This Should Bug You

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. I'm Nicole Johnsey Burke, your host and the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious yet? I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. The kitchen garden may just be the answer that you've been looking for on your own journey to health and wholeness in this podcast. It's gonna inspire and enable you to make garden magic right in your very own space. If you're someone who wants to eat more good food that's actually good for you, fill your day with great stories you want to text to a friend. If you wanna hear more about inspiring people and do a little bit each day better than the way you did it. The Grow Yourself is what your ears have been waiting for. You won't just learn about gardening here. You'll learn how to make growing as a person a big part of your everyday life. And your life, your community. And your garden, of course, will be all the better for it. So put in your headphones, turn up the volume, and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Welcome to Grow Yourself. This should bug you. That's what we're talking about today on the Grow youw Self podcast. All about bugs, pests, your food, your garden and the grocery store, the farmers, all of it. We're digging in to the buggy stuff today on Grow youw Self. Today's episode is brought to you by Gardenary Garden Coaching. Oh yes. We are fully up and running now with garden coaches all over the United States who can help you with all kinds of stuff in your own garden. From designing your garden plans from scratch, all the way to dealing with pests that are attacking the plants you've already got in the garden. We can help you with every step of the process through the Gardenary Garden Coaching System system. So go to gardenary.com coaches and start to check out some of the Gardenary coaches that are ready to help you in your own garden. Or check out the show notes for Today's episode@gardenary.com blog and you'll learn more about some of the coaches and the ways that they can help you to not be bugged in the garden. See what I just did there? All right, let's dig into today's episode. This should bug you. Let's go foreign. I just want to thank you so much for hanging out with me here on the podcast. It has been so fun to take on this new way of communicating with you, sharing with you over this year. We are halfway into the year already. This is episode, I believe 27, which means we are halfway through to having an episode every single week this year, which is so crazy. So I want to thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing the podcast. If you have not subscribed or left a review, I would love you if you would do that. So as you guys know, social proof is a thing and when people go to check out a new podcast and decide if it's a good fit for them, they're going to be looking for what you said about it. So if you would take some time to review the podcast today, I would be so, so thankful. All right, today we are diving into probably besides Nicole, where do you get your trellises? This is the second most popular question I get, which is what about bugs? Do you have bugs? I've got bugs all over my plants. How do you plant your plants so close together and not get bugs? Why are your plants not getting eaten by bugs the way mine are? I don't know about you, but this obviously seems to be a major issue for a lot of people in our community. And so today I wanted to really dive into this important topic, talk about what's going on with your food, with pests. Why are pests even in our garden in the first place? What does that indicate and mean to us? I'm going to tell you three things, three truths you can count on in regards to pests and your food. And then we're going to talk about five steps to to keep your garden organic and as pest free as possible. Key two words there as possible cause pest free is pretty much an impossibility. But we're gonna talk about how to take a few steps, the things I do and that we do with our clients to keep our garden organic and as pest free as possible. So I know you're gonna love this episode. I can't wait to share it with you. And of course, like so many of my episodes this year, I'm gonn reading from my book. My book is called Kitchen Garden Revival. If you haven't gotten a copy yet, what are you waiting for? It's got all my philosophies. It's got this. So many gorgeous film photos taken by Eric Kelly of the gardens that I and my company Rooted Garden, designed in Houston and my garden here in the Chicago area. So go check it out@Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or wherever you want to buy your book. Local bookstores are awesome. It's called Kitchen Garden Revival. Today I'm reading from chapter seven, which is called Tend. And this is just a little something I've been. You know, this is kind of one of my things I talk about a lot in regards to the garden. So let's go. As a soccer mom with four kids, I've watched a few games. I still don't know much about the sport, but I do know we're in trouble when our team keeps hanging out on the other team's end of the field. Even though most of my kids are great