How can we grow vegetables without using pesticide or insecticide to have it safe and healthy to consume?
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There are many websites about organic gardening.
Check out this one:
http://www.gardenersnet.com/organic.htm...
Pesticides and insectisides are a leading cause of health problems for farmers. Tend to your garden every day. It's hard to do this with a field of hay which may be fed to cows for example and we eat cows and get the toxins in us.
Since I've only been vegetable gardening for a few years, I've learned that soil testing is important and getting good soil (I love 2 cu.ft bags of Supersoil!) from reputable sources is key. Once you've gotten that down, plan out your garden and look for combinations (plant tomatoes and cabbage/broccoli since tomatoes ward off most bugs that attack cabbage/broccoli).
Go to your nursery and buy plants already grown. If you try to grow from seed, you've got a really large learning curve and now is not the time to start since the growing season is winding down (I live in California so I'm planning on using seeds for my autumn/fall crops). Also, with the plant having a head start, most of the big issues are solved and your plant will just thrive as long as you have a foundation of good soil, drainage, and a watering schedule. Lastly, there are plenty of non-chemical solutions out there for most common vegetable issues so if you use nursery bought plants I'm thinking you're most of the way there.
Don't forget to involve your family, it makes the daily chores so much more easier to handle especially when it comes to harvest time!
Welcome to gardening, enjoy and good luck!
P.S.: with a 20' x 18' lot, we harvested last year: 20+ lbs of green beans, 10 heads of cabbage, 10+ lbs of broccoli, 50+ lbs of tomatoes, 5+ lbs of carrots, 20+ lbs of onions, 12 ears of corn with lots of lemons, limes, jalapenos, and radishes. Welcome to gardening, enjoy and good luck!
Research into some plants that grow in your area that give of scents that will deter insects away.
Some vegetables are impossible to grow without bugs or worms. I learned to plant enough for me and the bugs. I quit planting things that were bug covered or worm eaten from the onset. as in broccoli, brussel sprouts and turnips, cabbage was also a pain. I grew tomatoes, potatoes, cukes, zucchini, bell peppers, kohlrabi, green beans,
herbs, onions, radishes, lettuce, peas, and beets. I canned hundreds of jars of goodies every year. No chemicals and no threats. I also had fruit trees and concord grapes for juice and jelly. Some things are just too much of a pain to grow--I used to go and pay a farmer for corn and pick 12 dozen ears a year to freeze. I also had a strawberry patch and mature rhubarb plants.
I put wood ash, and leaves and old mulch from a saw mill on my garden and tilled it in.I also had a non ending supply of horse manure which was great.
If in the early spring it looked like a weed patch I sprayed it with roundup prior to planting.
I suggest that you subscribe to the magazine, Organic Gardening.
That's how I grow mine.
First, start with a pile of compost. You may even consider vermicomposting, in a container. That will really give you nice soil in the future. If is virtually free because you use newspapers, kitchen scraps, dead houseplants, grass clippings, etc.
Then, when you do need to feed your plants, use fish emulsion, epsom salt, bone meal and blood meal instead of chemicals like Miracle-Gro, etc. They are kinder to the environment, and you know you are putting organics on the table.
Your produce may not grow as ridiculously large as it would with the Miracle-Gro, but it will be tastier and much more natural.
While many bugs carry disease they also help to pollinate your garden, so having some bugs and insects in your garden is a plus. Praying mantis and ladybugs (even their larvae) are good to keep aphid populations under control.
Tend to your garden frequently, keep dead, dying, or rotting fruits, stems, leaves, etc out of the garden.
If you decide you need to take control of the population you can use a dish soap and water mixture sprayed on the leaves. This will not kill the bugs, it only keeps them away.
maybe you should consider indoor hydroponics..
Surround your vegetables with marigolds. If you have lettuce, possible keep that in pots on a deck and surrounded with marigolds.
OK I'm 16 but I've seen my dad grow vegetables in a pot and he hangs it about 5 ft. high on the fence. It's a good idea and i haven't seen any bugs on it since he put it on the fence. Almost our whole fence is full of vegetables like tomatoes and jalapenos He's trying to grow watermelons on there. Hope this helped.
