We Need a New Mindset When It Comes to Tending the Garden and Dealing with Garden Pests

I can't tell you how many social media messages and comments I get about garden pests. There's caterpillars. There's aphids. There's these weird, gross things! There's holes in the leaves. There's yellow spots. The whole plant disappeared overnight! There's deer. There's squirrels. There's raccoons. There's rabbits. There's birds. What do I do?

It's just one thing after the other. Honestly, each message makes me feel a little sad that this is what so many gardeners focus on—that their response to each new imperfection in their garden is panic. Panic, panic, panic!

From my perspective, we're totally missing the point of gardening if we're focusing on the pests. I mean, it's kind of a killjoy, right? I want to change the mindset and help you focus on your plants instead. Sound good?

(Prefer to listen? Check out the episode called "Stay on the Offense When Tending the Kitchen Garden" from the Grow Your Self podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or Stitcher.)

See Your Garden Plants as Living Things

What if your fruit and vegetable plants could talk? Imagine not having to guess what they need to grow better because they could just tell you.   

"Hello! I'm so thirsty. Did you notice it hasn't rained in about a week? Can you imagine not drinking for seven days straight? Yeah, it's not a great feeling. How about getting off your phone and giving me some water, okay?”  

"Hey, I'm about to sprout, so I'm going to need extra attention over the next few days." 

"Did you notice I’m holding on to a lot of fruit over here? It's a little heavy. And if you don't pick them soon, my stem’s going to break."

On second thought, these imaginary talking plants are starting to sound a lot like my kids. Maybe it's best they don't talk after all.

As I write in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, "Perhaps one reason why gardens are such an escape is because the plants don't talk back. At least, not audibly. In a loud world, it's a huge relief to have a place to go that's only humming with bees and butterflies, not whining and complaining. The truth is our plants are communicating all the time. They're just doing it in a much more subtle way." 

Curling leaves, rapidly growing stems, ripening fruits, brown spots on leaves, dropping flowers—these are all signs that our plants have something to tell us. Seeing plants as living things comparable to pets and people, and understanding that plants do try to communicate their needs, can really change the game in terms of how we care for them. It can even help us calm down when things don't go perfectly.

What Does It Mean to Think of Your Plants as Pets?

We got our two dogs, Ponyo and Totoro, in the winter of 2017. Since then, we've adapted the way that we care for them and feed them as they've grown from puppies into mature dogs. And with each new stage, there were challenges.  

The idea here is to think of your plants as you would a new pet. Like puppies, your plants are living things with personalities and needs that change as they grow. When you bring your new puppy home, you want to give it the best start in life possible, so you feed it nutritious food. You support your puppy as it grows and give it some training.

This is one of the main reasons I don't love so many of the garden products on the market. They focus on cheap, fast, and easy solutions, and in doing so, they totally misrepresent what it really means to be a gardener. The only solution we need is to take care of our growing plants the same way we would a growing puppy. Let's explore what that means.

The Most Effective Form of Organic Pest Control Is Following These 3 Tending Tips

Our goal is to focus on the plants and their needs and little plant personalities, not the pests. We do that by putting all our gardening efforts into keeping our plants as happy and healthy as possible. I like to think of this as playing garden offense (I'm a soccer mom).

Your three main tending tasks for staying on the offense are feeding, supporting, and pruning in the garden. Let's look at each of these.

Feed Your Plants the Best Organic Garden Fertilizer by Mimicking Nature

Picture bringing a new little puppy or kitten home. What's the first think you do besides making them a bed? You get food for them—and lots of it. Animals need to eat regularly, and the younger the animal, the more frequently. (This should sound familiar if you've ever had a toddler.)

It's easy to remember to feed your new pet (or toddler) because they can be vocal about their needs, but we often forget to feed our new plants. We might be so wrapped up in dreaming of harvest time, when our plants will feed us, that we forget our plants need to eat too. I love to say, “Feed your food, and your food will feed you."

The great news is that feeding your plants doesn't involve as much work as feeding a puppy. If you set your plants up in nutrient-rich soil (like the 103 soil blend I describe in my book and Kitchen Garden Academy), then your plants already have access to so many of the nutrients they need. But if we're thinking of our plants like pets, then we know that they need to eat regularly, right? We can't just stop after giving them one meal, however nutritious that meal may be. Your plants will really appreciate it if you feed them regularly.

