Pests, Predators, and Prevention: Integrated Pest Management for Vegetable Gardens
Episode Description
In this episode of “The Evergreen Thumb,” we are joined by Laurel Moulton, an integrated pest management specialist with the WSU Regional Small Farms Program. Laurel sheds light on utilizing a holistic approach to tackle pests in your vegetable garden. Learn how to strategically manage pests, leverage natural predators, work with the weather, and implement preventive measures for a thriving and healthy vegetable garden. Laurel’s insights provide practical tips and sustainable solutions for gardeners looking to embrace effective integrated pest management strategies. Tune in for a comprehensive guide to harmonizing your garden ecosystem.
Laurel is a self-proclaimed plant appreciator who has spent the majority of her life immersed in the flora and fauna of the PNW bioregion. She loves working with farmers and gardeners in her work with WSU Extension. She is the Master Gardener Coordinator in Clallam County, an Integrated Pest Management specialist with the WSU Regional Small Farms Program serving Clallam, Jefferson and Kitsap Counties, and a member of the statewide WSU Integrated Pest Management Team.
Listen Now
Resources
- Hortsense Vegetables
- Pest Control in Home Vegetable Gardens
- Lady Beetles: Should We Buy Them for Our Gardens (Home Garden Series)
- Plant Disease Management Handbook
- Insect Management Handbook
- Solve Pest Problems
- Episode 18 Spring Vegetable Secrets: Tips for Planning a Bountiful Garden
- WSU Research Growing Sweet Potatoes in the PNW
Transcript for Vegetable Garden Integrated Pest Management
[00:00:00] Erin Landon: Welcome to the Evergreen Thumb Episode 17. My guest today is Laurel Moulton, and she’s here to talk to us about integrated pest management in the vegetable garden. Laurel is a self-proclaimed plant appreciator who has spent the majority of her life immersed in the flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest bioregion.
She loves working with farmers and gardeners in her work with WSU Extension. She is a Master Gardener Coordinator in Clallam County and integrated pest management specialists with the WSU regional small farms program, serving Clallam, Jefferson, and Kitsap counties. And a member of the statewide WSU integrated pest management team.
Laurel, thanks so much for joining me today. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:43] Laurel Moulton: Thanks. I’m happy to be here.
[00:00:45] Erin Landon: Alright. So to start off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work that you do for WSU extension?
[00:00:51] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, I’m Laura Moulton. I work out of Port Angeles in Clallam County, where I coordinate our Master Gardener Program, and I also work for the Regional Small Farms Program that serves Clallam, Jefferson, and Kitsap County.
[00:01:07] And through that program, I do technical assistance with integrated pest management for small farms and, you know, coordinate educational events, and do some on-farm research. Thank you very much.
What is Integrated Pest Management?
[00:01:20] Erin Landon: So, since you’re here to talk to us about Integrated Pest Management, let’s start off with what that is.
[00:01:26] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, we, we throw out that, that name, IPM, the acronym, but what it means is, an ecosystem-based strategy that focuses on long-term prevention of pests or their damage through a combination of techniques.
The pest control methods are selected and applied in a manner that minimizes risk to human health, non-target organisms, and the environment. And when pesticides are used, they’re only used after monitoring indicates that they’re needed.
[00:01:54] Erin Landon: Okay. And why is that important for vegetable gardening specifically?
[00:02:00] Laurel Moulton: it’s important for vegetable gardening because, you know, if you aren’t thinking about the tools that you’re using, you can do harm to good organisms, to people, to pets, the environment. And so why not? Deal with pests and diseases in a way that, that keeps everything else as healthy as you can.
So it’s just, it’s good to be gentle on the environment.
[00:02:27] Erin Landon: So what are the components or the aspects of integrated pest management?
[00:02:31] Laurel Moulton: Well, first and foremost, this doesn’t, doesn’t seem like, like you would have to say it, but, first you should make sure you know exactly what the pest or disease is that you’re dealing with because you don’t, you don’t know what to do about it until you know what it is.
Once you identify that pest or disease, you can understand its life cycle and find the most direct way to manage that problem, you know, targeting a pest at its most vulnerable stage. So, identify the pest, and then you monitor the pest population, to see what it’s doing.
Is it, are there really enough pests or really enough, active diseases, to be a problem for you? And then you develop your thresholds and basically, that is what kind of damage is acceptable to you. I know I personally eat a lot of pretty ugly Brussels sprouts, but you just peel off those leaves and they’re fine.
