Using Permaculture Integrated Pest Management For Intensive Gardens

See how permaculture and integrated pest management can your intensive vegetable garden grow even better and learn some strategies you can try today.

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What is integrated pest management?

Integrated pest management is an ecosystem-based strategy that focuses on the long-term prevention of pests. Pests are a sign that the environment, in this case, your garden, is out of balance. Permaculture integrated pest management teaches us as stewards of the land to understand why the system is out of balance and how the balance can be restored.

Getting out into the garden regularly and keeping a garden journal is helpful for you to spot a problem such as chewed leaves or seeing the pest then the steps you are taking to control the issue and bring your garden back into balance.

Changing Mindsets

Ok, I’m going to be straight with you. Insects, bugs, and weeds all have a right to be in your garden naturally. They all have a role to play in your garden’s ecosystem. Pests are part of the diversity of the natural world and require deterring not destroying.

When there is a massive increase in these pests, it shows that things are not quite right in your garden. When the soil and plants are right and working together, the pest problem will usually balance out and correct itself.

What causes pests?

So if pests are indicators that something is wrong in the garden, what might cause them to show up?

monocultures
growing the same plant in the same space each year
new insects being introduced in the area (e.g. brought in with shipped compost or plants from the nursery)
destruction of natural predators (e.g. use of non-target pesticides)
catastrophic events like fires or floods
plant breeding (e.g. new plant varieties are more attractive or susceptible to pest attack)

Become A Backyard Scientist

To take integrated pest management to the next level, you need to be able to identify what the pests are. Get familiar with the bugs and creatures in your garden. Have a pocket insect guide for your location and maybe even a small magnifying glass to see what it is. Being able to identify if it is a pest or beneficial insect will help you to determine the right management strategy for your garden.

Integrated Pest Management Methods

The most effective methods of integrated pest management in an intensive garden will take time to establish. Some thought is needed by you the gardener to help design your intensive garden to be a system that mimics the natural ecosystems. It’s this diversity and structure that creates resilience to the pests.

Encouraging Predators

Remember how cover crops used in the garden can help encourage beneficial insects into the garden? This is how you can encourage predators into the garden to help manage the pests. Increase their available habitats!

How To Do It

Plant a variety of plants in a garden bed and nearby. This could be by using companion planting, growing perennial flowers nearby, providing a water source for birds and insects such as a birdbath or a small pond. A small log pile can be an attractive home for lizards that can help tackle pests, whilst a bushy hedge in the garden or a bird feeder filled with seed can be attractive to birds.

Mulch and ornamental grasses provide a home to spiders that keeps stable temperatures and higher humidity that these critters prefer. Don’t get me wrong, I am most definitely not a spider fan. Why do spiders seem to flock to those who are the arachnophobes? But, in the integrated pest management plan of the garden, these critters can help take care of pests in big numbers. According to Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden, mulched gardens with spiders have less insect damage on plants than unmulched gardens.

Plants that attract these beneficial predators include

fennel
dill
cosmos
yarrow
marigolds
chrysanthemums
zinnia
poached egg plant or meadowfoam plant (Limnanthes douglasii)
mint
chamomile
sunflower
buckwheat
hairy vetch
clover

Think about how to add some of these to your garden beds or spaces around your main garden area. Interplanting these plants and other companion plants such as aromatic herbs with your vegetables helps to confuse the pests. They can’t easily see or smell their favorite plants in the garden bed!

Maintaining Soil Health

Healthy soil grows healthy plants! Covering the soil with a cover crop or mulch helps to protect it from washing away and helps to reduce diseases from being transmitted from the soil splashing up onto your vegetable plants where they wreak havoc.

Using cover crops helps to add diversity of plants back into the ecosystem. Providing a home and habitat or food source for the beneficial pollinators and predators. Dense plant spacing in the vegetable garden and using cover crops also help to keep the weeds out of the garden.

Crop rotation is a key part of helping to manage pests and keep soil healthy.

Physical Controls For Integrated Pest Management

Amazingly, using traps in the garden for some of these pests helps with balancing the pest numbers. Pests populations grow quickly whilst predators take a while to grow in population numbers. Using baits, traps, barriers, and lures in the garden can help with reducing pest numbers or interfere with their activities.

Barriers

Have you ever sprinkled crushed eggshell around a plant to stop slugs or snails? Barriers are placed around plants or garden beds to stop the pests from getting to them. They might be abrasive or dehydrating like diatomaceous earth or ash from a fire. Grease bands around the tree trunks of apple and pear trees in fall to deter the codling moth. Cardboard or felt collars around cabbages, broccoli, and cauliflower to prevent cabbage root maggots. These are all examples of barriers.

Lures, Bait, and Integrated Pest Management Traps

The tried and true slug beer trap is a great example of using traps in a garden. Other traps might be citrus shells, moist newspaper crumpled into cardboard tubes, and white sticky boards to trap thrips.

Lures and baits can be from using pheromones for your target pest to draw them into the trap or a more irresistible food source. Vinegar and sugar solution in plastic bottle traps can help attract away fruit flies from your fruit harvests.

You may find that you need multiple traps, lures, and baits to help bring down the pest population numbers.

Animals

Using animals in the intensive garden is definitely not a new technique. In fact, using animals to help bring balance to pest pressure is common to homesteads, home gardens, victory gardens, and small subsistence farms across the world.

Ducks and chickens are voracious eaters of bugs in the vegetable garden although care needs to be taken to make sure they don’t eat your plants too! Putting your compost in with chickens helps to not only add more nutrients from the chickens but the chickens eat the bugs in there. Letting chickens or ducks graze through the garden in fall when most of the harvest is gathered is a great way to reduce pest numbers as they find the ones trying to find a home to make it through winter.

Variety Choice

Some vegetable varieties have been selected year after year because of special traits like resistance to pests or diseases common in the area or when they mature. Most pests are at their peak in midsummer so try planting early or late varieties to avoid the bulk of the pests when your vegetables are ready to harvest.

Choose open-pollinated plant varieties or cultivars that grow well in your area.

Learn More

This post is part of a mini-training series. Click the links below to take you to the next training.

Double Digging and Soil Improvement

Plant Spacings

Composting

What Plants to Grow in an Intensive Garden

Cover Crops For Intensive Gardens

Keep reading and check out some related posts below:

I want to hear from you! Let me know what integrated pest management methods you plan to use! Let me know in the comments or over in the Facebook Group!

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