Feed Your Plants New Food As They Grow

Humans start their life on milk and simple foods and slowly graduate to more exciting things like pizza and tacos. But you wouldn't give an infant pizza and tacos, would you? Milk gives them all the nutrients they need and in a way they can handle.

Like babies, plants need different nutrients and foods as they grow. Think about how nature delivers these vitamins and minerals to plants. It doesn't give them a one-and-done solution that's expected to last for an entire year. So why would you buy some synthetic fertilizer to add to your garden? All-purpose fertilizers with high counts for all the major nutrients ignore the fact that plants have different nutrition needs at each stage of growth. These are nothing more than products marketed as cheap, fast, and easy solutions for all of us with busy lives.

The best way to feed your plants is to imitate nature and use only those materials harvested from nature in a responsible way.

There are forms of naturally occurring food that are capable of carrying plants from the beginning of their life cycle to the end (if applied regularly). These include plant-based fertilizers like compost and ground seed meals; animal-based fertilizers like worm castings, manures, blood meal, and bone meal; mineral resources like rock dust and greensand; and sea nutrients like kelp meal and fish emulsion.

Otherwise, you'll feed your plants with something new at each stage. Let's look at those different stages.

Essential Plant Nutrients at Each Stage of Growth

Seeds, Seedlings, and New Plantings

Your main goal is to give seeds or young plants that are just settling in a healthy and green start. We want to help them grow lots of roots and a strong main stem so that they have a strong foundation later. The best way to encourage strong roots and stems is to give your plants healthy, nutrient-dense soil. Then, we can give them a little mycorrhizae, a naturally occurring fungus that connects roots to the nutrients in their soil. While this connection happens on its own, adding a little mycorrhizae to the soil around your plants as they begin to grow helps speed up the process.

Nitrogen and potassium are also important to building roots and stems. Nitrogen comes from sources like organic cottonseed meal and kelp meal. Make sure you're following directions when applying these to avoid applying too much. You could also use chicken manure to add nitrogen to the soil, but you'll have to be especially careful not to burn young plants at this stage of their growth.  

Potassium is important for root health of your plants and aids their ability to grow and take up water and nutrients. Greensand and kelp meal are great sources of potassium for plants.

Growing Plants

Once the plants have formed a strong root structure and main stem, it's time to focus on leaf growth. For leafy greens, the leaves are the end goal. These plants are stronger now than they were when they were seedlings, so you can use stronger nitrogen sources like chicken manure and rabbit manure to encourage more leaf growth.

If you're growing a fruiting plant, like tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers, it's time to encourage flowering and fruiting by adding phosphorus. Phosphorus-rich foods include rock dust, bone meal, and finished animal manures. Continue to feed your plants phosphorus as the flowers turn to fruits.

A Major Part of Organic Pest Control Is Supporting Your Plants

Like feeding, supporting your plants properly can prevent pests from ever entering your garden. Trellises are essential structures in the garden if you plan on growing climbing or vining plants. By holding these plants in place, the trellis will help keep the leaves clean and dry and the air circulating around the plant. This prevents mold, diseases, and pests.

You can also support your plants with some compost whenever you see them suffering from pest pressure. You can do this by giving them more nutrition, and the easiest way to do this is by adding compost around the base of the plant and watering it well.

Here's something to keep in mind: Your plant wants to do well. Its number one goal is to grow fast and reproduce before its growing season ends. That gives it a strong will to not only survive, but to become the biggest and most productive version of itself. Your job is just to support it while it does its thing.

Prune Regularly to Maintain Garden Health

If you notice holes in your leaves or damage to your plant that make it clear a pest is eating from your garden, remove the leaves that are heavily chewed or affected. The best time to do this is in the early morning or evening since pests like to come out when it's cool and dark. After you've removed the damage, search for garden pests in the soil and on the undersides of leaves, and remove every pest that you can find by hand.