But, a farmer who had to sell those at the grocery store, might have to worry a lot more about having perfect Brussels sprouts. So, after you figure out what the pest is, decide whether it’s a problem, and decide your thresholds, then you employ a combination of management tools, and you time those for maximum effect.
And then of course you assess, how your system is working.
Integrated Pest Management Techniques
[00:03:56] Erin Landon: What are the techniques in integrated pest management to apply in the garden?
[00:04:01] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, so you want to use a combination of different types of tools, and so the first, and I think the most important one, is cultural techniques. So, an example of some of those are timing, when you put a plant in the ground, purchasing pest-free materials, or, you know, importing pest-free materials, employing techniques that reduce stress on your plants, using rotation, trap cropping, habitat modification, and sanitizing.
You can also use biological tools. So that might include enhancing naturally occurring beneficial pests. Or, you know, making a situation that’s better for them. It could include importing beneficial pests to help you with the pests. And then there’s, there’s some other ones, but I’ll just focus on those two.
Then you can use mechanical tools and physical barriers. Things like that. And then of course, chemicals, whether they’re organic or conventional, depending on your gardening philosophies, can be employed as well. So, you would, you would use a combination of those.
Common Pests in Vegetable Gardens
[00:05:07] Erin Landon: So, what are some common pests that affect vegetable gardens and how can we attempt to manage them?
[00:05:14] Laurel Moulton: Well, since the Pacific Northwest is so good for growing cabbage and broccoli and, other things in that family. I guess I’ll start with cabbage root maggots. Cabbage root maggots are actually the larvae of a fly. When you hear something referred to as a maggot, that is just the common term for the larvae of a fly and those are the little white maggots that get into the roots of your radishes or your broccoli or anything like that.
They can make your crop inedible, you know, in the case that you get a heavy infestation in radishes or those tasty little white turnips. But for some, for a bigger plant like broccoli or cabbage, you might not notice the damage unless it was heavy, and then in that case the plant would just be stunted.
So, for those critters, we know that it’s a fly. We know that the larvae inhabit the roots underground so they’re really hard to get at. And so, the point in the life cycle of that insect, that you would target is when the female is laying the eggs on the soil surface next to your plant. You want to prevent that.
Knowing what the pest is, what the life cycle is, then you decide, okay, I want to prevent egg laying next to the plant.
So there are a couple of tools you can use. You can use a floating row cover, and you just have to make sure that that’s, you know, secured well to the ground so they can’t get underneath
and there are some other techniques as well, like some people put little cardboard collars, around, around their cabbage plants and things like that.
Yeah, so that’s, that’s pretty much the best one is putting up a barrier.
We don’t recommend using chemicals because there are very few chemicals available for gardeners that work in the soil and they would probably damage your other soil organisms.
So, prevention is the best. Another cultural technique you can use for that, actually a couple of cultural techniques are making sure you pull up your brassicas that are in the ground for a while so, you aren’t leaving, you know, leaving some of the, you know, the, the maggots in the soil to pupate.
You can get those out of the system. You want to rotate crops because if you grow brassicas in the same place for multiple years in a row, you might already have the pupa of those, root maggots in the soil. And so when the adults hatched out of the pupa, they would be underneath the soil. that row cover already, and so that kind of, you know, makes your row cover useless except to keep them in.
[00:07:59] Erin Landon:
I know, well, this is the, not the root maggot, but the, the larvae of the cabbage moth. Mm hmm. For me, I manually, I mean, as long as it’s not too big of an infestation, I just pull them off and feed them to my chickens.
[00:08:14] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, yeah, I definitely do that too. So, the cabbage moth, and then there’s also, there’s also a cabbage butterfly.
So, the bright green kind of fuzzy one, that’s those white cabbage butterflies. And, the larvae of the moths are, are darker in color. So yeah, I do the same thing. I pick those big fat, fat suckers off and I feed them to the chickens. Thanks. Bye. And the chickens love it. But it depends on your garden size and the amount of time that you have.
That’s a good physical technique. I found with those guys, that sometimes there are so many larvae on the plant. And they still do damage when they’re really small and harder to find. Or if you have a large garden, or you’re a homesteader, or a small farmer, you may not have the luxury that we take of walking, you know, strolling through the vegetable garden and feeding our chickens.