at playing defender and the goalie is catching everything that comes her way, I can feel my nerves tingle when we cannot seem to move the ball toward the opponent's goal for any length of time. No matter how hard we fight, if we're always on the defense, we're probably going to lose the game. I know, I know. Playing sports is about building character, not winning. But soccer moms know best. Winning is more fun. I'll tell you what I'd tell my kids if they would actually listen to me. Stay on the offense as much as you possibly can. It doesn't just apply to soccer, but to gardening, too. Your job in tending is to keep the activity on the positive side, the offensive side, the growing side. Because when you start hanging out on the other side, plant diseases, the dried up soil, the pests. When it's just one defensive move after another, it is inevitable that there's going to be a point scored and it will not be yours. So each time you approach your garden, think offense, offense, think about scoring, about moving the ball, I mean, the plants a little closer to the goal. The more you think about that, the less you will worry about fighting off the bad guys. Hint you're gonna win. There are a number of ways to play offense in your garden, and they can be summed up in this. Feed, support and prune. The one act of defense you'll have to play is to protect. But you'll quickly see that all these tasks are, in fact, connected. So that is my key philosophy. If you stop listening right now, you already have the key to dealing with pests in your garden and with your food, and that is to stay on the offense. So staying on the offense means going for scoring yourself rather than focusing on the things that are trying to score against you. And the more you put your focus on that, the better you're going to see your food Produce your garden, grow. And your mind is going to be like, oh, so much happier. Because have you ever just tried, like, you've been focusing on someone who's really bothering you or something that's really bothering you, something that's bugging you, and the more you think about it, the more you're bugged? Yes, I have been there. But if you're thinking about a goal, you're going for something you're excited about, something you're preparing for, you're just gonna feel better. So that's the way I approach the garden, and I'm gonna teach you more about that in this episode. So first, let's talk about some three. Some. Some. Let's talk about three truths about pests and your food. The first thing I want you to realize is that bugs in general, all over the world, in nature, eat healthy plants. Let me take you back to 2010. I am shopping the Nashville Farmers market, and my neighbors tell me that the sweet corn down at the farmer's market is literally so sweet. And they're buying it up, freezing it, all this stuff. So I head down there with my kids in tow. I've got three that summer, and it's a handful. And so I'm stuffing as much corn as I can into the stroller, bring it home, open it up, and there are little caterpillars at the top of several of the cobs. I'm pretty grossed out. I'm just starting to shop the farmer's market at this point. You getting used to, like, really focusing on organic and locally grown corn. Fast forward to the next week. I cut it off. We eat it. It was delicious, of course. So fast forward to the next week. I'm back at the farmer's market, and same lady's there, and I say, hi, thanks so much for that corn. It was delicious. But can you help me? Because the pieces I bought last week, a lot of them had caterpillars in them. And she looked at me like she was my mother and she said, honey, if the worms don't want to eat that corn, it ain't good. She's like, the existence, the fact that you had caterpillars inside your corn proves that it is worth eating. Because if caterpillars don't want to eat that corn, then you shouldn't either. That was an aha moment for me. Now, she schooled me a little bit. And, you know, obviously it sounds a little maybe, I don't know, crass or something or gross, but the point here is that, you know, if, if bugs aren't wanting to eat your plants, then probably there's something going on in there that you're not going to love either. And so I think this is a fact that we can come to grips with in nature is that bugs and insects that eat healthy plants. And so if you have a healthy garden, if you have a garden that's thriving and your plants are growing well, then bugs are going to come and want to eat from it, just like those caterpillars going into that corn. And that's just kind of good evidence that you're growing your plants well, that they're organic and tasty and delicious. And so it can feel like an insult. It's kind of a bittersweet kind of truth. But I do find it comforting when I find pests and nature coming to munch on my plants. It's like, okay, well, at least I know that these are good. So that's the first thing to, the first truth to kind of come to grips with. You may have heard the story about in 2015, when I started Rooted Garden, my first vision was to sell lettuce from my garden. So we planted six beds with lettuce, I mean, tons of lettuce, and they were growing so