It's also a good idea to remove any additional stressors on the plant, like dead leaves, extra fruit, or extra large growth on the plant. One thing you don't want to do is take away healthy leaves because those are helping the plant work through the issue. But you do want to take away any other part of the plant that might be weighing it down. This will give the plant a little extra energy to focus on fighting for itself.

If you're growing leafy greens, then harvesting is really just pruning with the intention of eating what you're removing. Harvest the larger and older leaves from your plants frequently to keep the plants healthy and encourage them to form new leaves. This also gives neighboring plants a little more breathing room. For fruiting plants, harvesting fruit frequently similarly gives the plant more energy to form and ripen new fruits.

Deal With the Pest Issue and Move On

Our first summer in Chicago, we noticed fleas crawling over our two dogs. I freaked out at first, but if you have a pet, you probably know this type of thing just happens from time to time. You find a way to deal with the issue and move on. Pets will experience a series of injuries and illnesses and itchy pest problems. Whatever frustration comes their way, it's your job as the pet parent to continue feeding them, taking them on walks, petting them, and maintaining their routine.

It's natural to freak out when something starts to go awry in your garden. Just remind yourself that pests are part of the process. They're part of being on Earth and caring for a living thing.

That living thing wants to grow to its fullest potential and thrive as much as you want it to, so no matter what happens, don't feel like it's you versus the plant. Issues that arise in your garden are not commentary on how great of a gardener you are. We didn't take our flea infestation as a sure sign that we were horrible dog parents. We understood that we lived next to a wooded area and would have to step up our prevention game.

Your job as the plant parent is to listen to your plants, work alongside them, and clear the way for them to do their thing by feeding them, supporting them, and pruning regularly.

Three Reasons to Follow These Tending Tips for Organic Gardening

Here are my top three reasons why I recommend focusing on the positives of tending your garden alongside your plants instead of the negatives of always having to be on guard against pests.

First of all, it's more fun. If you celebrate the one thing you harvested that day instead of bemoaning the ten pests that were attacking your other plants, the tending process will be so much more enjoyable. If you've ever played any kind of sport, then you know it's way more exciting to score a point than to prevent someone else from scoring.

Secondly, it puts you in control. You get to decide what to plant next, what to tend next, etc. without letting fear of pests or failure call the shots for you.

Finally, it's better for the environment. Whenever I see a neighbor with tons of open space growing nothing but ornamental plants and spraying tons of Roundup to keep weeds from growing, I get bummed out. They're spending their energy, their time, and their money on a product that's harmful to the planet and their ornamental plants were it to get on them. Wouldn't it be better to spend those resources putting compost around the plants they want to grow and planting something nice in those spots where weeds are showing up?    

A Better Way to View Garden Maintenance

I always use this analogy: It's so much better to give your body vitamins and nutrients than to reach for antibiotics for every little issue. Your body is a living system that's set up to fight off bad things, with a little help from outside sources. The same goes for your plants.

I once had a wonderful client who freaked out when she noticed holes in her pepper plants. We had only recently set up her garden, and the temps that summer were pretty high. She texted me constantly about the pests. I told her, "Just give it some time. Nature's going to balance it out. Let's add some compost and care for the plants." But she really wanted a way to treat the pest, so I recommended a spray to protect the leaves that she could use in moderation.

After two weeks, I checked back in. She sent me a picture of her pepper plants. All the leaves had fallen off. She went from having a small pest issue to this. I asked what happened, and she said, "I don't know. I spray them every single day. I don't know what's going on.” And I thought, “That might be the challenge.”   

She was so interested in defending that she went way overboard with the pest treatment. She sprayed so much that the poor plants couldn't push through and take care of themselves because they were too busy being treated. Instead of spraying and pushing against the pests, focus on building up the nutrients for the plants.

Tend the Garden the Way You Tend Your Loved Ones

I hate seeing gardeners so focused on negative things they forget the garden can be a place to relax and enjoy themselves. Tend your garden the way you take care of your own body and your loved ones: a little each day. Take it one task at a time, and everything will be okay. If it ever feels frustrating, focus more on giving your plants what they need to thrive, and your garden will thank you for it.

When you trust that everything will turn out how it's supposed to, you can enjoy gardening in a totally new way.