[00:09:13] So, you could also use row cover for those, but row cover gets a little bit unwieldy when your plants are bigger. But you can also, a good option for that is, there’s a chemical management tool, which is Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a bacterial pesticide that’s certified for organic use.
To me, it’s one of the best types of pesticides you can have because it only affects caterpillars in the moth and butterfly family that consume it.
And so if you think of the types of caterpillars that are on your cabbage, the only ones you’re going to find are cabbage moths or cabbage butterflies.
The toxin doesn’t last long in the environment.
So, you know, you’ll read the label and it says how often you have to reapply it. But anyway, the gist of it is it’s extremely targeted to that specific pest and it won’t harm other organisms.
Other Problems in the Garden
[00:10:20] Erin Landon: So what about other problems in the garden? Like fungus or soil-borne pathogens?
[00:10:26] Laurel Moulton:
I’m gonna start with foliar fungal diseases because those are a little bit easier to deal with than diseases that are found in the soil. So if you have foliar fungal infections, there are some organisms that we used to refer to as, fungus-like organisms like downy mildew and late blight on tomatoes.
Those are not related to fungus, they’re more closely related to brown algae, but they’re treated similarly to fungus.
Foliar Fungal Infections
So, with those foliar diseases, well, first of all, I guess, you’ll have to think of what we call the disease triangle. Of the three sides of the triangle, one is the disease organism on one side.
Another side of the triangle is the environment that that organism can survive in. and then the third, the third leg of the triangle is the host. So those diseases can only exist if all three legs of the triangle are there.
So, if you can take out the host, then you don’t have the disease.
If you can take out the conditions that it thrives in, but you still have the host, and the path vision present, the disease won’t occur.
So, with those, you know, it’s important to identify the disease, because there are some diseases that we are more worried about than others, like, blackleg and cabbage, which is a, which is a quarantine disease, and there are others that are just, you know, around, like gray mold or botrytis.
First and foremost, a cultural technique you can have is just being careful about what material you’re bringing into your garden. So if you go to the garden center, and you see those kind of sad-looking plants on the sale table. It’s tempting as gardeners to want to buy those and baby them and bring them back to health.
But it’s smarter to actually buy a plant that’s healthy and from a reputable source, so you aren’t bringing, a disease or a pest unintentionally into your garden that you didn’t have before. So, that’s number one.
Number two, you can do things like, I mentioned habitat modification, and this is one that I didn’t think about until, recently, but when you’re designing your garden, you can design your garden, with the direction of the wind in mind.
So, for example, you know with these fungal diseases, getting lots of airflow through your garden is a good thing, so the moisture doesn’t sit on leaves. You could decide to, design your garden so that the rows went with the direction of the wind, and you’d, you’d have more flow through that way.
So yeah, once you get the disease, what you can do is, you know, sometimes you can pick off leaves and prevent the spread. If you reach the end of the season and you’ve had a disease in your garden, those foliar diseases typically most times can’t perpetuate without a host. And so if you compost them using hot compost or you till them into the soil, that goes a long way, to breaking the life cycle.
And then of course there’s, there’s some things that you just you just may need to use a fungicide, if it gets bad enough.
Another thing with the wind is if you’ve had an infestation of a particular disease on a crop in one part of your garden, you can take advantage of the wind by the next year planting, in an upwind location.
So if there are spores that are still around, they’re going to be blowing the opposite way. of the crop that year. So just plan where your rotations are in relation to where a disease occurred in your garden before. That’s getting kind of high level, but it’s a tool you can use.
Soil-Borne Diseases
So you had asked about soil-borne diseases.
With those ones, depending on what they are, I would avoid them if you can. Prevention, prevention, prevention. There are certain things, like, club root, for example, while we’re talking about brassicas. I think this whole show is going to be about brassicas. There’s a disease out there called club root, and once it gets in your soil, it can infect all things in the brassica family, some to a greater extent than others, and it can live in your soil for almost 20 years.
That’s definitely one that you want to keep out of your garden. So whether that is when you visit a friend’s garden who you know has that disease, don’t use your tools there and then bring them home or, you know, clean your shoes, things like that.
Timing Planting to Prevent Disease
[00:15:22] Erin Landon: What does the timing of planting in the garden, how does that affect pest activity and disease?
