More on Insectary Flowers (to attract beneficial insects)

A reader responded to my post Growing flowers to attract aphid predators in early spring

“Isn’t too cold for the predators to be around, Pam? unless they hibernated in the greenhouse. but even so, it’s still cold in there at night. We have some aphids too in the tatsoi and some of the lettuce, so thank you for all the tips, and the life cycle. I had not quite realized that the cycle was so short. I grow borage in the hoophouse but in the ground – the plants get large and gorgeous with clouds of blue flowers in March and April – much bigger and healthier than anything I try to grow outside. The honeybees absolutely love it and they attract are a lot of other insects too.”

Yes, it has been still too cold for predatory insects to be around, until this week, when ladybugs greet us around every corner. Our idea with the flowering plants was that by starting the plants in the fall, we’d have actual flowers earlier than if we started in “spring”, and that perhaps the extra stresses would even cause the plants to flower earlier. Apart from the borage, none of the others have flowered yet (Feb 23). We likely need to fine tune our sowing dates. We sowed at the very beginning of September and the very end of October. That two-month gap probably has better sowing dates! We noticed that some of our plants were not very cold-hardy. Some died and some had to be pruned of dead bits. Since then, we started more flowers in our greenhouse on February 1. Another thing we’re noticing since early February is that the plants in pots dry out very fast. It’s probably better to get the flowers in the ground in the hoophouse and greenhouse as soon as they are big enough, as suggested by the results of my reader quoted above, with borage.We had thought that having them in pots would enable us to move them into trouble spots.

Vegetable Crop Resources, Especially Weeds

A newly released handbook from Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), Manage Weeds On Your Farm: A Guide to Ecological Strategies by Charles L. Mohler, John R. Teasdale and Antonio DiTommaso, is set to help us all. I haven’t read it yet (although I am looking forward to that!), so this is not a review, But these are three big names in weed science, and SARE is well-known for providing solid information on sustainable farming.

I had the great good fortune to attend a workshop by Chuck Mohler years ago, and got some realizations that forever changed my approach to weeds. Top of the list is that some weeds, such as pigweed (amaranth species), don’t distribute any seeds until they have grown very big. Until that point they are not threatening next year’s farming efforts. We used to get huge pigweed plants in our sweet corn, and fatalistically did nothing once we were in there harvesting, somehow believing it was “too late”. No, it’s not! They hadn’t seeded. We started to make a practice of pulling the huge pigweed every two days while harvesting corn. Often it was necessary to stand on the base of the corn plant to hold it in place, while pulling the weed. Then all we had to do was drop the pigweed between the rows. Sweet corn ripens in hot weather and the weeds soon died, rather than re-rooting. All those big leaves sucked the moisture right out of the plants. Be extra careful if you have spiny amaranth. We have twice eliminated this weed form our gardens, by diligent hand-pulling, only to have it reappear a few years later!

Conversely, galinsoga forms seeds very soon after germinating, while still small. This weed is one to strike early and repeatedly. It readily re-roots in damp soil. Our strategy when we are too late to hoe and have to hand-pull them, is to shake off as much soil as possible, then to either twist and break the stem (if there are not many), or “shingle” the weeds, laying them down with the roots of one on top of the leaves of the previously pulled plant, providing a surface of roots all exposed to the air, and none touching the soil. This works quite well. Timely hoeing is much better, of course!

Manage Weeds has chapters on How to Think About Weeds, Cultural Weed Management, Mechanical and Other Physical Weed Management Methods, Profiles of successful managers,  and then the alphabetical rogues gallery of grass weeds and broadleaf weeds.

This book and all the online information from SARE is free of charge. You can buy print copies if that suits you better. Other good resources from SARE, while you’re at their website, include several other books:

Building Soils for Better Crops

Managing Cover Crops Profitably For many of us, this is the “Cover Crops Bible”

Systems Research for Agriculture

Crop Rotation on Organic Farms 

There are also podcasts, bulletins, videos, Topic Rooms and interactive pages to explore.

Winter Vegetable Production Methods

For those who missed the Pasa Sustainable Agriculture conference, here is my slideshow Winter Vegetable Production Methods, From the Field to the Hoophouse

Winter Vegetable Production Methods, From the Field to the Hoophouse Dawling 60 mins 2022 2.11 9am