Herbal Cultivation session 7

© Copyright PCNM 2011
Organic Farming
In this session we will be looking at:
• Organic Farming
• Solutions to common
problems for organic
growers

Organic as Nature Intended
by K. Robertson, M.Sc, F.NIMH
Seaweed overwintering on herb beds, Drimlabarra Herb Farm

Organic Farming
• Why organic? Is it just a trend?
• A food and certainly a medicine should contain no artificials - shop
carrots can be toxic!
• Sappy growth encourages pests and disease - insecticides kill allies
• Soil is our life's blood - needs "humus" - worms till the soil.
• Inorganics lock up minerals and they are then washed into rivers
and the sea.

Organic Farming
• How do these wider issues affect me?

• The most important consideration is the taste - potatoes grown for
water, tomatoes grown for their skin - we can select varieties for
disease resistance but genetic manipulation?
• Is expenditure & effort reduced in the long term. Organic
pest control and disease prevention are the only real solutions.
• Parallels our own health - build health and vitality. Rotations -
cleanliness returning via compost. Quick methods lead to poor
solutions.
• The question with herbs is academic however - as most suffer in
taste and hardiness from over-feeding. Mediterranean herbs
need to seek food have no pests and little disease.

Organic Farming
• The arguments for preferring organically-grown food are often
discussed at great length. We may follow these arguments
intellectually, but, if we are to successfully incorporate these ideas
into our normal routines, the main question has to be “is it
practical?”
• Prevention is really the only cure - because organic
gardening is based on this principal, yes, it is a highly practical
system of growing plants and one that Mother Nature has been
quite happy with up until now.
• The dream that we can mimic nature and supply all our needs from
artificial sources has proved false and the attempt has introduced a
host of pesticides and insecticides aimed at curing the problem, not
the cause.

Organic Farming
• The idea of chemically poisoning the soil fully enough to resist
pests such as club root fungus has never really proved to be one
hundred percent effective and, unfortunately, the end result is, of
course, a poisoned soil, such as we find in the intensive orange
groves in Spain.
• ‘Quick fixes’ are not and will never be a
substitute for good husbandry.
Natural farming, in its turn, is happy
to rely on healthy rotations of crops
as its main basis of prevention.
• The best author on The Natural Way of
Farming is Masanobu Fukuoka

Organic Farming

Organic Farming
• On the whole, organic gardening techniques may be more labour
intensive, but it depends what price you put on long-term peace-of-
mind for the soil.
• It also has to be said that in a world of unemployment and under
employment, it is a surprise that the allotment system, although on
the increase, has not made a much bigger comeback.
• Organic gardening also has the added advantage of having nature
on your side, rather then continually fighting her and so organic
techniques take a bit more planning. As the saying goes, “If you
don’t plan, you are planning for failure.”

Organic Farming
• The key to Fukuoka’s Natural Farming is the sowing of seeds on
undug, uncultivated ground, the co-sowing of green manures,
particularly clovers and the putting back on the land all
straw/stalks/leaves leftover from the harvest as mulching.

Composting
• Composting in Organic Farming is an excellent way of generating
soil food as well as well as providing mulch material.
• One of the finest soil foods is, of course garden compost. There is a
real art to making compost - it is rather like baking in that you have
to have a light hand!
• Composting requires oxygen and the best way to think about the
process is really that of a ‘biological bonfire’. When properly built, a
compost heap builds up its temperature until a working heap should
actually get to over 160 degrees Fahrenheit!
• It is then that high-temperature bacteria take over and finish the
process. The best designed compost bins keep the mechanics of
this process in mind, in that they should really be insulated.

Composting
• If you are making a wooden compost bin, make sure that the boards
are continuous and do not leave gaps in the sides, as some designs
appear to have.
• In Britain you will need a roof for your heap which lets water run off .
The best covering is not soil, as some books suggest, but a piece
of old textile carpet.
• There should also be some way for air to enter at the bottom of the
heap and brick channels or stemmed rubbish at the bottom of the
heap is probably a good idea. You can build a very simple bin with
two compartments, one for composting and the other for collecting
materials.

Composting
A simple compost bin

Composting
A double compartment compost bin

Composting
• For most people compost material comes a bit at a time from
kitchen waste and lawn mowings. A great way of making
compost is to have enough material to fill a bin and mix it all
together from the start. However if, like most of us, you do not have
this luxury, you start with the air channels (or twigs etc.) and build
up the heap in layers of vegetable matter and grass clippings
(always mixed with other material to break them up).
• Perennial weeds should be left out on racks to dry out (so that all of
the earth is taken from their roots) and then put towards the centre
of the heap. If your heap does get up to temperature then it will kill
weed roots and seeds. If you are worried about this, however,
these are the one thing you may wish to consign to the dust bin,
although any major throwing away of material from the garden is not
to be recommended as it is possible to recycle most things.