well. And my thought was that I was going to wash this lettuce and sell it well, then I realized, you know, I go in, I don't know, a couple weeks in, and the lettuce is totally overrun by caterpillars, specifically cabbage loopers. And I am like, oh, no. You know, as my first kind of, I was trying to really garden on a much bigger level and realizing, like, the way I'd planted out the garden basically with just tons of straight up lettuce, nothing in between, I was like, oh, no. So that quickly squashed my ideals of creating, you know, mass, Mass creating food to sell to my neighbors and as a business. But it also kind of woke me up again to this truth that good food is eaten by bugs. That, that nature, you know, knows good food when they see it. And honestly, in lots of situations, they're, they're just waiting, literally they're waiting at the ready for, for some food to appear. So that's the first thing to know. I mean, I know that may be like, duh, but I think it does give us some comfort and also helps us think, okay, the food that isn't being eaten by bugs, you know, the food that, that's being sprayed with pesticides, we're going to talk about in a second. Do we really want that food. You know, if bugs know better than to eat that food, then shouldn't we? Maybe. All right, so the second thing to know about pests and food is that there's more to your food than you originally thought. So I was reading up on what's going on in terms of the food that we eat commercially, that's grown commercially, that's grown by big agriculture and some of the backstory. And so it's pretty crazy. I'm not going to go deep, deep into this because I know it can be a little controversial, but a recent study, this was crazy. Found that more than 90% of Americans have pesticides or byproducts of pesticides in their bodies. And this is mostly from eating conventional fruits and vegetables, which is pretty crazy. So this test showed basically what they did. I know it's kind of tmi, but they tested people's urine and found byproducts of all these pesticides. So, you know, it's funny, like, a lot of the tests from like the EPA and stuff is to show that. That there's very little remaining of the pesticide in the fruit or the vegetables that we eat. But tests continue to show that there are still traces of these chemicals that come into our bodies and don't leave, which kind of makes sense anyway, because that's really the way those are designed in terms of harming or killing off the pests. Right. Most of those things are set up to go into the body of the pest and kind of break it down, down from the inside out. So that's kind of crazy to me to know that 90% of us have some trace of byproducts of pesticides in our bodies. And even though they're trying to do, supposedly, there's all these studies of keeping those pests from, say, especially or those pesticides from affecting young children. The tests show that we're not quite sure that we're doing that great of a job with it. So let me define the term pesticide as we talk through there being more to the food than you thought. So a pesticide, a lot of people think it just means the thing that kills the pest, but it can also include an herbicide. So an herbicide is something that's like a weed killer. Insecticides, nematicide, molluscicide, piscocide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, antimicrobial and fungicide. So when you hear anyone talk about pesticides in terms of our food production, it's not just bugs that's mostly what we're focusing on today, but basically most of our food supply, unless it is clearly organic. And even then, you know, it's still questionable through the whole process what happens, but is touched by some kind of something like this. So there's more to that food that you're buying from the grocery store that you're buying, say if you're, you know, I don't know, at a restaurant buying a salad or at a fast food store buying a sandwich with a tomato on it with lettuce on it. Most of the food that we eat, when it looks perfect, you know, it looks like it has not been harmed or touched by nature, that actually it's, it hasn't probably it's been touched by some form of pesticide and that even the, you know, the best tested pesticide situations are not perfect in the sense that we're still ending up with those chemicals in our bodies. So that's the second thing to remember is there is more to our food than you think. So you think you're just eating a tomato or a really perfectly grown strawberry, but you're consuming more than just that strawberry. You're consuming all the chemicals that were involved in keeping that strawberry so perfect. All right? And then the third thing to know about pests and your food is that changing nature. So interrupting this situation of bugs eating healthy food, bugs eating beautiful and delicious food, it doesn't just stop with the food. So when we come in, when farmers come in, when Big Ag comes in and, or even we do in our own garden and try to interrupt the cycle. So when we spray a pesticide, when we use some kind of chemical interaction to stop the pest from eating from the plant, we do much more than just what's happening in that little