alright, this is john kohler with growingyour greens dot com, with another exciting episode for ya. i’m still at the eco farm conference, ifyou guys saw the last episode, the last episode was like my summary of the eco farm conference,and you know i went to a lot of different speakers, and heard a lot of different presentations.
how to keep snakes away from your property, i learned a lot of stuff but as you guys willknow, i’m not gonna be able to interview many of the speakers here, but there’s onei actually had to corner, i stayed late tonight to do that for ya, through like a dinner,through an award ceremony, and three hours later i finally got this guy cornered andwe’re getting him in an interview for you
guys because i believe it is so valuable. one of my favorite presentations that i wentto, this year, was this guy’s talk, there’s like two different speakers, but he by farwas a better speaker, conveyed more information and more importantly more information thatwill help me but also help you guys in your quest for growing food organically, becausehe’s talking about something i wish i had more information on, but this is what he specializedin. this is dr. bill olkowski, he has a phd inentomology from uc berkley way back in the day, i mean he wrote this book partly, theurban house, and this is like back, copy write nineteen seventy seven, i think this is outof print.
he also has other books on like basicallyhow to garden, without using pesticides and all this kind of stuff. right, even organic pesticides, he’s notin favor of using organic pesticides maybe as a last control, because what he’s reallyinto is using the beneficials, so what were gonna get into this episode, is actually we’regonna explain to you guys, why’s is important not to just be spraying stuff, even if itis organic and some tips that you guys can use so that you don’t have to spray anythingin the first place, so you cannot have bugs in the first place. so one of the things i wanted to talk to dr.bill olkowski about today is basically allowing
the plants in your garden to actually attractthe insects. there’s this mentality in our society today,like bad bacteria it’s bad we need that hand sanitizer to kill them all, just killthem all the bugs but see when we’re killing the bugs, the bacteria in our hands we’rekilling not only killing the bad bugs but we’re killing the good ones as well. and you know, nature just slides in his presentationtoday that nature is in cycles and there’s an equilibrium balance, so we need to havethe good, we need to have the bad, there needs to be good forces out there and there needsto be bad forces out there, and they’re gonna hopefully balance out, hopefully thegood is gonna overrun the bad and that is
how nature set things up because if naturedidn’t set things up so that good always prevailed over the bad, we wouldn’t be alivetoday, who knows all the diseases. wed be covered in bugs. wed be covered in bugs but that’s just onepart of nature right and so, some of his techniques may, are, may sound kind of weird but heywe don’t wanna we wanna have some plants and just let them grow and just attract someaphids, but these aphids may not go to your other plants and then once there are aphidsthere, whats gonna happen is good bugs are gonna fly around because good bugs are outthere and guess what? they wanna either eat the bad bugs, they wannalay eggs in them, they wanna do all, parasitize
them, all kinds of crazy stuff, then thosebeneficials are gonna transfer over to your vegetables when the aphids are there and ifyou don’t ever leave any aphids, you always kill them all, you’re never gonna have anybeneficials. so dr bill olkowski do you wanna talk moreabout this kind of concept. well i would like to see people think aboutseeding in commercially available predators and parasites. see as a seed you don’t have to spend alot of time or money on it but you can leave it in your garden and they’ll find theirway or find the food, which is the pests, so sometimes when you’re studying a newgarden it’s been so devastated, and the
environment there is no food there for thenatural enemies. so this would be a way to seed them in. so what are some of these things they shouldseed in, you know some of these predatory insects. predatory mites for instance would be a reallygood one, and they sell them they’re cheap, there’s two species that are commonly available,especially in greenhouses or indoor environments, but there’s others too, it’s lacewings,they’re sold in the egg stage and usually you get a sort of a shaker and you shake themout on the plants, and they'll hatch into sort of an alligator like thing, maybe a quarterof an inch long, and they’ll eat caterpillars,
aphids, scales all kinds of things. so that’s a commercially available thing,you can buy a little seed, you can also attract them in with artificial honeydews, which isan interesting idea but i don’t think you need to get too elaborate about it you canjust buy the organisms and put them in and you’ll have them around you’ll see themyou may wanna buy these things so you can learn to look at them to identify them. because they’re already in your garden probably,or they’re gonna be after you grown something and be a little more tolerant, you can toleratesome bugs and that’s how you learn, get a hand lens fifteen x, and you learn how tolook at the leaves, hold it up to your lens,
you got to check the light coming down soyou can learn look at cause when i use to work under the microscope with 60 x power,was what our working microscopes were like and you could see a lot of detail but youcan learn to look through the little hand lens with the same sort of detail. learn how everything looked on the big scopethen move to the hand lens, that’s what i used in the field because you can’t carrya microscope out there. so you got to learn what these animals looklike and its marvelous experience to see some of these little critters eating the bugs andthat’s a learning experience and that’s your investment in the natural world and itwill be a payoff over time for a better garden
