- Pests in a vegetable garden
can cause so many problems.
They often like our crops as much as we do.
So we need to inform ourselves
and we need to observe very closely what's going on,
which is all easy to say, isn't it?
So I'm gonna show you some specific examples
of how to keep pests off certain crops
at certain times of year.
It's now the middle of May here at Homeacres,
southwest UK, quite an abundant time,
as you can see form the garden behind me.
And also how you can see
there're not many crops actually covered,
for example, against pests to keep them off
but specific ones are,
and they absolutely need it.
For example, here
is beetroot.
So this beetroot was planted late March
from a February sowing.
I think it's been covered all its life, in fact.
So I had a fleece cover over it originally.
And that kept the rabbits off,
as well as keeping the cold winds off.
And now it's got a net over,
which is against birds.
This is a very simple UV-treated polypropylene net.
It's five, six, seven years old.
I've used it every year in those years.
So it's got a long life.
It's a really good investment.
It's four meters wide.
That means it'll cover easily most beds
with a bit of edge that you can adjust,
in this case, keep it down with stones
or however you choose to just keep it down.
And for me, it's stopping the birds eating the leaves.
So in this case, it would be sparrows.
They just love beetroot leaves.
Without that, there'd be lots of holes in the leaves.
The net over the beetroot I was just showing you
is not always necessary.
You wouldn't need it
if your garden did not have sparrows coming
to eat the beetroot leaves.
So sometimes you just have to plant things
and see what might happen.
But be prepared, have some netting,
some covers ready before you begin.
And for example, here's a different kind of net,
which is suitable for keeping out butterflies.
The one over the beetroot
with wider mesh, they're about half inch there
is too wide and would let butterflies in
if that's what you were trying to keep off.
Whereas this one, the holes are about five millimeter,
1/5 of an inch.
And a butterfly, unless it was a bit of a Houdini butterfly,
won't get through that.
So you could put this over, for example,
cabbages, calabrese, cauliflowers in the summer and autumn
to keep the butterflies off
that will otherwise lay eggs on your leaves,
which turn into caterpillars that eat the leaves.
So you just need to support that
with something over your crop.
It's sometimes risky if you just put a net
on the leaves because then a butterfly
can lay its eggs through the net.
Just stick its little egg-laying bit onto the leaves
and that can cause damage.
So you need some support
of sometimes a wooden frame, wire hoops,
whatever it might be.
Here I'm beside a crop,
which almost always needs some protection.
One of the hardest vegetables to grow
in terms of pests, carrots.
And partly it's because the seeds are very tiny,
they take a long time to grow
and then slugs often eat them.
And I've actually had some slug damage in this bed
and the slug damage has been much worse
at the further end where the seeds
were not organically, biodynamically grown.
This side, the biodynamic seeds have given stronger plants
and the carrots have grown better.
So that's one little thing one could do.
But then this mesh is to keep off the main pest
of the carrot, which is carrot root fly
and that's a fly that lays its eggs on the soil.
They turn into little maggots
that burrow down and eat the carrot
and really make quite a mess tunneling through the root.
So all being well, this mesh will keep that fly off.
It doesn't always work 100%.
Sometimes I think they crawl under the edge
but you can see also how the carrots
are pushing the mesh up.
I haven't had the carrot on from day one,
sorry, the mesh on day one for the carrots
because the carrot seedlings, when they've very tiny
are quite tender.
So I actually covered them initially with fleece
and you can see some fleece here.
Fleece is different to mesh.
It's softer and lighter, warmer.
But less good at keeping all pests out
'cause it tends to get holes where birds
or rooks quite like fleece actually
for making their nests,
so they come along and peck wholes
and take bits away from them.
But you can see the fleece here is protecting,
in this case, some chard against again birds.
Particularly this red chard.
There's a weed onion in that one.
This red chard is much loved
by the sparrows I mentioned already.
So need, unfortunately here
where we're got a lot of the sparrows,
I need to keep some kind of cover
on my chard all through the growing season.
In my previous garden, I didn't need to.
So it just shows how variable this kind of thing can be.
Whereas carrots, most of the year,
I reckon to keep them covered with mesh like this.
Mesh is very durable,
very long lived, you can use it many, many times,
like 10, 12, 15 years consecutively.
So although it's quite expensive to buy,
you will get good value out of it.
Fleece, on the other hand, lasts maybe two, three years
before it starts to go into many pieces.
It's still very worthwhile.
Both these covers have many uses for many crops.
Lettuce for me is a very valuable crop.
