As plants start to leaf out, you'll notice garden pests appear in your garden too. Spring growth is especially tender, and it's easy for pests like these cutworms to completely destroy a plant before it even gets started. It's tempting to spray for pests, but of course pesticides linger around and kill off all the predators too, locking you into a cycle of increasing pesticide use. I've found it more effective to harvest cutworms by hand, using a flashlight at night. It looks eccentric. But in the end, I have a good meal for my chickens to enjoy.


Trust me. You're gonna love it.

Don't miss Leigh's extensive tips on organic pest control.

Insects, fungus, mites, aphids... there are many threats to your plants that you might have to deal with. Here is an overview of common options for organic control methods.

Prevention is key

• Crop rotation prevents many, many problems.


• Companion planting. Planting marigolds in with your squash, cucumbers and pumpkins can keep away certain pests. And in my experience, a row of dill seems to attract ladybugs.


• Diversity is better than monoculture, even within the same type of plant. For instance, plant three varieties of potato instead of just one, so that if you get a blight or fungus, one or two of your varieties will probably be resistant.

Getting rid of big, visible bugs

• Hand-picking sounds tedious, but for large insects on a few favorite plants, it works really well. I have a friend that pays his young sons 5 cents for each live squash bug they can harvest off the pumpkin plant. Sounds like a good investment to me, and a fun kind of family competition in the garden! Well-practiced hand picking can devastate the populations of caterpillars on broccoli or cabbage in just a few minutes. It works, and you'll feel awfully clever once you learn where the bugs like to hide on the plant.

Slugs, the bane of many a garden

• It sounds bizarre, but if you leave (well cleaned) tunafish can, filled halfway with beer, in the garden overnight you'll often find it filled with dead slugs in the morning. Gross, but effective.
  
• Crushed eggshells or hair (human, dog, or cat) can stop slugs in their tracks. Spread either in a band around plant bases.


• Find and kill slugs when hand-picking other pests: A spray bottle with one part ammonia to two parts tap water will do the job. It's organic, but you still might be careful spraying around the leaves of tender plants.

Aphids, mites, and other little suckers

• A mixture of dish soap and water, sprayed onto affected plants, will kill aphids. Make sure to water the plants really well an hour or two ahead of time, to minimize the chance that the plant will suck up the soapy water that could potentially damage roots. Pick a soap that is phosphorus-free if possible.

Miscellaneous pests

• Spraying neem oil mixes onto your plants can kill a variety of pests. You can learn more here.


• Hot pepper waxes are a mix of capsaicin (an extract of cayenne pepper) and a waxy substance (like paraffin). Proponents of hot pepper wax say it is effective against aphids, spider mites, whiteflies, cabbage loopers and beet armyworms. I've never used it, but I certainly would give it a try if my garden was inundated with these types of pests and I couldn't use another (free) method like soapy water or hand picking.

Fungi, blight, and other mysterious problems

• One year, when I planted four varieties of tomato, I had two of those varieties succumb to a mysterious fruit-rotting problem, while the other two plants got off scot-free. Like I mentioned above, biodiversity can be the key here. Within reason, it is a good idea to hedge your bets with a couple varieties of a given type of plant - some will likely be resistant to whatever strikes your garden. Besides, it is fun to have different shapes, colors, or sizes of whatever you grow.


• Water in the early morning. This cuts down on fungus, blights, slugs, and even sometimes caterpillars. All these things like damp nights - so if you have dry plants at night, you'll see fewer pests. Watering in the early morning also saves water, which is great.

Did I miss a favorite tip or trick you use in your own garden? Share it with readers in the comments!

We are a family of impatient and over-extended gardeners, so we don't start lettuce as early as we can, or should, for our climate, and by the time we do, we're ready to eat those fresh greens now. The solution is to buy seeds and started greens at the same time. Plant the seeds, give them a good watering, cover them with wet burlap, and while they wait to sprout, your starts are already hale and hearty.

The clumps are the giveaway.




Salad burnett has a lovely peppery flavor. You can eat it on its stems or easily strip the tiny leaves from the stems for a more delicate texture.


Sorrel, a personal favorite - both for its vibrant purple ribs and its sweet and lemony flavor.


Mesclun greens, best eaten this big or smaller. Flavors range from slightly bitter and licorice-y (the serrated, long green leaves) to hot mustard (the purple and green mustard leaves) to sweet and tender (a looseleaf lettuce thrown into the mix).

But see? We are growing them from seed, too. Here's our new lettuce bed, which is well-shaded for the Texas heat. It is also somewhat sheltered by the nearby crepe myrtles, so we're hoping it will make a nice space for a makeshift coldframe to inspire us to finally buckle down and grow some winter greens next fall.


We have a lot of petrified wood.


Family stepping stones are a fun garden accent and a great project to help young children remember and celebrate their loved ones. This one was made during a visit by some dear friends, a couple and their then one-year-old son. You can find out how to make them today on Z Recommends.


Wonder how this back edge will turn out... not very weedy, but will the weeds love the new soil?

We supplemented the flavorful greens from our garden with some good old-fashioned foraging.


A discarded broccoli plant yielded some surprisingly tasty flowers that would add a great visual accent to our salad. It isn't even in a pot anymore! Flowers in salad are always fun, and broccoli flowers, as it turns out, are quite sweet.



Another depleted broccoli plant yielded up some spindly broccoli. Broccolini, I say. It's as tender and flavorful as the stuff you'd pay too much for at the grocery store.


Then we went hunting for one of my favorite greens of the season.


Would you believe it's in this picture?


Green briar, a prickly vine in our Texas climes, would hurt anyone but a goat under most circumstances. But the tiny green shoots? Delectable.


Preparing the meal took under half an hour, much of the time spent making a new invention of Z's - cut-out pieces of flatbread toasted in our toaster oven, which made fantastic croutons.



Setting the table.



A meal of fresh salad with balsamic vinaigrette, plus spicy chipotle field roast (fake sausage) for Mom and Dad, and garlic-stuffed green olives, acai and blueberry juice, and hummus for everyone.




A lovely way to start our spring!