The way I do it is with large pots. I find it is easier for me to keep things properly pinched back so I get more veggies than leaves and it is much easier to control the insects (because with daily pinching there are not nearly so many places and leaves to hide under). There have even been years when I loaded them in the kid's wagon and parked them in the screen gazebo until a particular infestation passed . like beetles, ugh! You can also easily throw a piece of netting over potted and staked plants to ward off bugs. I grow the huge Beefeater Tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, assorted peppers and snow peas this way. I use a raised bed for cucumber hills, green beans (bush kind) and lettuce. Strawberries are on their own, lol, but we still get plenty even sharing with the birds and chipmunks. Before I began tub gardening for veggies I tried various things in the ground. The two most successful were layers and layers of newspapers around the plants and grass clippings 4 inches thick on top of them, leaving about a 6 inch circle clear around your plant base. Lots of bugs won't cross the decaying grass clippings (they DO stink pretty bad for a couple weeks, although turning them daily with a garden fork helps get the process over quicker) and the newspaper makes a decent barrier against the creepy crawlies in the ground. If you keep the weeds down brutally and water the bases, not the leafy parts, you will find that insects and rot are a lot less of a problem. Also, leave plenty of space around each for air circulation (real easy with pots). Like I said, pots are easiest if you aren't trying to grow a ton.
Someone once told me you can put in a water bottle add dish soap and water and spray your vegetables then make sure you wash them correctly.
Get rid of the insects. There is a species of ant in South America that eats everything near it's colony's nest except for the tree it lives inside. If we put a colony of these ants everywhere they would eat all the other insects and the things the other insects eat. Then we burn the trees and there would be no more insects around except for our honeybees, and there would be no insects eating our veggies so we wouldn't need insecticide.
This has gotta work better than that nonsense the other people have talked about.
we can just water them and put them in a place where insect and bugs can enter or just make your own fertile soil
i spray "tea tree oil" and "soap" on my garden vegetable and it works well.
i tried pepper but the rabbits thought i was spicing it up for them.
yo get the wii
hi
i have a garden at home and i know how you feel. people think the only way to keep insects away is to use harmful chemicals and pesticides. farmers grow organic vegitables and fruits without using harsh chemcials and pesticides and when you shop, try buying organic vegitables they are chemical free. i hope this helps.
For generations people grew their own product and were healthy. I grew up with a backyard garden and we did not use pesticides or insectidies. You washed the veggies off in the tap if you did not want to eat any dirt and looked for places the "bugs" could have entered. That included fruit from the apple tree.
to kill aphids mix red pepper and dish soap in water then spray on the tops and bottoms of all leaves and blooms
My wife and I have been composting yard waste and household organic debris for 20 years. We have a small garden with 24 various tomato plants and 12 bell pepper plants as well as extensive flower beds. We use only composted material for fertilizer and we search the plants each day for damaging insects and remove them by flicking them into a can and disposing of them away from the garden. Our Tomato's are coming in nicely and the peppers are doing well. We also have growing nearby some Asian Ameranthis plants that tend to discourage Tomato worms and Pepper blight. I'm not sure how, but it works. I like a good sweet Tomato with no aftertaste from bug spray. It's taken us 12 years to find the right plants to put near the Tomato's. Ameranthis is native to India and grows well in New England. Gotta be careful though, it spreads and will take hold of a neighborhood in 3-4 years. You pull out the plants you don't want when they are 5" tall. Full size can be 5 to 9 feet with beautiful foliage and flowers for most of the late summer. Study. Learn.
I don't think you can grow vegetables without using pesticides!I don't know of any other way !!!
mix some chilli powder (or pepper) with water and sprinkle over your plants. For some reasons the insects are afraid of the smell of it.!
