I do not have that much of a problem. The squash bug on squash.
Tomato horn worm on tomatoes & a few aphid on pea vines.
That is it for me.
Earth worms,beetle grubs in the compost,& many bees, some of them honeybees.
I give food away every year & have a 4' x 8' chest freezer to fill. I have some deer too.(in the garden & the freezer):-)
You may be joking, but the Wolf spider is in a family of 4000 ground spiders. FS is not poisonous to humans according to my information.

Here is a link that might be useful: wolf spiders

Encouraging to hear. Stink bugs have been a progressively worse problem each year here. I usually use neem pretty liberally and that would work. I would soak the ground and plant. Leap of faith this year and I am attempting to feed the soil and trying to take care of that. We will see.

I usually see a few squash bugs but not many. Have never seen a tomato hornworm but from what I understand I am fortunate not to have. Whatever the green worm is in corn, I have plenty of those.

If I hunted deer it would just be a matter of sitting in the back yard (love deer jerky) We are covered up with them here and they are practically tame. Sickening to see them wading through your garden in midsummer. I fenced my 30 foot by 50 foot garden spot with a 20 Acre Fi-Shock Heavy Duty electric fence about 3 years ago. 3 foot fence with chicken wire around the bottom and 1 electric strand around the top. It gets their attention. In fact it has kept out the raccoons, opossums, cats, dogs and ground hogs(but not spiders)(g)

As I have stated here many times, often to much derission, creating an environment where the beneficial insects can control the few insect pests works very well. When someone sprays a poison they not only kill off the pests, and the food supply for the beneficials, but the beneficials as well.
The link is about another concept along those lines.

Here is a link that might be useful: Aphids and Thrips

Wolf spiders have a painful, but not very toxic bite. They are not aggressive, and they eat a LOT of cricket-sized insects.

All this said, with no pesticides and saving the neem oil until I absolutely have to have it, I am betting my garden gets eaten alive this year. The trick is to WAIT ... you will have a rush of plant-eating bugs, and shortly afterward the bug-eaters arrive.

Right now I have a few plants that are encrusted with aphids at the tender tips, and I can see the lacewing and ladybug eggs on them. In a couple of days, the larvae will be munching on aphids.

Here is a link that might be useful: Bug eat Bug!

Kimm, what you keep stating is that constantly adding OM will solve all problems.

Once again I am here to tell you, from 13 years experience, that is not always true (I can state that at a minimum, and I strongly suspect that it is rarely true). My oldest garden now has 12% OM in the soil and the plants look great and still there are serious insect problems. It varies from season to season, no doubt because of factors that are far more complex than any of us can imagine.

What I think is definitely true is that one has to know the mineral starting point of one's soil. A certain amount can be surmised from observation. It isn't hard to tell if one has much clay or silt in the soil, or if it is a sandy loam, or just sandy, or just clayey. The extremes will have major problems right away. The extremes also will most likely not have all problems solved by adding lots of OM no matter how many years, because the OM itself is almost certainly deficient in certain minerals.

The most common situation in an organic garden is tons of OM in the soil, plants grow well and look good, and there are some very persistent problems because some minerals are low, which also means the produce is deficient as food.

We are all in for organic so for better or worse we will see what happens. I am willing to let the troublesome insects get a foothold and wait for the beneficials .

My concern is for insects like our stink bugs. Depending on the species (if it is the China version)they do not have a natural preditor here. The new hatchlings should be very vulnerable but I do not normally see much getting after them. But as said above I have never really gone totally organic before.

o man you have now come to organics the way nature intended. if you want to have a clean crop set up a bug net system. they block some light thogh but it is worth it. Look up the benifits of garlic as a pestiside. you can order Praying Mantis's online lol. thy kill

Plants that are getting all their nutrients in reasonable balance, plus adequate moisture and sunfall, and growing at the correct time of year for the climate, have near total resistance to insect attack.

Those requirements are not easy to meet, of course, whether organic or conventional.

pnbrown, apparently you have only been reading small bits and pieces of what I wite here. I have also warned people about putting too much OM in soil, but have tried to get people to understand about nutrient balance as well.
Often I tell people that a good healthy soil will grow strong and healthy plants that will be less affected by insect pests and plant diseases then unheqlhty plants growing in unhealthy soils. Kind of what you wrote above.

I know of somone who grows record size fruits pesticide free with only compost tea. he brews the tea adding sugar to it to help the microbs he pours it on his plants and in the soil the cell wall of the palnt builds so strong insects/desease cant effect..Please read my Post in composting called "advanced composting".

