stroke.
The Needle
Our original plan had been to hike an hour to the Lake Matiri Hut on day one. After a leisurely start and five hours driving, it seemed reasonable not to plan too much hiking. But when we reached the first hut, none of us was ready to stop—we’d only just begun, after all.
The DOC time to Poor Pete’s Hut, on the plateau, was listed as 3 hours. It was only four o’clock, and it was the summer solstice—there was plenty of time to push on to Poor Pete’s.
Unfortunately it was straight up to Poor Pete’s, and the temperature remained stubbornly high. By the time we finally crested onto the plateau I was questioning our decision to push on in the heat. But the plateau was painted gold by the evening sun, and our first glimpse of the remarkable limestone landscape was truly spectacular. We reached Poor Pete’s Hut at 8 pm, enjoying the final 20 minutes of flat-ish hiking as the sun set.
Poor Pete’s Hut is a sweet little 2-bunk hut. Unlike last year’s two-bunk huts that our family of four crammed into, Poor Pete’s has a spacious covered porch area that was brilliant for sleeping, so we snoozed in style as the noisy weka and ruru did their best to keep us up all night. And I can’t discuss Poor Pete’s Hut without mentioning the long drop, which isn’t the standard modern DOC vault toilet. Rather it is an old-style wooden box set atop one of the many deep crevices in the Thousand Acre Plateau landscape. And to make a trip to the loo exciting, the path down to the facilities crosses the crevice in an awkward fashion. I nearly slipped in my first time. Classic.
On day two, we hiked across the rolling landscape of the Thousand Acre Plateau to Larrikin Creek Hut. Compared to the first day, it was an easy stroll, but I can imagine in wetter weather it could be an absolute nightmare. The plateau is mostly wetland, with lots of tarns and wet, mossy and muddy ground. Entries in the hut book at Larrikin Creek Hut mentioned ending up waist deep in some of the boggy holes. We managed it with mostly dry feet.
The Hundred Acre Plateau, as seen from the top of The Needle
It was only 9.30 am when we reached Larrikin Creek Hut, nestled at the edge of the forest near the base of The Haystack, a gravelly limestone ridge that kept shedding rock, even in the still and sunny weather. We had a brief rest, dropped most of our gear, and headed up to the top of The Needle, which looks like a child’s drawing of a mountain. There is no official, marked route to the top of The Needle, and it’s a bit of a scramble up Spaniard-infested scrub to get there. I decided there is no good way up, only less bad ways. But the view from the top is fabulous.
The limestone of the plateau is fractured and crumbling, and with landslides clattering down The Haystack, it wasn’t hard to imagine how the entire plateau will eventually tumble into the valleys below.
Evening at Larrikin Creek Hut was filled with birdlife—a cheeky weka kept us vigilant as it eyed up our boots and snacks. A kea called from somewhere on The Haystack, but thankfully didn’t descend to plunder our gear. Weka, bellbirds, and tūī kept up a cacophony until dark, when the ruru joined the weka (do those birds ever sleep?) for the night shift.
On Day three, we took an early morning jaunt down Larrikin Creek to the point where it plunges off the plateau. There were a couple of lovely pools near the edge, which would be fabulous swimming spots on a hot day (day three dawned coolish and drizzly, so no swimming for us, though we did all take a dip the day before in some shallower pools upstream). Walking across water-smoothed slabs of limestone in the creek bed, we saw lots of fossils and some interesting aquatic invertebrates.
After our stream scramble, we hefted our packs and began the return journey. Lunch at Poor Pete’s Hut in the rain was a real treat—that covered porch working its magic again. The descent off the plateau was not quite as bad as the ascent had been, but the earlier rain only served to make the forest hot and humid, so it was almost as sweaty.
The real treat on the descent was a flock of kākā calling in the treetops, keeping pace with us for a while.
We spent the night at the heavily sandfly-infested Matiri Hut, which we shared with a group of three others who were on their way up. The sandflies drove us out early on day four, and we were back at the car by shortly after 7 am. A nice little tramp in a spectacular landscape!
I don’t often get to geek out with biologists (other than my own family, of course), so I was pleased to have an opportunity over the weekend to spend a day at Cass Mountain Research Station helping out with a mini bioblitz.
We couldn’t have asked for a better day—warm sun and clear skies made it a pleasure to be wandering around the forests and fields of the research station. And the company was great—everyone eagerly pointing out the mosses, herbs, bugs, birds, fungi and slime moulds we came across.