Composting
• To build a heap, spread nine inches of plant matter, then a layer of
activator which could be in the form of manure: pigeon manure is
very high in nitrogen, horse manure a bit less. There are even
herbal activators on the market. The purpose of the activator is to
provide nitrogen and basic food for the bacteria, thus this could be a
green manure of cut Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) or Nettle (Urtica
dioica).
• On top of this apply another layer of vegetable matter and a
sprinkling of lime. You will notice that manure and lime are kept
apart. Wood ashes (as long as they contain no coal ash) can be
used in place of the lime. The reason behind the use of lime is to
neutralise the build up of humic acid which, as we can see from
looking at peat, eventually stops any breakdown process as the
environment becomes too acid.

Composting
• Wood ash helps neutralise and also provides valuable potash. A
heap built up like this, kept moist (not wet) and allowed to heat up,
can break down to a lovely compost quite quickly. There is a huge
reduction in volume, however, and you should not be too
disappointed. You may only have 1/10th of the volume that you
put in the bin left at the end, but what is left is a wonderful plant
food, root selected and immediately available for uptake. And the
great thing is, for the want of a bit of effort, it is actually free.

Composting
• If a heap fails to start then it may require some more activator which
could be watered on. It is actually possible to use diluted urine
(which is naturally sterile) for this purpose. If a heap becomes too
cold and smelly it may have become too wet. A heap covered in
black polythene can often suffer from this as the moisture
condenses and runs back down on the heap, hence the earlier
recommendation of a carpet covering and a sloping roof to the bin.
If you’ve had the all-too-common experience of vegetable matter
rotting and then the weed growing through the heap in larger
gardens, often leaving rather forlorn grass sculptures around the
place, then you may wish to opt for a suggestion of Lawrence
Hill’s that is perhaps the easiest method of making compost, with
an additional useful by-product. Eliot Coleman also has good
advice.

Composting

Composting
• The trick is to grow Pea family members eg Liquorice (Glycyrrhiza
glabra) which provide the nitrogen for the breakdown. Simply dig
out a trench about 9 inches to a foot deep and fill it to 3 inches from
the top with kitchen waste. Be aware that potato skins with ‘eyes’
on them will grow, as will some vegetable tops. Chop your
vegetable waste in the soil and whiten it with lime, then cover it with
an inch of soil. Pea tribe members can then be sown and the
remaining two inches of soil covered
back in.

Composting
As the Pea family members grow, the roots break, forcing the
ground-level into the trench and the trench slowly sinks. This is
ideal for peas as they want their roots in the shade and it helps if
you have to water them - what could be nicer: you return any of
your kitchen waste to the soil and receive in return beautiful
legumes.
• The soil underneath will be enriched and you simply have to cut the
Pea member stem off at ground level and compost it leaving the
roots in place to rot down. In the city, you could try using a planter
trough - ideas and results of experiments in this are welcome.

Comfrey as soil food
• Another plant food pioneered by Lawrence Hills is Comfrey
(Symphytum officinale): that wonderful healer in herbal medicine is
also instant compost. The Comfrey leaves can be cut and put in
potato trenches or used as a mulch round any plant that likes
potash (it is best to cover the comfrey leaves with grass clippings to
stop them drying out too quickly).
• It is also possible to make a liquid feed by placing the leaves in a
drum and weighting them down with bricks.
• The resultant black goo is an excellent
all round feed and is ideal for plants such
as tomatoes when diluted 1:5 to 1:10
• It smells like animal manure.

Checkpoint!

Organic Farming
• So the message is, if you can feed your soil a good balanced diet
and keep your plants on a healthy rotation, you should not really
have to face problems.
• However, like medical text books, gardening books often end up
talking more about illnesses than health. A healthy growing plant
cell is actually very strong and many predators simply cannot break
the outer shell of the vegetable. It requires it to be ill in some way or
attacked by a pest for the insects to gain a foot (or claw-) hold. In
this way we can see that disease and pests are actually a way of
dealing with plants that are unhealthy.
• As soon as a plant gets out of balance, it seems to be hit from all
sides and very quickly disappears. Pests can actually single out
ailing plants and, in the same way as a predator interacts with its
herd, they can act to maintain the plants vitality.

Organic Farming
• There is an account about cabbage white butterflies, flying many
times over a field of organically grown cabbages. They landed
many times on Brassicas but on examination only very few, and
those which were ailing in some way, had been chosen by the
butterflies to lay their eggs on the leaves. So, from these
arguments, compost grown vegetables should suffer from fewer
pests.
• The Cabbage family’s other main enemy (apart from club root) is
cabbage root fly. When it arrives it lays its eggs on the surface of
the soil near to the stem and they then hatch out and burrow down
to give the nasty maggot-infested appearance of the infected root.
This is the second sign of infestation, the first being a withered
cabbage or failure to grow topside.