Spinach and snap peas often grow very well without fertilizer, at least in fairly good soil. Spinach grow in any soil with out anything added at all. Tomatoes are more demanding, and needs more careful attention to compost, and added nutrients. Fish emulsion often are pure nitrogen, and you need something with lots of kalium. Soil often contain enough phosphorous naturally, at least plenty in cow manure and many other organic fertilizers.

So MG1, nature intended for us to use raymax?

Yep, Old Mother Nature is all about big factories making synthetic products for gardeners.

Toaseeker, your post is nonsensical: spinach certainly will not produce in any soil without any inputs. I just came from florida and growing in nearly pure sand so I can say for certain your statement is incorrect. It is an odd thing to add to a statement that spinach will grow well in "good" soil. Really, most everything grows well in good soil. That is the definition of good soil.

pnbrown

raymax? isnt that a laser or somthing like that i would look it up but i have no idea why you said it? here are both my responses to this....
1."o man you have now come to organics the way nature intended. if you want to have a clean crop set up a bug net system. they block some light thogh but it is worth it. Look up the benifits of garlic as a pestiside. you can order Praying Mantis's online lol. thy kill"
raymax?????????????????????????????//
2."I know of somone who grows record size fruits pesticide free with only compost tea. he brews the tea adding sugar to it to help the microbs he pours it on his plants and in the soil the cell wall of the palnt builds so strong insects/desease cant effect"

I am not sure what raymax is? Please it went over my head?

Merely saying that I don't at all think that "nature" "intended" for people to use a 'bug net system'.

Ok that is what i was thinking you ment. You are correct about nature never intended to use bug nets but fact is they grow more safer, cleaner, productive crops. No need for spraying because bugs cant get to them.

My 2 cents here. Now keep in mind I'm all hat and no cattle when it comes to successful organic growing. But the light that got tripped for was this book recommended to me by another poster on the vermicomposting board. "Teaming with Microbes". If you've read then you know what I'm talking about if you haven't(well you should consider it(g)). Eye opening book. Doesn't harp but puts into farmer terms(for me) a little of what is actually going on in the soils. So when I'm adding organic material(mulch) to the soil I'm not trying not trying to get minerals to break down into the soil. I'm feeding bacteria and trying to establish bacterial dominance in the soil which, in turn will help get the results I want. (in theory so for me so far)

I'm sure this book has surely been discussed on these boards somewhere in depth but I keep reading and rereading. Fascinating for me. I'll provide a link to the book and amazon and notice there is a "look inside me link" right next to the picture of the book. So clicking that will let you read the first 22 pages and the appendix of the book. I read the 22 pages and was hooked. Went out and bought from a local books-a-million because I wanted it now. First item there that got my attention was "Plants are in control"

Teaming With Microbes.

I second the Teaming with Microbes recommendation. They've somehow managed to make the subject entertaining and accessable.

I have only ever grown without chem ferts and poisons. However, lately with taking course in nutrient density and doing a lot of reading on the subject of fertility research going back to the 1880's, I have become aware that there is a lot more involved than the average idealistic organic gardener (like myself until recently) has any inkling of.

I read that first 22 pages of 'teaming with microbes'. It is clear that they are describing best-case typical soil systems for moist cool climates which also happen for the most part to be within the glaciated zone. They ignore both all other climates, which have very different systems (for example, in drier hotter climates where sandy soils exist ants completely displace worms and do the same jobs), as well as non-typical soils within moist cool climates. For example, beach dune soils are not at all like what they describe, even though those are found in moist cool climates as well as everywhere on the planet. Why? Have those areas been wrecked by synthesized fertilizer? Of course not. They simply don't hold any moisture and so the soil life and flora above is totally different.

While I entirely agree that high salt-index chemical N-ferts are a big problem, and that N is massively over-applied all over the world in conventional ag, demonizing all "synthesized fertilizers" and claiming that any application of them will destroy the soil life is certainly unprovable and probably not correct. Addition of any missing minerals is difficult or impossible without using synthesized fertilizers. Since I was not able to read the whole book I will have to presume that they deal with the issue of mineral deficiencies and how to correct them so I'd be curious to know what their strategy is in that regard. Probably fine rock powders.

Organic sources of minerals:
Phosphorous - bone or rock phosphate
Potassium - wood chips, rock potash, greensand
Calcium - dolomite, limestone, bone
Zinc - granite dust
Molybdenum - rock phosphate
Trace minerals such as copper - granite meal, greensand (glauconite), kelp meal

I am perplexed as to why someone would say that you cannot get minerals except in a synthetic fertilizer

Here is a link that might be useful: Building Up Soil

Greene, as I understand it, there are two different ways to effectively add minerals: the finely ground rock powders, and the various salts.

