Oh, but you don't need any... if you don't have any bugs!!! Your food will be better without *cides!

Moni

I do have bugs already on my asparagus. I have some insecticidal soap but haven't put anything on yet. I am interested in the safest cides. Hand picking doesn't work the beetles fly or drop to the ground and I can't catch them.

I try to avoid using all the *cides too. As Moni mentioned, your food, flowers and herbs will be healthier if you don't spray them with a lot of substances.

With fungal issues, there are different fungicides available and you need to wait until you actually have a fungal issue so you can buy the product best suited to whatever fungi your plants have. Often all you need is a baking soda spray. I have gardened for my entire life and, other than spraying roses for black spot before I stopped using chemical fungicides years ago, I almost never have a fungal issue that requires the plants be sprayed. I bet I don't spray more often than once every 5 years. It is easier to prevent fungal problems by mulching the ground well to reduce soil splash which carries disease up onto the plants. It also helps if you put water only on the ground and not on the plant foliage when you water by using soaker hoses or drip irrigation instead of sprinklers. Spacing plants properly to encourage good air flow also reduces the incidence of fungal issues occurring on your plants.

It is possible most years to garden without the use of pesticides. Your garden is its own ecosystem and it will be full of insects (both the beneficial ones and the destructive ones). The beneficial insects help keep the number of pest insects low. Between 95-98% of the insects you see in your garden are beneficial and it would be a shame if you sprayed with a pesticide that killed all of them just because there are a few destructive insects. Not only will the beneficial insects help control the destructive insects, so will many other inhabitants of your garden ecosystem. In my garden in the last few days I have seen toads (they eat lots of destructive pest bugs), lizards, a snake (eek!), song birds of different kinds, butterflies (love them and wouldn't want to harm them), hummingbirds (they eat small insects), turtles (among other things, they patrol the rows of potatoes every year and will control the Colorado Potato Beetles for me), dragonflies (eat oodles of pests), bees and hover flies (essential for pollination), lady bugs (they eat many pests including mites and aphids), and green lacewings (voracious eaters of many pests). This is how I prefer my garden---teeming with life, not nuked with dangerous pesticides.

When I do have a problem insect, I try to use the least toxic solution and try to use a narrow-spectrum product that kills only the targeted pest.

My garden is so full of insects that many children of our friends have done their insect collection assignment for school using insects from our garden. We still have a very beautiful and very productive garden every year. I wouldn't want to be outside every day in a garden full of pesticides, which often include nerve poisons or endocrine disrupters. Also, I believe that one of the main advantages of growing our own veggies, fruits, herbs and flowers is that we have healthy, chemical-free plants.

When I was a kid, my dad, other gardening relatives and our gardening friends all relied heavily upon chemical pesticides (including DDT). I hated it. The garden smelled bad all the time from the pesticides, and the pest problems got worse and worse the more they sprayed. The main reason why? They were killing off all the beneficial insects that helped keep the pests under control. Most of the pests that damage gardens are herbivores. Their population rebounds quickly. The beneficial insects are carnivores. Their population cannot rebound after being sprayed with a pesticide as quickly as the herbivores do. This is because the carnivores won't reproduce large numbers of young until there is a large enough population of herbivores to support their babies. So, every time you use a broad-spectrum pesticide you hurt the carnivores more and more, thereby allowing the herbivores to run wild with no predatory insects to keep their numbers low. Insects also are good at developing a tolerance of specific pesticides, so the more you use them, the more you are helping to develop pesticide-resistant pests.

I am not saying you never will need to use a pesticide, but just that there are other methods to use first. We have lived here since 1999 and I have never once used a broad-spectrum pesticide to spray my entire garden. I hope that I never have to. I will spray an individual insect or group of them if I find them on a plant doing a large amount of harm, but in that case I will stand there with a spray bottle in my hand directly spraying the pest insect. I did that last year with black blister beetles that I found on two different cucumber plants.

I've always avoided using pesticides as much as possible. Here is an example of why: the bluebirds. I love seeing bluebirds in our yard and in the surrounding fields. One year we had horrendous levels of grasshoppers in our rural area. It was about 10 or 11 years ago. Many of the ranchers and farmers sprayed pesticides heavily, using restricted pesticides not even available to the average homeowner. Did theses chemicals kill the grasshoppers? It was hard to tell. I used organic products and had better control than the folks who sprayed chemicals. It was obvious too because some of those guys came over and asked what I was using. Why would total strangers stop at our house and ask that question? Because When they would drive up our road, they'd notice very low numbers of hoppers flying up out of our bar ditch compared to the rest of the area. Anyhow, when they found out I used organic control methods, they really weren't interested in continuing the discussion. Meanwhile, guess what happened to the bluebirds? They all disappeared. All of them. I suspected they died after eating grasshoppers and other pests sprayed heavily that year with pesticides. I was horrified by the loss of the bluebirds. It was at least 3 years before we began seeing bluebirds again and, to this day, the bluebird population still isn't as large as it used to be. So, when I am tempted to spray a broad-spectrum pesticide, I think about the bluebirds and all the other members of my garden's ecosystem that would be harmed, and I choose not to use that pesticide. I am not saying I never use pesticides because sometimes I do. However, I use them as an absolute last resort and I use them as the final step in Integrated Pest Management. I also always start with the least toxic option and work my way up
to progressively more toxic methods over time if the least toxic method doesn't work. I even totally avoid the use of some organic pesticides because they are very dangerous. Just because a pesticide is of organic origin rather than synthetic does not necessarily mean it is safer to use.

When I began gardening as an young wife and mother, I lived a short distance away from my parents home. By them it was the mid-1980s. I noticed my dad used almost no chemicals by then, and as more and more grandkids came along, he used the pesticides less and less. Eventually he was gardening almost as organically as I was, having discovered the chemical pesticides really didn't help all that much anyway, and having reached the point that he didn't want his grandchildren exposed to all those chemicals.

I don't know if what I have said here will persuade you to avoid developing a heavy reliance on pesticides, but at least I tried. It would have been far easier and less time-consuming for me to quickly list 3 or 4 pesticides and fungicides, but doing so wouldn't have been in keeping with my own gardening philosophy and principles. I hope I have given you something to think about, at least.

Dawn