[00:15:31] Laurel Moulton: That’s a great question. Timing is one of those cultural tools that you can use to have a healthier garden in the first place. If you’re planting, a plant in a time where it can’t grow, you know, it doesn’t have rapid growth, and that’s not ideal for it, it’s just going to be less healthy, it’s going to be more susceptible to diseases and pests.
I like to give the example of I had a neighbor who loved that she could get her tomatoes out in the garden earlier than anybody else, and she did that by putting the wall of water things around each tomato and using row cover, and just babying each plant. At the time I lived next to her, I was a relatively new gardener and also, I don’t know, lazy, didn’t have time, whatever.
But I didn’t get my tomatoes planted until much later in the season, but accidentally I did the right thing because I put mine out when it was ready for, you know, when the temperatures and moisture levels were really good for tomatoes. So, I found that the tomatoes I put in the ground a month later than she did, caught up with hers almost immediately because her plants had just been sitting in the soil just barely, you know, just surviving, but not thriving.
So, if you can wait for a time when you can put that plant in the ground and it takes off growing, it’s going to be healthier. It can outgrow the impacts of some diseases like that’s, you know, going back to the cabbage root maggot.
If you have a healthy, larger, healthier plant that’s growing quickly, you may be able to, it can tolerate damage from, from some, some root maggots. Yeah, so put things in at the right time when the conditions are right.
Other Cultural Practices for Pest and Disease Prevention
[00:17:24] Erin Landon: So, are there other cultural practices that we can use to prevent pests and diseases?
[00:17:28] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I love to advocate is, testing your soil and basing your fertility regime on your soil test. Just besides integrated pest management, I see so many people putting all sorts of, I don’t know, tasty fertilizer, you know, things that they think are going to make their plants really happy because, you know, somebody said a particular micronutrient was good, or this fertilizer is what you should have for tomatoes.
But if you did a soil test, you might find that you don’t need any fancy fertilizer, or you might find that you only need one nutrient.
Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the three major macronutrients. Oftentimes we have enough phosphorus and potassium in the soil because those tend to be bound up in the soil, whereas nitrogen can wash away over the winter so oftentimes you’ll find that you have plenty of phosphorus and potassium in your soil, and you just need to add more nitrogen fertilizer.
So, where that comes into play for integrated pest management, is when you have healthy, fast-growing plants, they’re more resilient. But also there are more specific reasons, like if you over-fertilize with nitrogen and you have all this lush growth, that is actually attractive to aphids.
So you can create a bigger problem with aphids than you might already have because you’ve created plants that are growing really quickly with this nice succulent growth and they end up giving off some type of signal that the aphids, take as a signal to come and enjoy the buffet. So, yeah, just getting the fertility right in your garden can really go a long way with your integrated pest management regime.
Beneficial Insects as a Part of Pest and Disease Management
[00:19:25] Erin Landon: how about beneficial insects and, predatory or parasitoid insects in the garden and using them as a control?
[00:19:36] Laurel Moulton: I always say more insects are better. Anything you can do to attract insects is great. So, there are several things you can do to encourage native populations.
Number one, make sure that they always have something to eat and you know, something to be on. So, I encourage everybody to augment your vegetable garden with flowers. Alyssum in particular, is one that’s been shown to be very attractive to beneficial insects, and there’s, I saw a study a while ago that actually showed in orchard situations, planting alyssum between the rows of trees increased beneficial insects in the tree canopy.
There’s also, you know, plants in the carrot family, those, those tend to be very attractive to insects. Flowers can never hurt. Well, I’m sure there’s a way they could, but I don’t know it. So, in addition to be benefit being beneficial to insects, it’s also beneficial to our mental health to have more beautiful flowers.
So that’s a way you can naturally enhance the native insects and beneficial insects. Also being very careful with pesticides. That’s way up there on the list as well. And when I say that I mean both with conventional pesticides and with organic pesticides. Sometimes I find that folks think that organic pesticides won’t hurt anything. Any product that’s labeled to kill something will hurt something.
So, for example, Neem is a really commonly used pesticide and fungicide in organic farming, but it’s actually a broad-spectrum insect insecticide. So, it’s not just going to kill your aphids. If you put it on your plants while they’re flowering, there are pollinators there.
It will kill your pollinators as well. So just be very, very careful in the types of products that you apply to your garden.
Augmenting with Beneficial Insects
People ask about augmenting. So like buying ladybugs at the garden store or, you know, lacewings, things like that. That’s, that’s always fun to do. Specifically with ladybugs, I would only do that if you’re using them in a greenhouse because they tend to fly away and disperse as soon as they’re released.