The rock powders are usually many minerals together (good example is the dolomitic limestone you list for Ca, but you don't mention that it has lots of Mag also - that is why so many old hay fields have very high Mag). So let's say one's copper is low but everything else is ok. Using rock powder one is going to raise other nutrients at the same time, so the relative deficiency is not really being corrected. To hit one mineral one generally will have to use a salt form, like copper sulfate. If one's soil has a high level of humus or clay colloids it will be able to handle moderate amounts of mineral salt without undue damage, and once that mineral is brought up it should be able to be retained unless it is being steadily removed by heavy cropping.

My garden is very low in K right now. If I tried to correct that with such a clumsy addition as wood chips (seriously?) it would be nearly unusable for years. I think you must mean fully broken down wood chips or bark. IOW, finished or nearly finished compost. Yes, good compost tends to have plenty of the macro-nutrients but the traces will vary depending of course on the soils the materials were grown on. Also, most gardeners do not have access to the amounts required to correct deficiencies. Not to mention that large amounts will drive some nutrients overly high, for example my Ca and P are too high in relation to the other nutrients because of using a lot of composted manure over the years.

Yes, I do mean at least partially decomposed wood chips.
The reason I say partially, is that partially decomposed wood chips
will grow a fungus that kills nematodes, but fully decomposed wood chips will not.

And when I say partially decomposed wood chips, I mean they have reached the point
where they are producing more nitrogen than they are consuming.
Garden-ville compost in San Antonio would be a good example.

At least we are in hearty agreement on one thing.
Adequate minerals is one of the keys to healthy plants that can fend off insects.

Please forgive me if I am overly skeptical of anything synthetic.
Maybe it comes with getting older.
I have simply been told so many times that something was safe and then it turned out not to be.
Copper sulphate has been shown to cause liver damage in vineyard workers.
Rotenone can induce Parkinson's disease.
Bacillus thuringiensis spores can cause fatal lung infections in mice.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, .....

I will use all natural amendments to a point.
And I bend over backwards to attract predators, use rotations, use a trellis for squash, etc.
But my philosophy over the years has adapted to change what I grow to fit my climate and soil.
If I start having insect or disease problems, then I must be growing the wrong vegetable / fruit for my area.
Then I try something different.

You have a valid point in that it can be difficult to find a soil amendment that has just the right minerals.
But usually, there is a safer more natural source than an isolated synthetic.
For example, granite dust has such a slow release of potassium that it is really only useful for trace minerals.
On the other hand, I cannot say for sure that someone would not find themselves in a dilemna of needing one mineral only and no way to get it naturally.

Here is a link that might be useful: Controlling Insects

I agree wood chips broken down to that extent are a nice product. I have a couple big piles a year old so a couple years to go. Leaves in a big pile for a couple years are nice too. I like those things because the fungi are high. I keep a lot of mulch on the ground which keeps fungi high also.

Right now I am putting low-index salts in because I know I am low in K, Mag, S, Mn, Cobalt and moly. My percent OM is quite high so I think the soil can handle some direct apps. In the future I will only apply salts with charcoal or humate. I am also putting in some super fine granite dust but I don't have much of that. I did some greensand a few months ago but not much. Prior to this I have not mineralized since starting food production 13 years ago when i did some greensand and rock phosphate. So it is much overdue and salts are really the only way to get minerals into play quickly.

Urine and wood-ash are nutrients in mostly salt form as well which is why urine should buffered by dilution or soaking OM, and wood-ash should be used fairly lightly.

We know so little about soil & earthworms or bees.
I doubt we know much about microbes, either.
I have tilled the soil in the Organic way for 30 years & persons who read a book are telling me I am kill the soil.

Who told you not to till the soil?

gnhelton

"Who told you not to till the soil?"

Teaming with micros did like you wrote above? "No-till"

Correct. So who read a book and told jolj not to no-till?

I believe jolj read the forward of the book I linked and the forward was written by Dr. Elaine Ingham. Dr. Ingham's doctorate is in Microbiology with an emphasis on soil.

I simply mentioned I enjoyed the book and highly recommended it .

youtube link.