The enthusiasm was infectious. Back at the lab, folks peered at bugs, fungal spores, slime moulds, and moss, debating and discussing identifications, and calling out in delight when they discovered something awesome.
I was disappointed to have missed the tardigrades under the microscope, though my husband got fabulous footage of one being about as cute as an animal can be.
I was also jealous of the crew who spent the previous night at the station observing the nocturnal creatures—they bagged a giant springtail.
But there were more than enough cool critters to go around. I enjoyed peering at some of the little spiders I swept from the tussocks, and finding a clutch of spiky beetle larvae all curled up together in a rotting stump. The freshwater researchers brought in trays full of wriggling caddisflies, midge larvae, mayflies and other macroinvertebrates. The botanists catalogued a wide variety of orchids, mosses, and shrubs. The soil researchers found slime moulds, fungi, nematodes, and beetles.
When all the specimens were identified and catalogued, we’d logged 579 individual observations of 259 different species. Many of those species were new records for Cass, bringing the total number of species recorded for the field station to 590 and blowing our goal of 500 well out of the water. A fabulous effort, and a thoroughly enjoyable day!
Sometimes it’s easy to forget the simple thrill of discovery—that wide-eyed wonder we had as kids, when everything was new. We get bogged down in daily life, forget to keep our eyes open. It was great to remind myself last weekend that there is joy in simply observing.
Yesterday I wrote about strategies for preventing pest problems. If you’ve taken all the measures you can to prevent pests, but the pests arrive anyway, there are different questions to ask:
Centipedes are predators of many garden pests.
Do I need to worry? Low levels of pests aren’t a big deal. A few aphids, a caterpillar here or there, the odd bite out of a leaf—these things aren’t going to have a big impact on the quality or quantity of your harvest. Just keep an eye on them to be sure the problem doesn’t get worse.
Can I physically remove them? I’m a huge fan of squishing and hosing pests off plants. For example, I have problems every spring with aphids on my roses. If I do nothing, the plants become completely covered, and the blooms are destroyed. So in spring, I keep an eye on the plants, and once the aphids start reproducing, I hose the plants down once a week, knocking off most of the aphids. Usually I only have to do this about three times before the aphids’ natural enemies build up enough to keep them under control without my help.
Can you disrupt a critical part of your pest’s life cycle? Is there a life stage that can be easily killed, or has specific requirements you can disrupt? For example, I keep a close eye on my brassica seedlings, looking out for cabbage white butterfly eggs on the undersides of the leaves. All it takes is a quick swipe of the thumb across the bottom of each leaf to squash the eggs and eliminate future problems with caterpillars. Another example is my recent problems with slaters in my greenhouses. Discovering that the slaters are congregating between cement blocks stacked beside the greenhouse, I’ve started regularly checking and squashing all the slaters in those blocks. (I could also have moved the blocks, to eliminate the slaters’ shelter, but since the population was quite high, I thought squishing a whole lot of them would be more effective for now. Later I will probably move the blocks to make the area around the greenhouse less attractive to slaters).
Can I make use of them? Pest-covered plants, grass grubs and slugs all get thrown over the fence to my chickens, who turn them into beautiful eggs for me and save me from the disgusting task of squishing the bugs.
Can I pull out badly infested plants? If there’s a couple of plants badly infested, but the pests haven’t spread much, rip out those infested plants and destroy the pests on them. You’ll lose a few plants, but you’ll protect the rest of your crop.
Pest-gobbling chickens.
In an IPM system, you don’t consider any sort of chemical control until you’d exhausted all the possibilities above. In practice in my garden, I almost never need anything else. Occasionally, if I’ve missed an aphid infestation on a crop that can’t handle a strong spray of water, I’ll use a soap solution to kill aphids. That’s the extent of my chemical control. But if you do need to resort to chemicals, it’s important to choose the right one. The more specific it is to your pest, the better. Many modern pesticides are narrowly focused, and target specific pests, and that’s great. With a narrow target, the pesticide is less likely to kill beneficial insects or harm people and pets. Stay away from broad spectrum pesticides. Also, if you do use pesticides, be sure to follow the label directions carefully, wear protective gear, and dispose of leftover product and empty containers properly.
It’s nearly spring, so naturally my thoughts turn to the subject of pests. Our big pest-related project in the garden this year is bird netting a third of the vegetable garden, so we don’t lose most of our tomatoes and peas to the feathered rats.
Aphids–the one on the right is healthy, the one on the left has been parasitised by a wasp, one of the many natural enemies that keep aphids under control in the garden.
