Natural and Organic Food

Here are more tips to companion planting in the organic garden to keep down the invasion of pests to a manageable level.

Aphids are a real menace on crops, whether they be vegetables, fruiting trees, bushes or berries. When infestations are bad, they can weaken the plants by their sap-sucking, but they also deposit honeydew on the leaves and branches of crops which eventually attracts mould spores which then turn the area black and sticky, reducing the leaves ability to convert sunlight into chlorophyll and to take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

One great way of reducing their numbers is by planting marigolds around and interspersed amongst the crop beds. Marigolds attract hoverflies which love to eat aphids, so the more of them you can attract into your growing space, the better.

Another hoverfly attracting plant is lemon balm, which also doubles as a great multi-use herb.

In the organic kitchen, chop the raw leaves of lemon balm and add to fish dishes - it goes great with grilled trout! Simply stuff a handful of raw chopped leaves into the fish and grill both sides for a few minutes until cooked.

Whenever you feel stressed, make yourself an infusion of lemon balm leaves, by pouring boiling water onto about a tablespoon of raw chopped leaves and allow to brew for five minutes, then strain. It makes a great natural relaxing tea!

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food

Following on from the last post on coping with bugs in your organic crops, there are some more excellent ways to cut down on the damage some little nasties will do to your carefully tended vegetables if you let them!

One sure fire way to practically cut our attacks on two popularly grown vegetables, carrots and onions is to plant them together. I’ll explain.

Carrots are often blighted with attacks by the carrot fly, which lays it’s eggs on the new growing root and the grubs eat their way through the maturing plant and ruin it. The same goes for the onion fly, which is another real menace when it finds your patch.

But guess what - they each hate the smell of each other’s lunch!

Yep, if you inter-plant onions and carrots in the same bed, the smell of the carrots will deter the onion fly and the smell of the onions will deter the carrot fly!

It’s known as companion planting and there are a lot of different combinations you can try that will cut down considerably on damage from common pests.

Being that you are growing your own vegetables organically, of course you won’t entirely remove the problem, because nature will always find a way, but you can limit the damage an awful lot by careful planning when it comes to planting your precious crops.

So if you had a mind to create a whole bed just with carrots… don’t!

Monocropping as it’s known is the bane of the organic gardener and a green light to all the hungry bugs that love that one particular flavour of vegetable, so it’s always a good idea to mix up your vegetables in each bed.

Just like it would happen naturally in nature!

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food

When you grow your own vegetables in your own back yard, or allotment or anywhere you have space, there is a certain feeling of achievement when you finally get to harvest a few pieces for your dinner table.

There can sometimes be a few problems that modern supermarket consumerism seems to have made us forget (or in many cases, never known) about. I’m talking about the small creepie crawlies that also inhabit your vegetable patch!

Most are perfectly harmless but because modern families have been weaned onto sanitised, perfectly shaped, shiny clean and bland tasting supermarket produce it can come as a bit of a shock to see the odd caterpillar crawling around our vegetables!

Well, do not despair!

These little guys have as much right to crawl around your patch of dirt as you have to plant your cabbages there! In fact, with organic gardening, the more veg you cram into your vegetable patch, the more likely you’ll see plenty of critters homing in on it for a free lunch.

Well, just be sure to wash your vegetables thoroughly before you consign them to the cooking pot! Be especially careful with leafy vegetables like cabbage, kale, spinach and especially calabrese (broccoli).

Cut into carrots and onions carefully and if there’s anything in there that shouldn’t be, don’t have a fit and throw the whole thing away! Simply cut out the part that has been damaged (along with the perpetrator) and throw that away. The rest of the vegetable will be untouched and perfectly fine to eat.

Just don’t be squeamish. Organic and squeamish don’t mix!

Non-organic ways of dealing with these interlopers has always been to spray enough poison on your crops so that one bit and their dead. Great for bug-free crops. Not so great for safe eating!

How to Deal With Pests in the Vegetable Patch:

So truly hardened organic gardeners shy away from anything like that and heartily accept the bugs as a sure sign that their crops are good to eat. Ok, caterpillars can eat a lot of your leafy vegetable crop, so you have to be a bit more diligent and pick them off as soon as you see them. You could even do your local bird population a real favour and pop the caterpillars into a large high sided plastic bowl an leave it in the middle of your garden.

Waste not want not!

As for greenfly and other aphids, a good squirt with a water jet gets most of them off your plants or you could be a little more mercenary and add some freshly squeezed garlic juice to the water - it kills them but does no harm to your plants or to you.

Slugs and snails will decimate a crop if allowed to, so you can combat them with traps made from plastic bowls full of stale beer - they come from all over to have a party, dive in and drown! Or if you don’t want to do that, you can stalk them in the late evening with a torch (flashlight) and collect them up for your bird feeder. Make sure you put them in a container with a lid or they’ll slime their way out!

Well, that’s all for this instalment - I’ll add some more organic vegetable gardening tips in a later post.

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food

It was reported in a UK national newspaper yesterday that organic food and drink sales in the UK reached £2 billion for the first time in 2006, with a 22 per cent rate of market growth throughout the year.

Launched to coincide with the start of Soil Association Organic Fortnight 2007, the Soil Association’s annual Organic Market Report shows a continuing strong growth and great public support for all things organic. This includes food, drink, textiles and health and beauty products.

Overall retail sales of organic products made through organic box and mail order schemes as well as other direct routes increased from £95 million in 2005 to £146 million in 2006. This represents a 53 per cent growth which is more than double that experienced by the major supermarkets.

in 2006, organic textiles and the organic health and beauty sector saw a 30 per cent increase in the number of health and beauty products licensed with the Soil Association. At the current rate of growth, the UK market for organic cotton products is estimated to be worth £107 million by 2008.

Sales of free-range and organic outstripped eggs from caged birds for the first time. Consumer concerns over animal welfare appear to be driving changes in the poultry sector

Each and every week, an average of £37 million is spent on organic produce in the UK. Households with children under the age of 15 tend to buy a wider range of organic foods than those with no children.

Naturally, organic farmers are said to be three times as likely to market their products locally or directly as conventional farmers.

Organic livestock farmers are dependent on supplies of organic feed. Unfortunately, in 2006 UK self-sufficiency in organic cereals fell below 50 per cent This places an increase on our reliance on imported organic grains.

But overall this is extremely good news for the organic food and related industries, meaning more and more people are heeding the warnings that non-organic produce is not up to scratch.

Further information can be found at soilassociation.org.

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food