This really bugs me... 🐛

Bugs aren't killing your plants - your dead soil is.

One of my biggest pet peeves in the gardening world is not only gardeners refusing to coexist with bugs but also the huge misunderstanding of what really causes garden “pests.”

If it were that easy for bugs to destroy entire plants without other factors at play, then plants would’ve been wiped out entirely long before the invention of pesticides

The reality is that plants have immune systems just like animals.

If a plant is healthy and thriving, it can’t be killed by insects.

Stressed plants let off signals that attract bugs, while healthy plants remain essentially “invisible” to bugs by not releasing these chemical signals.

So if your plants are covered in aphids, there’s a problem with the plant, not the aphids.

There’s a beautiful quote about this by my regenerative soil science teacher in his book:

“...when stressed, plants send out a very loud signal to the world that they want to be eaten, inoculated, and decomposed back into soil organic matter to try again some other time as some other plant.” - Regenerative Soil: The Science and Solutions by Matt Powers

So how do you get your plants healthy enough not to get eaten?

Healthy soil!

Per John Kempf’s Plant Health Pyramid framework (which I teach in my course Gardening for the Future), there are four tiers of plant health, and as a plant achieves each tier, it becomes more immune to pests and pathogens.

Healthy plants need soil with a healthy, diverse, and robust microbiome because their preferred way of up-taking nutrients is by letting the microbes digest the nutrients first and then eating their waste (or eating the microbes themselves!)

Gardeners tend to immediately react when they see their plants covered in insects.

They spray pesticides or do whatever they can to kill the “pests.”

But pesticides damage the soil microbiome necessary to get to the top of the Plant Health Pyramid.

They also kill predators of the “pests” who could naturally reduce the populations and contribute to a healthy ecosystem.

So if you see plants in your garden being killed by insects this growing season, take a step back before you act from a place of seeing the bugs as the problem.

The bugs are a symptom, the soil is the problem.

So how do we improve the soil so our plants can reach their full potential?

• Compost, compost, compost!

• Soil organic matter

• Chop & drop

• Cover crops

• Natural fertilizers

• Microbial inoculants