They’re gonna go look for another home and That’s not necessarily your garden. So even though it’s fun, you may not get a benefit from it. So, just research before you import insects. I would see what you can do for your native ones first.
When to Consider Pesticides
[00:22:15] Erin Landon: So at what point would a gardener want to consider pesticides?
[00:22:20] Laurel Moulton: I typically recommend, in the integrated pest management cycle. First, you’re going to be using these cultural preventative tactics, then you might try barriers, removal, enhancing the native predators, and things like that. If none of that works, then that’s when you, start looking at whether pesticides or fungicides or, other things in that, that category are useful.
Another place where I see them applied is I don’t want to say an emergency situation, but for example on a farm, if you had a pest situation that was developing rapidly and it could destroy your whole fall crop of kale, then you might jump to a pesticide faster because at that point it’s too late to prevent. It’s too late to do the slower-acting things.
So yeah, if you’re applying any pesticides and fungicides, things like that are there as tools. You just have to be very careful to read the labels, follow the labels exactly, and apply them as they’re intended.
Working with Your Weather Conditions to Prevent Pests and Diseases
Erin Landon: So are there, you mentioned wind and orienting your rows with the wind as prevention for fungus. Are there other ways to use the weather conditions to help prevent disease or pests?
[00:23:44] Laurel Moulton: Good question. I think moisture is another one. In addition to wind spreading spores, I think moisture is actually our biggest weather condition. So for that, I mean there are definitely ways for dealing with moisture. The best thing to do is make sure that your garden can breathe; if that’s a good way to say it.
I know we want to try intercropping, a lot of folks are doing square-foot gardening, having really high yields off a small amount of land, but you need to take into consideration the airflow through your garden too. If you’re packing everything in, then the water sits on leaves longer and that is conducive to developing fungal problems or other diseases.
So you just have to experiment with packing in plants, intercropping versus not, and how much space you leave between the rows, and that can be a huge way to impact how moisture behaves in your garden. You can also do drip irrigation instead of overhead irrigation too, I guess that’s not weather-related, but it’s water-related, and it’s a cultural preventative technique that you can employ.
You know, setting your garden in the sunniest location possible is another thing. If your garden is sitting in the shade and you’re growing crops that aren’t okay with partial shade, then they’re not going to be growing as fast or as healthy as might be required. And water will sit on the leaves for longer.
So, yeah, there’s just all sorts of little things you can think of.
Resources for Integrated Pest Management
[00:25:26] Erin Landon: What are some of the resources or tools that are available for people to do some of their own IPM research?
[00:25:36] Laurel Moulton: It’s really important when you’re researching the pests and diseases in your area to use resources that have been developed for your area.
You don’t just want to Google something because you might come up with a pest or disease that’s only in Mississippi. And, you know, you wouldn’t find it here.
So some local resources that I would highly recommend include Hortsense, like Horticulture Sense. This is a WSU website and it’s broken up into an easy-to-use format, so you can choose whether you’re dealing with an ornamental plant or vegetable, and then if you choose vegetable, you can go down the list and choose tomatoes.
And once you’ve chosen tomatoes, it lists all the pests and diseases that you might find on them. You can just, read through all the options and see what fits. The benefit of that program too is it will list the life cycle of the organism and some cultural tactics you can use and also biological, mechanical, and chemical tactics. So Hortsense is a great WSU resource.
You can also look at the Pacific Northwest disease and insect management handbooks. Those are more targeted to farmers, but they do have relevant information for gardeners as well. You just have to be careful if you get down to the chemical recommendation sections. Just know that many of those chemicals will not be available to you, but typically the ones that are labeled for homeowner use or organic use will be.
Another new resource that’s being developed down in Oregon is called Solve Pest Problems. From what I’ve seen, it’s a lot like Hortsense, so that’s a great one to take a look at.
[00:27:26] Erin Landon: Okay, We’ll link to all of those in the show notes so that people can find them easily.
[00:27:31] Laurel Moulton: There’s one more, a really important one that I didn’t mention, is going to your local Master Gardener plant clinic.
Sometimes just going online and looking at pictures, you can still get it very wrong because, you know, it’s like me trying to diagnose, you know, problems with my chickens. I’m not a vet. I don’t know what those diseases look like.