Diatomaceous Earth. Made from diatoms in the ocean (as is toothpaste), used in swimming pools. Available at pool supply stores at a reasonable price (although, do shop around). It is an abrasive (hence, being in toothpaste). Dust it on the leaves (liberally, in my opinion), top and bottom. The insect eats the dusted leaf and ingests the DE. which then cuts up its insides, and dies. Sounds horrible, but I have had great success with keeping plants from being eaten alive (except for squash bugs) by grasshoppers and worms. It must be reapplied after rain or watering.
Use a soap and water spray to deter insects
I don't know if you are speaking about commercial growing or individual growers. I have a large vegetable garden. I grow about 50 times more than I can consume from the garden. My dirt is full of earthworms and a few grubs as well. I only use natural fertilizers and compost(homemade) for nutrients and homemade remedies for insect control. I do not use any commercial pesticides or fertilizers. Most Americans are used to buying the "perfect" looking fruits and veggies from the store. My home grown stuff sometimes has to be trimmed to remove a bad spot or a hole where a bug got a bite. I really only lose about 10% of my crop to insects and disease. I feel that it is better to have some loss to nature and still have plenty to eat than to poison the environment, period.
Organic farming is incredible and it works for you in many ways. The results are worth all the trouble to learn the techniques. The insecticides used on food has it's beginnings from World War I when they discovered that the NERVE GAS being used to kill soldiers also killed bugs. When gardening became a profit structure instead of a health quest, insecticides like DDT became the holy grail. We are now living with the results of that great experiment. Weight gain is one of the results and is the major contributor to obesity along with the vegetable oils and bad saturated fats are also big players in this issue.
Only about 4% of the entire food supply in America is organic. Organic must also be accompanied by food grown on fertile soil as opposed to the depleted, over cultivated, worn out soils being used to produce food that is 50% less nutrients than we had just 25 years ago. The good news is that people are now consuming more organic food than farmers can produce and the demand is growing. I believe Americans are beginning to see the real picture of what many large corporations have done to our food supply.
I saw an incredible example of what organic farming technique can do. I was a member of a group of a small city farm coop that was formed to grow our own food. There were the organic people and the chemical people separated so as not to contaminate each other's crops. Of course, the organic people were always at odds with the chemical people as to who was growing the best crops. The organic side grew these wonderful tasting foods and the chemical people grew food that was not as good, but they both had good appearances. The example was one small organic farm had been abandoned and weeds were about 4 feet high all over the area. All the rows of lettuce, tomatoes, etc. were eaten by aphids and bugs I've never heard of, except for one lonely, large, cabbage plant that was absolutely beautiful and covered with weeds. There was not a bug on it and it was huge. When we uncovered the plant and cleared the weeds, no one could believe it. So how did this happen? Right next to this perfect cabbage plant were two very large onion plants. Bugs hate onions.
No we do not need insecticides. We need dedicated farmers interested in health and welfare of this Nation, unlike corporations like MONSANTO that is contributing technology that is destroying the very fiber of quality, healthy foods and replacing them with genetically engineered garbage, seeds that contain insecticide genes that create corn plants with insecticides built into the corn, and terminator genes so farmers have to buy the seeds from them instead of using decades of environmentally, biodiversified, adapted seeds they have used for generations, and forcing their corporate will on farmers by suing huge numbers of them for patent infringement on seeds where they have patented life. Amazing.
Any word with "...cide" at the end of the word is designed to kill, not be nutritious. Everyone of us needs to take back the health of our food by refusing to buy the garbage and demanding quality.
good luck to you ---
I think you can keep used tea leaves & neem leavs in a big pot with water for few days then sprey it on plans it will help a lot to protect ur plans from insecticides (bugs).
One thing more you can also sprey dry ash on plants it also protects from bugs.
use organic composit you should perpare it yourself
use good tested soil
you should also sprey water daily
the best way to grow ur plants without using pesticides....\
there is a best way to overcome this problems....
u should have the good mineralised soil,clay in ur farms .so, it gives lot if energy and food to plants...\
this is possible only by u having the good mineralised land only.....
u r doing good job...
all the best for ur work...
finally congratulation for ur natural thought...
if u have any problems just contact me :::::sai21531@yahoo.co.in
you could use a net to cover them. or you can plant them in a green house
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