It produces so much to harvest
and it is pretty much liked by a lot of different insects
and birds but more particularly birds.
And so I find it worthwhile
just to keep a net over it the whole time.
Just standard bird netting,
half inch, 12-millimeter size gauge.
And that stops them pecking the leaves.
It also stops, blackbirds, for example,
love to come and look for worms
in the compost in the beds here.
And have a little dig and than that flicks compost
all over the leaves
and makes them hard to wash.
So it's just worthwhile to do that.
It's very simple and when we're picking every week,
we just roll the stones away
and flip the net over and pick
and then pull it back again.
So easy.
And water goes through obviously.
That can be a problem with covers
that you can't always see, like with the fleece and mesh,
what is going on.
And a net is one of the best from that point of view
because it's so visible.
And then behind me is an example of a crop
that had a cover on
when it was young.
So these peas I planted six weeks ago
and they've been there under a fleece cover
for the first three or four weeks
while they were just getting going through April.
It's now the middle of May.
And you can see they've suddenly got away.
But at this stage,
pigeons quite like pea leaves
but they find it hard to eat them
when the peas are this big.
They could do if they were really abundant pigeons
but here there aren't that many pigeons.
But the main point here
is that it was really worth protecting those peas
when they were small
and that's often the case.
Think in terms of protecting your seedlings
and your teenage plants,
once they approach adulthood,
they become more able to look after themselves.
In the case of these peas,
they're quite tall now,
so it's quite hard for birds
to hand on there and peck away.
Aphids are a difficult pest at certain times of year
on certain crops.
This is a very strong and classic example here
of aphid damage to cabbage
but not all cabbage.
Some of the cabbages here are grown actually in no dig soil.
This is a dig-no dig experiment
where I'm comparing the effect
of growing same crop, no dig and dig.
And the no dig cabbages are actually pretty healthy.
And there's more damage on the dug bed
where aphids have got into some of the cabbage plants
and they bring in a virus.
You see this mottling pale yellow,
the leaves losing color
and that's almost certainly a virus of some kind
that the aphids inject into the plant
to suck the sap.
They've also brought a disease with them.
And we can see the aphids here.
They tend to hide under leaves
because hey don't like moisture,
so that's why it can be effective to water them
as long as you can get water on them
'cause the water rubs and washes them onto the ground
and then a few of them will crawl back.
But you can mitigate the damage.
Apart from if they bring in virus,
mostly aphids are short-term pests
because at this time of year,
this is May, they're building up
and then the predators will arrive very soon.
Ladybirds are breeding now,
so their numbers are not yet able
to cope with all these aphids
but they soon will.
So I find that in June, July, onwards,
aphids are much less of a problem than at this time of year.
So it shows how pests can vary at different times of year.
The kind of leaf damage you have is a clue
to pests that might be causing it.
And here is an example of bird damage, for example.
Pecking around the edge.
Quite severe in that case.
Or there's a beetroot leaf.
Beetroot, spinach, again these are loved by sparrows.
If it was pigeons, it would be quite similar,
a bit more angular maybe pecking around the edge.
Here I have some examples of the dreaded slug.
That's a basil leaf actually
where the slug holes tend to be quite large,
almost like punched holes,
often in the middle of a leaf
and often in older leaves, like this
where the leaf's already aged.
You can see it's going yellow.
Slugs' role in nature I believe
is kind of recycling agents.
They're clearing up the debris,
turning it into food for the next generation of plants.
So if you leave old leaves like these lying around
in your garden,
these are all old cabbage leaves,
the slugs are going to be attracted to that
and think hey, food.
Maybe hang around
and also, as these old leaves fall down on the ground
and sit there like that,
that keeps the soil moist underneath
and the slugs can hide there by day
and come out and eat by night.
So what I do is go through my crops
of cabbages, broccoli, calabrese, cauliflower, for example,
also spinach and lettuce sometimes,
depending what's growing,
removing older leaves like this.
And that means less hiding place for slugs,
less slug damage.
It also looks nicer.
And lastly here, we have a bit of woodlice damage.
So this is where I'm growing this cucumber
that's been on a hot bed full of woodlice as it happens.
Mostly I can get by with them
but sometimes, they chew a stem like that.
I just happened to know that's woodlice damage
'cause I've seen it before
and there's nothing else there
that could cause it
but it's just another little thing to look out for.
In my garden, I use very few products.
I find the best strategy for pests
is to know they're gonna come
and use covers to prevent them eating crops
and provide minimum habitat
but there are some pests that more difficult
and butterflies are certainly one,
particularly the ones
that lay their eggs for caterpillars to eat.