And so it’s really easy for me to go down the wrong path. So if that’s your case in plants and you don’t feel so confident, well, even if you do feel confident, you should go ask Master Gardeners, at a local plant clinic. They’ll help you diagnose and find tools that will help manage your pest and disease problems.
[00:28:13] Erin Landon: I’ll add to that too, to make it as easy as possible on the Master Gardeners, if you can bring in an actual sample of the plant so they can examine it under a microscope if they need to, things like that to make it, rather than just pictures, though in a pinch pictures will do.
[00:28:30] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, absolutely.
And just because I like bugs, I’m an entomologist, If you bring in insects, don’t squish them first. Because most of the time, they’re good. You want the clinicians to have a great sample to work with.
[00:28:49] Erin Landon: And preferably in a container that isn’t going to introduce that pest into a new location.
Vegetables and Integrated Pest Management Research
Erin Landon: So, what kind of research is going on right now in vegetables that you can tell us about?
[00:29:05] Laurel Moulton: Well, there’s always all sorts of great research going on in vegetables and integrated pest management. But one project that I’ve been involved in is a sweet potato project. We’re testing out sweet potato varieties to see which ones will grow well in the Pacific Northwest.
And more specifically, we’re looking at wireworm-resistant sweet potatoes. That’s a pest we didn’t talk about, but wireworms are, they’re the juveniles of click beetles, and they can be a really bad problem if you get them in your garden or on your farm. Since they live in the soil and they have a long life cycle in the soil, they’re very difficult to manage, using organic methods.
So, a great cultural tool to use is a wireworm-resistant sweet potato.
And actually, that goes for all pests and diseases. If you can get a resistant variety, like cucumbers that are resistant to powdery mildew, why not go for that?
Anyway, so sweet potato research. Yes, you can grow sweet potatoes in Western Washington and we’re in the middle of doing trials at the WSU research station in Mount Vernon and on local farms throughout Kitsap, Clallam, Jefferson counties, and also some counties in the Puget Sound this year.
Final Thoughts about Integrated Pest Management
[00:30:31] Erin Landon: Is there anything else that you’d like to add about IPM and the vegetable garden?
[00:30:37] Laurel Moulton: I think once you get the hang of it, integrated pest management just makes sense.
Do it as you walk around your garden and look at things. Don’t be afraid of it. Just make it a part of your gardening process. You know, it’s always nice to stroll through the garden with a cup of tea and see what’s going on. That’s a big step in the IPM process. So, have fun while you do it.
Get to know your local critters and how to best keep the good ones and manage the bad ones.
[00:31:10] Erin Landon: I just thought of one thing we didn’t really talk about much was, tolerance. Because I was just thinking, you know, sometimes you eat lettuce that’s been chewed on, you know, things like that. A lot of gardeners don’t, I mean, sometimes I don’t even realize that that’s what I’m doing; accepting a level of tolerance rather than treating the issue.
Can you think of some other examples where that would be the case?
[00:31:33] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, yeah, definitely as gardeners, you have the power to choose. Make choices that allow you to do less work or employ less harmful techniques. So just because I can’t help myself, I say that if you have leaf miners in your beet leaves or your chard why not just eat them? Because it’s extra protein, but that’s your choice. But yeah, there are certain pests or diseases that you can choose to tolerate.
So, if there’s a couple bites out of your lettuce, who cares? I’m not trying to sell it. And, also, I think you can help, you know, if you’re, patronizing a local farm stand and they have a couple bites out of their lettuce or, you know, maybe, you know, something’s a little bit misshapen or something, it helps to choose to buy that too to support them in their using fewer tools by not looking for perfection. But yeah, I also think as gardeners, just because we’re proud of what we grow, we’re more likely to eat anything that comes up out of the ground. Look what I grew. It’s ugly, but it tastes good.
[00:32:51] Erin Landon: Yeah. We overwinter our potatoes in the garden and, this time of year, some of them are starting to rot or they’ve been chewed on.
I just bring them in the house and I just chop that part off. The rest of the potato is fine.
[00:33:09] Laurel Moulton: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, a little bit for the compost, a little bit for you. It’s all good.
[00:33:14] Erin Landon: Alright, thanks so much for joining me today. This was a great conversation and hopefully, we will teach people about integrated pest management.
[00:33:22] Laurel Moulton: Yeah, it’s been fun. Thanks for having me.