Natural Pest Control
• A very simple method of prevention is to cut roofing felt or any other
durable material into discs with a slit in the centre (you can now buy
these discs in garden centres).
• This disc is simply slipped round the stem of the cabbage. With a
barrier like this in place the maggots hatch out but cannot do any
damage to your plants - simple but elegant strategies.

• We now come to the age old dilemma of when it is right to take life.
We now have the idea of veganic gardening which incorporates
vegan ideas as well as organic techniques. If you do not wish to
have to kill any insects, then all the principles discussed so far will
have to be very keenly observed and you will have to allow the
populations of wild predators to build up. It has to be said that when
using any pesticides, even the most biodegradable, you are still
affecting some predators and, of course, the true head gardeners,
the bees.

• It can be nerve wracking to watch, but usually a build up of the
aphid population is then followed, in the fullness of time, by an
increase in the number of lady birds and their larvae, which balance
things out again.
• If you do decide that a particular pest warrants the death sentence,
then there are plant-based pesticides available, such as Derris
and Pyrethrum, which break down in the soil after about 24
hours. They are fairly selective and tend to go mainly for the
caterpillars, but it is safer to use these at night after the bees have
gone to bed.
• Of course, for aphids, simply washing off with soapy water can work
or a host of other plant remedies such as Rhubarb (Rheum sps)
leaves or Nettles (Urtica dioica) soaked in water or even Garlic
(Allium sativa) sprayed on the plants.
• Neat Capsicum (Capsicum minimum) tincture can be applied to tree
bark suffering from scale insect.

• The main thing is not to let the plant be attacked in the first place
and you will find that for susceptible crops there are techniques to
help minimise this. For example, when Legumes reach a
reasonable height it is best to remove the sweet young growing tips
(which can be eaten) which are the main point of attack for
blackfly. This also stimulates the plant to then produce beans
instead of more leaves.
• A companion plant can also help minimise attack.
• It is said that Roses, when planted with Garlic (Wild Garlic (Allium
ursinum) would be even better), exchange root secretions and so the
rose has less chance of blackfly
when growing in this arrangement.
Wild Garlic

Companion Planting
• Mixing Marigolds (Calendula officinalis) and herbs in the vegetable
garden to confuse or repel plant pests is a well-known example of
the practice of Companion Planting.
• Hundreds of examples of plant companions are recorded in garden
lore.
• Modern research substantiates the effectiveness of some
companion plants in repelling pests or attracting pest predators and
parasites.

Companion Planting
• However, the mechanisms that cause a plant to repel or attract
pests remain largely unverified, and many Companion Planting
practices continue to combine folklore and fact.
• It's interesting to find scientific justification for companion planting,
and it's fun to try your own companion planting experiments. We
managed to control an aphid attack in one of our Blackcurrant
(Ribes nigra) plots by planting Chives (Allium schoenoprasum).

Companion Planting
• "Evidence" from scientific studies and gardeners' experimentation
indicates several possible benefits from companion planting:
• Masking or hiding a crop from pests
• Producing odours that confuse and deter pests
• Serving as trap crops that draw pest insects away from other
plants
• Acting as "nurse plants" that provide breeding grounds for
beneficial insects
• Providing food to sustain beneficial insects as they search for
pests
• Creating a habitat for beneficial insects

Repel with Smell
• Experiments demonstrate that night-flying moths (parents of many
destructive cutworms and caterpillars) approach flowers by flying
upwind. If netting is placed over flowers, the moths will still land and
feed, indicating that they react to flower odour.
• However, moths won't land on coloured flowers that don't have
noticeable aroma. Can masking odours from plants such as
Marigolds work, too? If pests can't smell your prize plants, or if the
scent isn't right, maybe they'll go elsewhere.
• Common sources of repellent or masking fragrances include the
following plants.
Marigolds: Plant them as thickly as you can in a vegetable garden,
but keep in mind that unscented Marigolds won't work for this trick.

Repel with Smell
• French marigolds (Tagetes patula) below left, offer a second benefit
—their roots emit a substance that repels nematodes in the
immediate area.
Mints: Cabbage family pests and aphids dislike Catnip (Nepeta
cataria) below right and some other members of this fragrant family.
Since mints can grow out of control, set potted mints around your
garden or plant in areas where
growth can be controlled.

Companion Planting
• Rue (Ruta graveolens) : Oils from the leaves of Rue give some people
a poison-ivy-like, photosensitivity rash, so use this low-growing plant
with care.
However, what annoys people also deters Japanese beetles. Grow
rue as a garden border or scatter leaf clippings near beetle-infested
crops
• Sweet basil: Interplant (Ocimum basilicum) in vegetable or flower
gardens, or chop and scatter the leaves to repel aphids,
mosquitoes, and mites. It also acts as a fungicide and slows the
growth of milkweed bugs.