SOIL not DIRT - Dr Elaine Ingham talks Soil Microbiology

No, I will read your link after I post this.
The guy name is JAY & he lives in S.C.
He said that the micros are killed when you till & that the
micros get anger when you add 10-10-10 or some other Synthetic.
I do not know how anyone can know how micros feel, but that is what Jay said.
Also some person on this forum repeat two themes, do not use peat moss & do not till, because it kills the food web.
But in the above post I was talking about JAY, I will ask him to post the book title. I forget in my old age.
We all have a right to garden the way we think is best.
I am not saying you are wrong, just not my way of doing thing at this time.

jolj, I want to apologize for coming across so haughty.

I was confused as to who you were referring to. I feel exactly as you do. Each should garden the way they see fit, the last thing I would want to do is insist someone else do what I feel is best for them. Plus I stink at organic gardening right for now. Even if you want to pee on your plants like pnbrown.(g)

Actually I rarely urinate directly on plants. Urine is much more useful when chelated (aged). Sawdust or wood shavings well-soaked in chelated urine break down quickly into a nice fertilizer, and of course hay or straw so soaked is best of all.

Like all strong N ferts, urine should be applied lightly to growing plants or to active soils (during the growing season).

No problem, I seem to confuse people sometimes.
I say Jay & he does not remember the book, so maybe he dreamed it.
The last two post have me LOL:-)
I would think urine would burn tomatoes, just as it does English Box Wood.
I like to mark my garden with urine to keep other alpha gardeners & deer out.
It works until the hot Summer sun, burns up all of the wild grass, then they eat EVERYTHING.

The deer eat everything, not the Alpha gardener!!!

The most talked of method is companion planting with flowers and herbs. You can try pot ash as well, there were lots of squash bug, squash vine borer researches I went through last year, trying some of them now.

Pyrethin daisies, they are pink and hard to find the seeds, soften the backs of squash bugs, then the potash can seep through to kill them faster. I think that's it, but search it to find out. I just planted seeds, so no flowers yet, but 2 squash plants, to afraid to add the potash just yet being they are only a few inches tall.

Try to one row of herbs next to one row of what vegetable/vegetables can grow next to them, plant flowers every few feet or at the end each row. I'm trying flowers at the end of each row with herbs or pepper rows next to them to see if it works.

Good luck fighting off the bugs, my neihbor lady is using insecticide and I'm 5 feet away, but trying to do organic. Her's looks great and already got brocolli, but the aphids were attacking her tomatoes.

Don't forget that tomato leaves and tobacco are considered a nice additive to homemade insecticides. Always add some red pepper seeds, Cayenne peppers grow like mad, so if you plant some this year you can add to your homemade insecticide soon enough.

I haven't read the book, but read other articles and advertisements about no till gardens. Over refining the soil with tillers is bad, but aeriating the soil is necessary with probably a broadfork or digging fork.

You can plant ragweed over the area for fall planting, it will naturally compost down over the winter and keep the soil soft. It has a deep taproot to bring up moisture and nutrients from the surface below.

Good luck on you quest. Everyone is always searching for a nice alternative, bt did not work on squash vine borers, gave up and refusing to use it this year. Going for the potash and paper mulching for squash.

What exactly do you mean by 'pot ash'? The fly ash from a wood fire? IME, that has little effect on hard-shelled insects. DE has more effect, but is not highly effective on a severe infestation. Nothing is other than serious synthesized insecticides.

Severe insect infestations are a certain indication of mineral deficiency in the plant. It means the plant is not making enough complex molecules -proteins, which are indigestible to herbivorous insects.

I don't think that severe insect infestations are a certain indication of mineral deficiency in a plant. The place where I had the worst problems with insects preying on my plants had soil that was more than 30% rock fragments, which is a LOT of minerals. The stink bugs were incredibly bad there.

I will agree, though, that the only thing that kills stink bugs is synthetic pesticides. I tried the pyrethrin and all it did was knock them onto the ground. They'd squirm around a bit and then they'd get right back up on the plants. That's when I felt the most tempted I've ever felt to use synthetics. I ended up shifting the tomatoes to a previously unused spot under some trees, which I tilled--yes, I am that evil that I till. They grew great and no bugs. I ended up abandoning that plot and using other parts of the yard and large pots, which worked well. I believe that land there was simply used too long for a veggie plot and the previous owner most likely had to use synthetics to keep planting where he did, so bug populations had built up hugely. My neighbor has a similar problem here. He throws Sevin on his garden just as a matter of course. His soil is dead as a doornail and he has bugs eating his veggies and I don't (this place had no gardens prior to my moving in--all turf and still 1/3 rock frags).

Stink bugs are disgusting.

For plants to get minerals from rock, the particles have to be extremely fine. Not sure how fine rock "fragments" are, but we are talking about close to the fineness of clay particles. otherwise all the plants get is what is wearing out of the rock yearly from weathering.