with less poison. wow, well said, i mean i think it’s so oftenyou think, bug it’s bad, time to spray it right, that’s not the answer that naturewould have, that’s an answer that humans would have and you know if we tried to likerule over nature we’re bound to fail so we need to just work with nature and livewith nature and encourage nature and encourage, you know, different areas of our garden toattract beneficials like if you’re not growing some vegetables, grow some native, grow someflowers that are gonna attract some beneficials to your garden or your farm because they’regonna do some of the work for you so you don’t have to spray it, if you’ve got beneficialsin your garden they’re gonna eat all the
bad bugs so you don’t have to deal withit, right? and so, i don’t think i even introducedthe praying mantis in my garden, but i’ll see a little praying mantis around, oh mygod, a praying mantis, i got to like make sure he doesn’t get hurt. i put them in because i like to look at them,they’re just spectacular things but they eat all kinds of things, they eat bees, theyeat other, they’re a generalist predator. the other little trick i should pass on, isstraw piles, i learned this myself. you put a bunch of straw out maybe six toeight inches high, put a little water on it and the straw starts decomposing over thenext few days or weeks depending on the moisture,
and the decomposing straw produces a littlebit of a nat, or something tiny and then what happens is the spiders are coming in all thetime, they float in and they’ll start eating those little critters because spiders, smallspiders they have to have small food, then they end up eating each other, they becomecannibalistic and you’ll see on top of that pile of straw a big hairy wolf spider theseare spiders that run across the ground they don’t have webs, and they are powerful predatorsand so that’s what’ll happen you’ll essential create your own natural enemies. i’m not against buying them. so another point that i wanted to talk toyou guys about before we get into the tips
of this episode is like i have this mottofor pest control of escalation for example, the first thing i do if i see the aphids onmy plants, i got my fingers i’m gonna smash the aphids with my fingers, ima pick off caterpillarsor horn worms off my plants, i’m gonna go out there at night with my uv light to seethem bloss fluorescence. a flashlight or go out at night with my headlampon, find my slugs and seals, because the slugs come out at night, right? and then i’ll pick them off, but then youknow that’s the first step like manual control like me use my physical labor, maybe if ihad kids, maybe get them involved, and the second step if i can’t do it with the aphidsfor example then ill spray them and hose them
off with water and ill spray them off witha high pressure water. hand picking is good idea, handpicking isa really simple thing, you can do a lot of simple stuff like that when the populationgets big you got to like move into other strategies. so the next thing i’ll do is ill spray thesoap then the next strategy, and then maybe hopefully i’ll do it a couple times andi’m not just gonna spray water, oh it doesn’t work and go to the next thing, continue, likewait a day, spray again, spray again and then go back to even smushing and then i’ll dothe soap, escalate it higher and then maybe after the soap, what would be a good thingto do after soap. well pyrethrum is your last ditch, well that’slast.
but after soap i might do like a soap withneme oil, or something like that. neme oil would be good, or some sort of like,maybe before that step i might do diatramethazurin depending on the insect then maybe if theneme oil and then maybe the pyrethrum . it’s your last stop, a very short lived material,you have an immediate effect doesn’t stay around and it’s virtually nontoxic, yougot to protect yourself from everything you use with insecticide, even soap, some peopleget allergic to everything so i’d like to avoid those things so if you wanna save yourcrops, you know in a garden you could always plant more, you don’t really have to gonuts about it. some people like to think the natural world,clean it up, and i think it’s a losing battle
don’t clean it up, it’s kind of greatjust the way it is, just learn how to see it and work with it. another thing i say is, sometimes if it’sso bad i don’t even try to spray it, i just sacrifice the plant, sacrificial plant, icut the plant down, i don’t even use it in my compost if there is like a lot of insectson it. i might send it off site just to get rid ofit, and you know, that’s the step before i even spray the pyrethrum in, so sprayinganything on your property whether it’s the dr bronners or neme, or the pyrethrum or evenusing diaz can have a negative impact, not only on the bad bugs but also the good onestoo, so then you could literally be shooting
yourself in the foot, because now you’rekilling the good bugs that would be eating your bad bugs, otherwise so you should really,in my opinion, try not to spray, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. ya know, if you don’t know how to recognizethe beneficials you could just be killing things that are gonna be beneficial. sometimes you see a big black ground beetle,a lot of people kill those they think they’re roaches. they just don’t know how to see them andyou got to practice learn how to see them or look around for more information.