As an entomologist whose research focused on Integrated Pest Management, I always have a lot to say about pests. And it’s an important topic—globally, 30-40% of crop yield is lost to pests (interestingly, this figure didn’t change with the advent of chemical pesticides—insect pests are incredibly quick to evolve pesticide resistance). That’s a lot of wasted food!
For home gardeners, fighting pests is a daily task. Every place I’ve gardened has its own unique pest problems. Growing up in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania, I remember the rabbits munching through the garden. In State College, Pennsylvania it was flea beetles that shot so many holes through my eggplants’ leaves they never had a chance to grow, and the squash bugs that clustered in masses under the leaves of my zucchinis. In Panama, leaf cutter ants could strip a plant bare in no time.
In my first garden in New Zealand, aphids and rabbits were my main problems. When we first arrived on the property, there were so many rabbits I wondered if I’d be able to grow anything. A rabbit-proof fence was the first garden project there.
In my current garden, birds are my worst enemy—mostly English sparrows and European blackbirds. They strip seedlings bare, eat tomatoes, pull out onions, and scratch away mulch and soil, leaving plant roots to dry out (never mind the amount of chicken feed they snarf down every day!).
Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the pests), my masters degree focused on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), so I’m well-armed when it comes to tackling pest problems.
IPM is often called common sense pest control. In IPM, the goal isn’t to eliminate pests, but to minimise the damage pests cause, while choosing the most environmentally-friendly control methods that do the job.
To successfully use IPM, you must first know your enemy. What conditions does it like? What’s its life cycle? What are its natural enemies? How does it find your plants, and how does it travel? Books and the internet can tell you a lot, but careful observation of the pests in your garden is key. The particular conditions in your garden will affect how pests behave, and where their weaknesses are. If you know exactly where pests are and what they’re doing in your garden, you can begin to tackle them more effectively. For example, I know that in my current garden, there are particular varieties of squash the aphids like. By keeping an eye on those particular plants, I can catch aphid infestations early and deal with them before they spread to more plants.
Bird netting protecting pea seedlings
Once you know your pest’s habits, you can begin to consider control methods. Questions to ask:
Can you time your plantings to avoid the damaging stage of the pest’s life cycle? For example, I don’t grow brassicas during the summer here—I have an early spring crop and a winter crop. By avoiding brassicas in summer, I eliminate bad problems with cabbage white butterflies, which tend to reach damaging levels around Christmas. I still have to be on the lookout for butterfly eggs on my seedlings, but once the plants are growing, they easily stay ahead of the caterpillars.
Can you exclude the pests from your crops during critical time periods? For example, psyllids can transmit disease to potatoes and tomatoes, leading to poor growth and damaged tubers. By covering the plants with a fine mesh cloth, I can keep the psyllids out for most of the summer (until the plants are too big for the covers, by which point the psyllids don’t seem to be much of a problem). I do the same for my peas and lettuces—netting out birds until the plants are large enough to handle losing a few leaves. I also net my berry crops and olives before the fruits start ripening, so the birds don’t pick them before I do.
Can you plant varieties the pests don’t like as much? For example, I plant mostly red varieties of lettuce, because the aphids take longer to discover them than they do the green ones. Usually, by the time the aphids find my red lettuces, they’re bolting and ready to pull out anyway.
Can you plant a ‘trap’ crop that the pests like more than your favourite vegetables? I haven’t done this explicitly, but as I mentioned earlier, there are certain varieties of plants I know are particularly tasty to pests, and I closely monitor them and kill the pests on them before they can spread to other crops. A true trap crop is something you’re willing to pull out entirely when it is infested by your pest, in order to destroy the pest.
Can you prevent pests from finding your crop? Interplanting different crops can help disrupt the spread of pests, because they struggle to find new plants to feed on. It can also help you make the most of the space in your garden. For example, I sometimes plant summer lettuces in the shade of my sweetcorn—not only does the shade help prevent the lettuce from bolting, it also seems to hide the lettuce from aphids.
Can I encourage the pests’ natural enemies? Many pest insects are preyed upon or parasitised by the larvae of beetles , flies and wasps. The adults often eat pollen and nectar, so planting herbs and flowers is a great way to encourage many pests’ natural enemies.
All six of the questions above will help you avoid a pest problem in the first place. They are changes in the way you plant or grow your crops that make it less likely you’ll have pest problems. Tomorrow, I’ll look at what you can do once you’ve discovered pests in your garden.
Robinne Weiss 