Mineral deficiency tends to be worse the coarser the soil is, so a soil composed of 1/3 fragments, depending on what the remaining portions are, may be very deficient.

Peaceful Valley Farm Supply (groworganic.com) has a great little booklet called "Understanding Your Soil Report" for, like $10. It lists all of the organic amendments needed to solve certain deficiencies. Like kelp meal if you are low K. You can also get a phone consultation. Kelp meal is pretty cheap because you really don't add very much to correct a problem.

I've focused a lot on adding organic amendments to get my soil in good shape, which includes adding some really good compost.

Yesterday, I showed my garden to a friend. The plants look like they are on steroids and I don't have much of a bug problem.

After about 4 weeks, results are in on my highly unscientific experiment and different types of mulches are in.

Vegetable plants mulched in shredded grass clippings are about 1 third to double the size of plants with mulches mixed with dried leaves and grass, shredded wood chips and grass, dried leaves and plane shredded wood chips.
Pulled back the other type mulches today and replaced with grass clippings.

I've put fish emulsion for every plant twice. Vermicastings were placed around each plant. Made an aerated tea out of the same compost, sprayed each plant and row, and poured about 16 oz at the base of each plant.

My results:
1 Grass clippings.
2 Dried leaves with grass
3 Wood chips and grass.
4 Wood Chips.

Results may vary. Have no idea if they are typical.

Bugs have been tolerable so far, lots of squash bugs on the spinach, lots of holes. A few aphids on the tomatoes. Nothing touching the lettuce so far

The discussion of minerals is very interesting. I read Teaming with Microbes last year, and I thought it was fascinating, as well. I may have missed it, but I don't remember a discussion of minerals.

I do live in a cool, moist environment in the glaciated zone - New Hampshire. There are rocks *everywhere* on my property. Every time I put in new plants, even in the veggie garden where the soil was once upon a time double-dug, somehow a rock turns up. (We joke that we have magic rock seeds.) In the front yard and near the house in back, there is a varying amount of top soil with yucky sand underneath from the builder carting away the soil ~40 years ago. In the woods in back, there is about 6" of lovely forest humus with clay underneath.

I've been gardening seriously/more intensively for 5 or so years. (I've always done OG and we've owned the house for 11 years.) Assuming my soils were decent in minerals originally (I don't know), what's the best way to keep them that way for the long haul? I do use compost, manure, and a complete OG fertilizer (North Country or Espoma). I just sent my soil for a "real" test at the Extension for the first time - they usually measure some of the trace elements in the OG panel, right?

As far as the idea of bringing in praying mantids, I'd advise against it. I let my nature-loving son get a PM egg case 2 years ago. Last year was the first year we ever had insect problems. We noticed a definite change in the overall insect population, including a lot fewer beneficials. We're hoping things will gradually balance themselves. It's like bringing in a T-rex or something - those suckers are a little scary....

If there is a quarry not to far you can go there and see if they do any sifting of rock dust. Granite dust if sufficiently fine is great stuff with many minerals. It has a lot of K which gets sucked out of gardens pretty quickly. Though if you have clay soil it will not be generally as low in minerals as sandier soils.

The soil test is important, and should give you a snapshot of many of the minors as well as majors. Some people believe that the minors should have much higher ppm's than the land-grant universities recommend, which would mean that even if the university lab (UNH?) tells you your traces are adequate the other school of thought might say they are low.

Predators showed up not long after and poof. So far no chemicals ferts and zero pesticides.

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tomato/msg0622481928572.html

Everyone's soil, zone and garden is different...but what works for me is lots of aged horse manure mixed in with our very nice clay soil. It's nice because it's on the edge of the Palouse, but it's still clay. Slime in spring, cement in summer...without the manure.

I don't spray anything but water and mix in lots of companion plants. This brings in the good bugs and keeps out the deer, for the most part. That being said, I don't grow corn or other tall veggies I can't hide from the deer.

Probably wouldn't work for everyone, but I've had great luck, so far. Also, adding living muches shades the soil, keeping weeds down and less watering. My favorites are alyssum with the annuals and violas and strawberries with the perennials. Don't care if I eat the strawberries (the birds love them) but they're great around the raspberries and blueberries. I also added bee balm, to keep out the deer.

Again, might not work for everyone...but keep trying until you find what works well for you! :)

This is such an interesting discussion. I'm a new to not just organic gardening, but gardening in general. I'm not doing anything special and now I'm wondering if that is a mistake.