information now is so wide spread a littlesearch on google, will come up with a lot of good information there’s free informationeverywhere so educate yourself. the other one i like to tell people aboutis sweedalisel, you know almost forgot that, and sweedalisel is a little low growing plant,it’s a nice little flower, you can put it on boarders or beds and it seeds itself inand the little natural enemy that comes to that will feed on mites, caterpillar eggsall sorts of little critters. and it’s called the oreus that’s the genus,it’s a plant, it’s a predacious plant bug small tiny little thing, and it takesa while to learn to spot it. but if you put sweedalisel in and start lookingat the blossoms after a while and you’ll
see them in their eating the fluids from theblossoms. ive seen it on, it seeds itself in the grapeareas, i was driving here down to the eco farm and i saw these patches of white alongthe roadsides of grape vineyards they’re hip to it now, maybe they know that story. yeah so i guess, there are some tips, nowi wanna get into the real tips so that guys don’t have to spray, use these tips beforeyou even think about spraying anything because good growing practicing good garden practiceis the key to actually avoid having to spray anything in the first place. one of my biggest tips is to grow high qualityplants.
the more nutrient dense and high bricks, morenutrients are in your soil, the better the plant can actually create protein, and createmore complex proteins that bugs cannot digest, complex proteins. i mean using compost is one of those excellentways and, let’s hear some more ways, some more of these tips from dr bill olkowski. well that’s a good intro, i’ll give youa series of tips that i learned and one of them is transplanting. transplanting means that you grow the seedlingin a warm place inside the house for instance and then you put it out and you wait for,put it out when the first two leaves show
up because before the first two leaves theplant is sensitive to damage, a snail or a slug can come and kill off a lot of seedlingsin one night and then all your time and effort has been wasted, so when you get it out andthe seedling, and get it started, you’re getting it past the most vulnerable stagein a plants life. so you got to transplant and when you transplantyou then wait and now, all the other problems show up. now tips to think about is plant materialsthat raise another insect that doesn’t go on your crop. and one of these is anice, you know, fennyl,which in my area it is a weed, it even has
its own aphid and the way this works, is itdoesn’t go on, that aphid doesn’t go on your crops. it has its own natural enemies that come andeat on the aphid, and when it eats up the aphids on the fennyl it moves over on broccoliaphids or other aphids that are in your garden, so you wanna have alternative plant materialsthat you grow or as weeds or even old broccoli plants you don’t have to pull them out whenthey’re finished producing broccoli just let them grow a seed, the pest will stay onit, the pest aide particularly, broccoli’s got a problem with an aphid. so now you can have natural enemies on theaphid survive and help you with the next crop
of broccoli. so those are like little tips you can sortof learn how to use those and look at your weeds, look at your weeds and get yourselfa hand lens, and study the insects on those weeds because sometimes, very likely the weedhas its own pests and they’re not gonna go on your crops, they’re different kindsof animals. there’s five thousand species of aphids,there’s all kind of animals, we can use the same idea for other plant material there’sactually catalogs you can buy from cornflower farms for instance, has a catalog about plantsthat you grow that attract beneficial insects. so that’s one of your strategies, is seedthem in and i also recommend compost.
compost changes the fertility conserves water,you got to watch out some of the animals like to live in composts, when you go out and lookfor damage, you see some damage, you might have to go look around for a cutworm or alittle stick around the plant, if you’ve seen the seedlings been chewed up, it maybe a cut worm, probably likely in fact. look at the plants that are being damaged,to understand who it is that is eating them. birds have beak marks and leaves, and youmight wanna put a screen over those, and see what i can think of, other things, snail barriersyou know you have copper strips you can buy those or you can use electrical. electrical fences for slugs basically andthe iron.