Brassicales, for example, there's also butterflies
that lay eggs on tomato leaves in certain areas
and vine leaves even.
Leek moth is another one.
And this is a product, which you can buy as a powder,
a dry powder, about two grams in a teaspoon like that,
level spoon, it's just a small spoon mixed with water
and spray it on leaves will kill,
well, what it does is it gives indigestion
to caterpillars, which eat the leaves
that you've sprayed.
And it doesn't affect any other mammals.
It's not harmful to chickens, for example,
if they eat the leaves, nor to us obviously,
other insects, so it's only caterpillars
that get indigestion and then die
and it is remarkably efficient.
And in this climate, for example,
I find three times a year is enough.
I put it on mid-July,
early to mid-August
and early September
and those three applications give me mostly clean cabbage,
brassica, salad, whatever leaves,
right the way through the summer.
You can soak a significant amount of pest damage
by sowing at the best time
for each particular harvest you want to make.
So for example, this is springtime now,
and it's an example of why it's not such a good idea
to grow rocket patch or mizuna,
oriental leaves, brassica, small brassica leaves for salad
because they are very prone to flea beetle damage
at this time of year.
Flea beetles are little hopping insects,
which make these very round
and small holes and lots of them
in young brassica leaves,
right through spring and into summer.
So rocket, salad rocket here is an example
of a salad that I reckon to sow in August.
So late summer and then it crops beautifully
through the autumn,
after it's flowering time as well.
And there's a lot less flea beetles around,
so you get really healthy leaves.
Whereas in the spring,
instead of rocket, I find it's really good
to grow pea shoots
because they are so healthy at this time of year.
This is their season.
This when peas are growing really strongly,
healthily, abundantly,
and so we're harvesting many times pea shoots
off the same plants
at this time of year.
And I don't sow these in the summer.
So they're spring crop for me
'cause I find to crop late summer
and autumn pea shoots, you tend to get more mildew.
The pea pod's just not so healthy and abundant.
Companion planting can help plants
to have an environment
where there's a better balance of pest and predators.
So for example, here between the two rows of tomatoes,
I have planted French marigolds,
which are quite small.
They are just gonna stay that kinda size,
just taking up a bit of space here
and they have quite a strong aroma,
which is reckoned to maybe deter white fly.
To be honest, I'm not too sure
but I have found, over many decades of doing this,
that they grow very happily with the tomatoes.
They kinda seem to like each other
but neither one gets in the way of the other.
And I have very few aphids on my tomatoes.
Now, that's also related to all the other things
that are going on here.
No dig, good mulchy compost and so on.
But all these little things add up.
There's not really, I don't think,
any one thing you can do
to be sure of not having any pests
but doing something like this,
which as well as probably being beneficial,
looks really nice.
What not to like?
And there's other things you can do
of a similar nature in here,
like there I'm growing some dwarf French beans
in amongst the marigolds
with cucumbers and I find that works well
because the dwarf beans crop very quickly
through June, they're finished by the end of June,
by which time the cucumber's are getting big
and would be shading the light anyway.
So that's another version of companion planting
where you're cropping something with another thing.
And they get on well
and maybe that helps keeps the pests down.
One doesn't really know.
But it's just fitting things in
when you can, it's all good.
Here's an example of another method you can use
to reduce habitat for aphids
because these broad alfalfa beans
are susceptible to black fly,
which is a kind of aphid.
And they land in the main growing point or tip
of the plant.
So this little bit here,
the new leaves clustering in the center
at the top of the plant,
you can pinch it out.
You can take that top out like that.
That is really nice to eat.
That's a taste of broad bean, tender leaves.
Well before the broad beans are ready
and what this does is it reduces landing place for aphids
and encourages actually also the development
of pods lower down.
So all these flowers on these beautiful broad bean plants,
which have a lovely aroma
and there's lots of bees here,
they are developing into pods
and taking out the top encourages the plant
to stop growing, which it can't do any more
and make pods more quickly.
And behind me are some broad beans,
which we've pinched at the tops a little while ago.
So you can see they haven't got any growing points
on their tips.
And lower down, there are some nice little pods developing.
So these were broad beans that were sewn last November,
before the winter, over winter, small plants,
whereas these were sewn in the spring.
Growing vegetables is great fun
but that can so easily be massively damaged by pests
as much as they can damage your crops.
So do take appropriate measures.
Check, get informed about what you might need,
at which times of years.
Most of the products I've mentioned here
are widely available, garden centers, online.
Have fun with that and over to you.
Happy growing.