Fallacies Keep Some Gardeners In A Rut

From The Fresno Bee, June 24, 2010, by Elinor Teague:

The Fresno County Master Gardeners, like all Master Gardeners in the state, are trained by University of California Cooperative Extension to educate other home gardeners in the most effective uses of the least toxic or harmful gardening methods.

We are all converts who have witnessed first-hand that these methods really work. But persuading other home gardeners to try using fewer chemicals and fertilizers is not always an easy job.

There are two very common misconceptions that often keep home gardeners from trying new (actually, very old) approaches to keeping their plants healthy and relatively pest free.

You must use chemical pesticides to kill insects. Not true. There are many very effective means of non-chemical insect control. The first and foremost is to correct any cultural problems in your garden.

Take note of which plants have insects and which don't, and then investigate the differing conditions for those plants. You'll see that the one rose bush that gets less water than the others has aphids while the other roses don't. Or that the pile of garden debris near the raggedy hydrangeas is full of earwigs. Maybe the roots of the redwood tree are stealing all the water and nutrients from the coral bells you planted underneath it.

If you fix the cultural problems, you may well fix the insect problems.

Many gardeners don't realize that aphids are killed when washed off plants with a blast of water from the hose. And, it's hard to believe, but true, that hand-picking will reduce snail populations. Washing the dust off plants will prevent red spider mite infestations.

Experiment with some of these nontoxic methods.

Unless your plants are seriously infested or damaged by pest insects, you'll probably be surprised by success, and you will have preserved the populations of beneficial insects that are crucial to keeping pest insect populations under control.

The more fertilizer you use, the better the results. Also, not true. You may have noticed that some fertilizer manufactures have greatly increased the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in their products.

The percentage of nitrogen in one well-known product has jumped from 15% to 26%. This is in response to customers' expectations of fast results from fertilizers. We can't wait to see (and brag about) 10-foot high, lush tomato plants.

There is nothing wrong with fertilizing to encourage slow and steady growth and production.

Slow and steady growth is best accomplished by regular, consistent feedings with a lower-number fertilizer. A half cup of a 5-10-5 rose and flower food, fed monthly from spring until fall, is enough to keep roses and other flowering plants blooming throughout the season.

Just a tablespoon of the same fertilizer, fed monthly, will produce excellent results on tomatoes, peppers and other summer vegetables.

Using less fertilizer with lower percentages of nitrogen also reduces the amount of chemical run-off into our water systems.