the slug o is a ferris ammonium sulfate isbait for slugs and snails it degrades into a fertilizer so that’s not a really badslugicide the one metatalhyde is the bad one, because the dogs can eat it and die so i alwaysavoid that. cardboards rings around your seedlings andthey are sort of a semi permeable barrier. the slugs will come along the snails willcome along and hit the little cardboard barrier, like a little wall, like you’re making afort for your plants. they can climb over but likely not, it’sjust another strategy it’s easy it’s cheap it’s just something to do. now the other idea i had that might be usefulto a lot of people is let the seedling, let
some of your food go to seed, carrots, charredis a good one then you have these charred stalks go up, the little seed spew all overthe place. so the little seedlings that come up, youwanna plant something else in that spot, you pull the seedling up and you have a littlesalad with those little guys and that helps take up the niches for weeds and so everythingelse you can handle mostly by hand if you’ve got a small enough space. and you can also tolerate a lot of damage,plant extra if you have a pest problem that’s really chronic you know it’s gonna showup every year, plant extra don’t worry about it, give it away so it gets destroyed, you’renot on a production farm, you can tolerate
things. fact is most gardeners are always busy givingaway their extra stuff, so don’t worry about it. so i think that’s a few little tips thatmight open up things for you, there’s other things, in my area in southern californiawe have lizards in our gardens and lizards eat ants and i always like to keep the antpopulation down. ants like don’t like water, they alwayslike to protect their colonies from moisture because they like in the soil, so you canflood ants out and discourage them from coming to that area, and ants protects aphids, andso you may wanna keep the ant population down
and encourage them to move away from yourplants, so you can also trap slugs and snails by upside down flower pots they love to gointo that terra cotta kind of thing, so i used to pick up, just put the pots out turn themover, if there’s a snail or a slug in it crush it then that’ll attract the next slugor snail so you can build traps like that that are very simple. and just leave the flower pots here. we have anything else on that list, we weregonna try to work off an outline. barriers you can use for gophers and vertebraethat may come in like rabbits, squirrels, brown squirrels problem for each particularfruit like a squash, you should build a little
cage for, so squirrels wouldn’t eat it,you know the damn squirrels would come in and eat my squash, take a bit chunk out ofit, you know. and the other thing, are area we have a lotof snakes. rattlesnakes, so i make sure my plants werehigh so i could look under them so i wouldn’t be surprised by finding a rattlesnake livingin my garden which is not the nicest thing to find, no, especially when they’re realclose. what about planting flowers? oh flowers, i’m glad you reminded me ofthat, flowers, beneficial insects eat nectar, and so that gives them some more life andthey’ll stay in your garden, so diversify
your garden with extra space somewhere, putsome flowers in. nest urchins are good, everybody likes them,they’re easy they are cheap, and they’re edible. that’s the other thing that’s funny, youcan plant things like that, and what else, extra floral nactories, is one that’s gotextra floral. and they feed their honeydew, essentiallya sweetener from the plant that feeds beneficial so tolerate some pests, it’s not the endof the world and you learn what the animal looks like, how to identify it again, andyou watch for natural enemies on those exotic aphids or something, and your broccoli, justwatch them, and you’ll see that, learn to
identify the natural enemies that are killingthe aphids, that’s something to learn about. so how’s that for a few little tips, that’sgreat, so i mean i wish you were here to get all his tips from his talk and i’m gonnashare with some of you guys his tips in my last episode. but he also wrote a book on it, unfortunatelythe book is out of print but it’s still available on amazon, so what’s this book,i wish it was still in print because this is what everybody needs to learn about growingorganically is not just picking up an organic spray but the steps to do before you evenpick up the spray. well you could look on amazon for olkowskimy last name, and it’s a book i reprinted
now, that my wife and i wrote back in nineteenseventies, called the city peoples book of raising food, there’s a nice little chapteron soils, and plant nutrition, and some composting tips and it’s written in a very nice style,and we used to sell it for five bucks i don’t know what amazon is selling it for, but itwas really nice readable book, bar some really thick heavy books that i have written, oneis called common sense pest control, it’s a seven hundred page book, we used to jokethat to control the insects we would drop the book on them. so now you can actually look in that bookand get a real good introduction to insects, the natural enemies and the tools that i useagainst the pests that are nontoxic.
there are soap solutions, there’s water,washing things with water, and oh roses were another one that we try to talk about. roses have their own aphids so again thataphid doesn’t go over on broccoli, doesn’t go over on any of your other garden plants,and so you can actually learn how to use them, those plants for your own benefit. so how’s that okay? that’s awesome, so uh, dr bill olkowski,if somebody wants to get a hold of you, read your blog read all the information you’veput online, he’s been doing this, gardening for forty fifty years now, how can they geta hold of you.
well i have a blog, i wrote poetry on it,got my paintings and stuff uh, and there’s some articles there that might be useful toyou. it’s called entomological philosopher. and so it’s kind of, you can roam around,you can write me there, there is an email address or just search for my name, you mightbe able to find my books with my name, olkowski. like an old cow on a ski. alright doctor, thank you for being on theshow today, if you guys enjoy this episode here please be sure to give a thumbs up tolet me know, also be sure to do some of the practices he says, it’ll definitely improveyour gardening and your organic gardening
style. um also be sure to click that subscribe buttonright down below because the next episode, also with doctor olkowski, is one more aboutbasically using good bugs to kill the bad bugs, so that you don’t have to. so stay tuned for that and of course be sureto check my past episodes, over twelve hundred
episodes now on this youtube channel, dedicatedto teaching you guys all aspects of growing food, biologically and organically. so with that my name is john kohler with growingyour greens dot com. we’ll see you next time and until then remember,keep on growing.
