Category Five of a Kind

As the season changes and signs of new life begins to emerge with the arrival of spring, it’s easy to think about it as a season of abundance. But as we break out of our winter dormancy and the soil begins to warm up, spring is a season of abundant growth. And it’s because of that we often find very little food ready to harvest from our vegie gardens.

Known as ‘the hungry gap’, it was traditionally dealt with by preserving enough summer and winter produce to see families through at least the early part of the season. A greenhouse or polytunnel is another good way to extend the growing season of certain plants, as is foraging for edibles such as wild garlic, but all require resources, forward planning and time that many of don’t always have.

There are still vegetables that will grow and produce for you during the seasonal gap while we get ready to plant out our summer crops. Some are conventional spring cropping vegies, some need to be thought of in a different way than we otherwise would, but all are delicious and nutritious ways to eat from your garden throughout the so-called hungry gap.

It sometimes feels like as soon as we begin to enjoy our garden, so do the pests and diseases! Warm and damp weather can promote lush growth on our plants, which seems to send a signal to pests and diseases to come in and take up residence.

But identifying the common ones and knowing how to manage them will ensure our plants and ecosystems stay healthy and in balance. Because for many of our pests there is a natural predator ready to devour them for us, eliminating the need to resort to sprays. So while keeping our plants in tip-top condition can be challenging, observation is our first line of defence.

It’s important to understand your garden needs to have pests in order to have predators, so try and resist the urge to manage them immediately and wait and see if nature will solve the problem for you.

Your garden, big or small, is an ecosystem where living things interact with each other and their environment. An ecosystem is healthy when the relationships – insect/ insect, plant/insect or living/non-living – within it function well. Formed over many thousands of years, these relationships provide services such as pollination, water filtration and biocontrol.

Biocontrol is the process of using living organisms to manage plant and animal pests with minimal negative consequences. Because spraying, whether organic or not, can lead to unhealthy soil and decreasing pollinator numbers. One of the best forms of biocontrol is to have predatory insects feed on unhelpful pests. To attract them, plant diversity is key; the more beneficial insect attracting plant species you have in your garden, the more beneficial insects you’ll have.

It’s okay to have a few pests in your garden – they will feed the beneficial bugs and help prevent an outbreak. Biocontrol is a terrific permaculture concept, making less work for you and more food to share.