Companion Planting
• Tansy: Used as a mulch, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) see below, may
cause cucumber beetles, Japanese beetles, ants, and squash bugs
to go elsewhere for a meal. It attracts imported
cabbageworms, however, limiting its appeal as a repellent.
• Other interplanting possibilities exist.
• Try the following combinations in
your herb and vegetable garden:
• Plant Basil (Ocimum basilicum)
among your tomatoes to
control tomato hornworms.

Companion Planting
• Combine Thyme (Thymus vulgaris) or tomatoes with
cabbage plantings to control flea beetles, cabbage maggots, white
cabbage butterflies, and imported cabbageworms.
• Sow Catnip (Nepeta cataria) by aubergine/eggplant to deter flea
beetles.
• Set onions in rows with carrots to control rust flies and some
nematodes.
• Grow Horseradish (Amoracia rusticana) with potatoes to
repel Colorado potato beetles.
• Grow radishes or nasturtiums with your cucumbers for cucumber
beetle control.
• Alternate double rows of corn with double rows of snap beans or
soybeans to enhance the growth of the corn.

Companion Planting
• Interplant peanuts with corn or squash to increase the yields of both
crops.
• Plant spinach, lettuce, or Chinese cabbage at the base of trellised
peas, where they benefit from the shade and wind protection.
• Grow tomatoes, parsley, or basil with asparagus to help control
asparagus beetles.
Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) also deter whiteflies and
squash bugs, but they are more often used as a trap crop for
aphids, which prefer Nasturtiums to other crops.
• Planting a ring of them can
prevent damage to the trees (although the
nasturtiums won't look too great).

Support Beneficials
• The idea of gardening to attract insects may seem odd, but in the
case of beneficial insects, this companion planting technique can
really pay off. Although some beneficials feed on pests, host plants
provide food and shelter during some or all of their life cycle.
• Beneficial insects have short mouthparts. They can't reach deeply
into flowers for food. Plants with numerous, small flowers,
containing easy-to-reach pollen and nectar, provide the necessary
high-protein and high-sugar meals that maintain beneficial insect
populations.
• Help beneficial insects get a jump on early spring aphid activity by
planting Gazanias, Calendulas, or other small-flowered plants that
will grow in your area despite early-season cool weather. Beneficial
insects need a series of blossoms to sustain them from spring until
fall.

Support Beneficials
• Herbs such as Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) – see below, Dill (Anethum
graveolens), Anise (Pimpinella anisum), and Coriander (Coriandrum
sativum) are carrot-family members that produce broad clusters of
small flowers attractive to beneficials. Grow these culinary items
nearby your other herbs to keep away parasitic wasps.
• Composite flowers such as sunflowers, zinnias, and asters also
attract beneficials and have
a longer season of bloom
than carrot family herbs.

Support Beneficials
• Use this list of plants and the beneficials they attract to lure such
insects to your garden:
• Yarrow (Achillea spp. ): bees, parasitic j wasps, hover flies
• Angelica (Angelica archangelica): lady | beetles, lacewings
• Candytuft. (Iberis spp): syrphid flies
• Morning-glory (Ipomoea purpurea ): lady beetles
• Baby-blue-eyes (Nemophila menziesii ): syrphid flies
• Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis ): ground beetles
• Goldenrod (Solidago spp. ): lady beetles, predaceous beetles,
parasitic wasps
• A new native beneficial insect that predates on Western Flower
Thrips (WFT) is an exciting find for Australia where there are few
beneficial insects available to growers compared to their
counterparts in Europe and North America.

• The other method is to plan your growth with the pest’s life cycle in
mind. Onion fly used to be as big a problem as carrot fly. However,
people now buy their onions as sets, small bulbs which have been
halted in their growth. This is the best way to grow onions and it
means that your onions are still in storage when the onion fly would
have been active. In other cases, simple barrier methods can also
be effective.
• Remember the disc around the stem of Brassicaceae to prevent
cabbage root fly larvae damage. With a barrier like this in place the
maggots hatch out but cannot do any damage to your plants -
simple but elegant strategies. Carrot fly can even be deterred by
glass barriers at ground level. They seemingly have a low approach
angle in their flight! These methods are, above all things,
sustainable. For pest control, our chemical methods (including
"organic" pesticides), apparently so effective, are nothing other than
poison to the earth and, ultimately, to ourselves.

Summary
Today we have covered:
• Organic Farming
• Solutions to common
problems for organic
growers

Next Session
We will cover:
• Hydroponic growing

Preparation
Brief Notes
• Don’t forget to log on to the LMS and download and print off your
brief notes and handouts for the next session.

Herbal Cultivation session 7

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Herbal Cultivation session 7