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Agriculture

Gardening 101

Edwin Dysinger

Paul Dysinger

Where to Do It

How to Do It

How to Water It

When and How to Grow It

Pest and Weeds

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this time to come and to share together.

And as we think about pests and diseases in the garden, it reminds us of how we have an adversary in even our spiritual lives as well.

And Father, I pray that you would teach us to deal with the root problem.

And I pray that you would teach us through nature that we would learn more about you and how you work and how you deal with us and the relationship that you long to have with us.

Okay, I want to start out by introducing you to 2 different paradigms.

So I believe that these 2 paradigms are not only true in the realm of agriculture, but they are true in the rest of life as well, but I'm going to talk about them from the realm of agriculture and I think you'll recognize how to make application otherwise.

So the first paradigm says that the insect pest or disease is the problem.

It's damaging and reducing our expected harvest.

And so since this pest or disease is causing our problem and damaging our harvest, we need to eliminate it.

So we are searching for some way to kill the pest or the disease.

And in this paradigm, where is our focus?

Okay, the second paradigm says only weakened or stressed plants are susceptible to insect or disease pressure.

The insect, pest, or disease is evidence or a sign that the plant is stressed or weakened.

To reduce or eliminate the pest or disease, we must discover what's causing the stress and what's weakening the plant.

Now, most Often, whatever is stressing the plant or weakening it is at the root level.

Not always, but most of the time that's where it is.

There can also be something else, like too much sun or too little, too much water or not enough water, too hot or too cold.

You know, there are a number of other things that are not in the soil that could be stressing your plant.

But anyways, the focus here is what is going to is what is going to make my plant thrive?

So which paradigm would you prefer to live with?

Now 1 thing I, now, I don't know if you're seeing connections here to some of the other realms, as in health, and maybe as in spirituality, and whatever.

There's 2 different ways of looking at things.

So 1 thing I want to be clear on is that these 2 paradigms, these 2 different paradigms, are not the difference between conventional agriculture and organic agriculture.

Okay, There is a difference between conventional agriculture and organic agriculture, but these 2 paradigms are not describing that difference.

In other words, you can organically, using organic materials, operate in the first paradigm.

These are 2 different ways of looking at life.

Some people might want to be wondering what then is the difference between organic and synthetic chemical poisons.

The primary difference is that organic poisons are naturally derived from something already existing in nature, and 2, is they tend to degrade rapidly.

So they're not effective for a long period of time.

The synthetic chemical ones, they're often made so that they're effective for a long period of time.

You know, people have spent money to put this on, they want it to laugh.

So, now, you have an insect problem in your garden, honestly, there often is not a lot you can do.

Sometimes there is something you can do, But using the first paradigm, you often cannot really resolve the situation with the current crop that you have.

It's sometimes by the time you notice or realize that you've got an issue, the disease or the insect presence is well established and it's really hard to organically knock something that's well established like that.

But you can take note in preparing for next season.

And that's 1 of the blessings of farming is that God gives us another chance.

And so, so what can we do to deal with an insect pest or disease pressure that we have right now, we're going to go over some things.

But 1 thing we want to do is we want to look at the system that God has established.

Okay, out in the natural world, do you see insect pests or diseases just running rampant?

Out in the woods or, you know, in the natural world.

Okay, so it does happen, but let me ask you, is the insect or the disease that is attacking and destroying those trees, is that a native thing or something that got imported?

So, the point I'm trying to make is that in the natural world, there are checks and balances that keep diseases and pests from just going crazy.

And that's why we have forests that continue to be forests for hundreds of years.

The diseases and pests that are uncontrolled have been brought in from outside and they don't have those natural checks and balances managing them.

But this is a reason, this idea of checks and balances, this is a reason that we are very reluctant to use strong chemicals, whether they're organic or not.

For example, pyrethrum is a, and a common product with pyrethrum is pyganic.

And it is a very strong and very effective insecticide.

And we do use it occasionally, but we really don't like to use it.

Because if you use it, you're not gonna only knock out your disease pest, you're also going to knock out the beneficial insects that are preying on your pest.

The part of the checks and balances, you're knocking out the whole system.

And then you're leaving things weaker for the future.

So We're going to talk about different organic ways that we can handle pests and diseases when you have the problem, in the problem, just keeping in mind this bigger picture that we would prefer our first line of defense against diseases is to have a healthy plant.

And your first strategy in having a healthy plant is to have a healthy soil.

Plants do have immune systems just like we do.

And they will fend off disease and they'll fend off pests and we have seen it happen over and over again in our garden.

They will fend them off if they are healthy.

Well my computer, okay here it's coming up.

My computer knows it's plugged into the projector, but I don't know about the projector.

So dealing with pests and diseases like that, we're saying we've seen it over and over.

We had a hoop house that was put in where there was a slope.

And so in order to level off the ground, we had to scrape some of the ground from 1 side to the other side.

And naturally, that scraped the top soil all to 1 side of the hoop house.

So 1 side of our hoop house had unideal soil, the other side had beautiful topsoil.

It was going 1 way, so 1 end of the hoop house had good topsoil and the other end...

So we planted a bed of spinach and you could literally see the difference with the spinach going down the hoop house.

The spinach on 1 side that didn't have the good soil was much yellower and was also attacked by, there were smaller leaves, and was attacked by insects.

And as you would go down the hoop house to the other end, where the soil was better and the plants had a better environment, more nutrients, the plants were much larger, greener, and there was hardly a bug hole in them.

So that was just a very practical, you know, why were the bugs going for the, you know, the compromised plants?

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Gardening 101

Pest and Weeds

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