Early Season Pest Prevention
The best early season defenses against garden pests are healthy soil, healthy plants, and a diverse garden.
Just imagine it - it’s the beginning of summer and you’ve planted your whole garden. You’re bursting with excitement, looking forward to a whole season of harvesting, but…what’s that? Your leafy greens are looking suspiciously splotchy and discolored. And there are so many holes in your treasured tomato and pepper plants! Unfortunately, pests are an inevitable part of gardening and can eat their way through your precious vegetables. Here, we will review a few proactive steps you can take in the early season to minimize pests later on, give your plants the best chance of thriving, and even improve your garden’s long-term health and productivity.
Healthy Soil
The first step in minimizing pest damage in your garden is to create healthy soil. Soil should provide plants with the nutrients, chemicals, and more. With this strong base, plants are equipped to defend themselves against pests. It only takes a little insect activity to kill or damage an unhealthy plant.
What can you do to create healthy soil in your garden? A great thing to do in the spring is to add organic material like compost and manure into your soil. These amendments will add the needed nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium to the soil. Plus, when you turn the amendments into your garden, you aerate the soil, improving soil health and water infiltration and retention and disrupts pests and diseases.
Healthy Plants
Similar to when we are stressed and unhealthy, an unhealthy or stressed plant will be much more susceptible to and less able to fight off pests and diseases. Our vegetable plants are especially prone to pest issues when they are young and/or have recently had the stress of being transplanted out to the garden. Here are a few tips to prevent stress on your plants in the early season:
Use healthy starts for your garden - avoid plants with yellow leaves, shriveling, or too-early blooms/fruits. For example, if you see a tomato start that already has a tomato on it in May or early June, it means the plant is stressed and trying to reproduce quickly.
Choose varieties adapted to our climate - buy seeds from local companies like Montana-based Triple Divide Seeds or companies in similar climate, like Maine-based Fedco Seeds. Read this post to learn more about selecting your seeds. Check out our farmers’ market for climate-appropriate plant starts. Plants that are adapted to our cooler temperatures and shorter growing season are less likely to become stressed and weakened.
Time your planting - wait to plant ‘warm season’ crops like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants until after Missoula’s average last frost date, May 18th. Warm season crops planted too soon will be damaged by the cold and become vulnerable to pests. This post summarizes which crops are safe to plant early.
Weeding and water with care - pull weeds consistently to prevent competition for nutrients in the soil. Avoid over-watering, which can lead to disease and mold. Check out this blog on tips for watering.
Remove any diseased leaves/whole plants and throw them in the trash (NOT the compost) to prevent the spread of disease.
Diversity and Crop Rotation
Plant a diverse garden! A variety of plant types helps attract beneficial insects, confuse pests, and minimizes the effect any one pest could have on your garden. Generally, we recommend planting a variety of herbs, flowers, and different vegetable families in your plot.
Rotating your vegetables, while challenging in a small garden setting, can still do a lot of good. Many garden diseases are soil borne and many insect pests overwinter in the soil, so moving your crops around will also make it tougher for pests to find the plants they prefer. Crop rotation will also improve soil health by ensuring that the same nutrients are not being taken out of the soil year after year.
Spend Time in Your Garden!
Give your garden attention and observation, and you’ll be able to prevent a lot of pest problems before they get too serious. Pests will inevitably appear, but healthy plants in healthy soil are much less vulnerable. Even if you do start to see pest damage, don’t panic! Besides the proactive steps listed here, you can read through this blog on the top 4 most common garden pests in Missoula and how to manage them.
This is the perfect time of year to be thinking about what you can do for the long-term health of your plants and your garden. Incorporate these practices into your planning and your garden will thank you for many years!