Non-toxic pest control is becoming more popular with the growing interest in organic gardening. In fact, one of the most common questions asked by new organic gardeners is on how to get rid of pests without using chemical pesticides.
As a result, you will find many recipes for homemade "organic" pesticides on the Internet and in books.
For this article, organic pesticides means pesticides that organic gardeners are allowed to use for non-toxic pest control.
Spot-spraying dandelions with vinegar
But the problem with focusing on moving from chemical pesticides to organic pesticides is that we’re not recognizing the root cause of the pest problem and fixing that instead.
Why Do Diseases and Insects Eat Your Plants?
Why do insects eat your plants? Why do "bad" bacteria, fungi and other protists (I will refer to all of these as diseases from now on) eat your plants? It all comes down to the same reason and it's probably not what you think.
When planning for our non-toxic pest control, we tend to think insects and diseases are making our plants unhealthy, but actually, they are there because our plants are unhealthy. This is one of the biggest shifts we need to make in our thinking when moving to organic gardening practices.
Beautiful beetle
As discussed last time, animals prefer healthy plants, but insects and diseases prefer the opposite. They choose plants that have either a deficiency of excess - a nutritional imbalance - of one or more nutrients. They literally do not possess the enzymes necessary to digest "healthy" plants.
In fact, they don’t even see healthy plants as a food source at all! Sounds crazy, right?
Well I'm going to explain it, because this is one of the most important concepts to understand when talking not only about non-toxic pest control, but organic gardening in general. I won't go into too much detail, but here's the gist of it.
How Insects And Diseases Find Our Plants
Animals (like us) see in the visual light spectrum. Insects and diseases do a lot of their “seeing” in the infrared light spectrum. Insects do this by using their antennae and tuning into electromagnetic frequencies.
So in your organic garden, your sick plants - those that have a nutritional imbalance - emit a frequency in the infrared light spectrum that a pest "sees" with its antenna and it recognizes it as food.
Healthy plants simply do not emit these frequencies. So insects and diseases do not see healthy plants as a food source.
Why do sick plants invite predators to eat them? I don’t think we know for sure, but many of the smartest ecological scientists, farmers and organic gardeners think the plants don't want to survive since it would be a detriment to their species.
If sick plants were to continually reproduce, the species would not be as strong and would have a much more difficult time surviving. So they "take one for the team", so to speak. I figure plants don't have the same anxiety about death that we do.
This has been an excerpt. You can go here for a short video on organic pest control, or the full article is now the first lesson you'll receive if you sign up for my free online course below.
