The Good the Bad and the Ugly of the Garden! 

I will start with the Good Guys! 

Our garden has been teaming with beneficial insects over the last few months – they are also known as the predators because they eat the bugs we don’t want around. They can also be known as the important pollinators such as bees that are responsible for fertilisation of our plants to produce fruits and seeds. We love diversity in our garden and welcome these intriguing visitors.

The first visitor to our garden was the Blue-banded Bee – this is an Australian Native Solitary Bee. Solitary because they live and work on their own (alongside other native bees) as opposed to honey bees that are social bees living in colonies housing a queen, drones and workers. The photograph below was taken in the All Hallows Parish Community Garden at the Tulsi Basil plant. These bees are attracted to blue flowers. You can just see the blue and black stripes on the bee – a female has four stripes and a male 5 stripes. A special feature of this bee is buzz pollination - rapid movement to release pollen from the anther of a flower. For some plants such as our tomatoes and eggplant buzz pollination is necessary to release pollen and enhance yield - the honeybee is not able to buzz pollinate.

Next exciting visitor to our garden was the Ladybird larva. This visitor while not as beautiful as its adult self has a very important role as a predator of aphids, mites and scale (all things we don’t want to see in our garden. Here is the story of the Ladybird life cycle to put things in perspective: During the warmer months lady birds lay small eggs in clusters on the underside of leaves (they are very clever as all insects are and lay the eggs close to a source of food for the larva that hatches).

The eggs will usually be close to a community of aphids that have been attacking our plants. The larva goes through three stages of growth over 21 days, shedding its skin at each stage. The larva increase in size over these three stages by being ferocious eaters of our pests. It then attaches itself to a leaf by its tail where it changes to pupa.

During this stage the ladybird starts transforming into an adult. It doesn’t eat during this stage and stays in one spot huddled in a ball until it is ready to emerge.

When the ladybird emerges as an adult it doesn’t have spots until the ladybird shell dries and hardens. This takes several hours.

Okay now its time to talk about the bad & the ugly!

We all need to know this; every garden has its share of pest and disease at one time or another, it is a fact of life. There are many contributing factors – weather and humidity play a big part in this, continuous planting, overuse of chemical fertilisers, poor soil quality and lack of diversity in the garden just to name a few. It’s how you deal with it that matters, we have chosen to maintain an organic garden – that means we do not use any harmful products containing chemicals or toxic substances, no chemical/synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. So we use natural strategies that take a little more effort, but in the long run we reap the rewards of contributing to the health of our ecosystem and planet, including the humans that are a part of it. Recently our garden has been giving us signs that it is in need of some extra care with soil regeneration. Two diseases that we have witnessed in the last two weeks are shown below:

Root Knot

This is caused by microscopic nematodes (eelworms). The female embeds in plant roots where eggs are laid into the soil. One female can produce 2000 eggs. On hatching the larvae force their way into young roots, as they feed they release a saliva into the root that causes lumps to develop along the roots. The effected roots are unable to transport nutrients and water to the above ground plant, causing it to deteriorate and die. Practicing crop rotation helps prevent this disease. Sweet corn, onions, cauliflowers and cabbages are tolerant of this disease. Have kept a specimen of part of the affected root collected at our last working bee. You can see the lumps on the root system and how deformed the root looks in the image below.

Blossom End Rot

The symptoms of this disease occur only on the fruit at the blossom end (the opposite end to the stalk). A distinct characteristic is the brown sunken end. It affects tomatoes and capsicum. The disease is the result of a lack of calcium in the soil, being exasperated if the water supply to the plant fluctuates.

Reference: What Garden Pest or Disease Is That? By Judy McMaugh