microscopic situation. We're doing a lot more than just spraying a leaf and killing one particular bug. So there's all kinds of things. I mean, you can go down a serious, serious rabbit hole in terms of, in terms of the bad stuff. And I did go there and research for this podcast, so I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I'm going to give you a quick overview. So basically, there's at least four other things that happen when we, when we spray our plants for pesticides. So with pesticides, so one of the first things that I think is the most important is what happens to the farm workers. So I went, if you want to research this, it's pretty crazy. Most of the research is based in California, where the majority of the US Food is Grown. But, you know, most of our food is grown by migrant workers. And most of them are, you know, not necessarily on a. They're not financially taken care of, I'll say that, you know, or they're not living at a very comfortable financial level. And studies have shown that as they're spraying these toxins and chemicals and pesticides, their health is affected, and not just their own health, but the health of their families. So I was reading even how the EPA goes to links to make sure that those pesticides don't end up in baby foods and foods of toddlers because children are the most affected by these strong chemicals. But that say a farm worker goes home with sprays on their shoes and their clothes and it ends up in the floor and, you know, in the air that their children are breathing. So that's one thing to think about, is just, you know, our food is grown even though there's tons of machinery and things around the food. Our food production, when you break it back down, our food is grown by people and people who matter, people who have children and families and people who are trying to provide for their family in a meaningful way and want to stay healthy. And so there's all these links to poisonings from farmworkers and their health being negatively affected from spraying these toxins. I don't know about you, but have you ever seen, say, some commercial truck and they're spraying for mosquitoes or whatever in your neighborhood and they're wearing these gas masks and you're like, I don't know if, like, you want to keep doing that. You know, like, if. If you've got to wear some kind of protection like that to. To do your job, then. Then it's probably not that safe of a job. And so that's the first thing I think to think about is the safety of our farm workers. The second thing, which I think is so important is the pollinators. So we are finding more and more. I'm sure you've heard just the decline of honeybees and the colony collapse disorder that we're seeing with bees around the country. And I was surprised to see how recent these changes are. So some of the numbers I saw have started to change, really as recent as 2006. And then I was reading this neonix. It's a new kind of pesticide that they use with seeds of corn, soybeans, canola and others. So these are plants that are widely, widely grown in the US for all kinds of things. And the neonics is something that's been added in the last, say, five years or 10 years to these seedlings and plants. And they have been linked with the dramatic decline of pollinators and wildlife. In fact, from just 2016 and 2017, US beekeepers reported losing an unsustainable 33% of their hives in just two years. So they're really seeing this linkage as these new pesticides and these new ways of keeping our plants healthy and pest free are having an impact on other insects, of course, insects that we know we need to keep, like bees and butterflies. The third way that this affects more than just our food is groundwater. So often I don't know if you've seen this, but I remember when we lived in Houston, all of the gutters in our city would have a little circle on it and said, protect the bay. And we lived about, I don't know, 45 minutes from Galveston. And it said everything that goes into this, you know, these gutters is going to end up. Are these called gutters? I think so, yeah. Everything that goes in here will end up in the bay. And you know, you're thinking like gum and paper and trash, you know, that kind of thing. But I think what most of us forget about is all the stuff, sprays that have gone onto our grass, that have gone onto our plants. As it rains, those toxins, those chemicals are washed down, they go to the, you know, this. Oh, sewer, that's what it's called. Is that right? Yeah. Anyway, they go down to the street and then they end up in the city's water system. And you know, looking back at in Houston, those are all going to end up in Galveston Bay and affecting marine life and fish and what's under water. So we end up with contaminated water from spraying leaves and then finally it being poisonous to wildlife. So when, you know, it's not just going to stop with that bug that's bugging us, right, that's bugging our plants, it ends up affecting the whole food chain, you know, from the very bottom all the way to the top. So poison is not something that we can just, I think what we want in our minds and what kind of has been sold to us is it's just a very isolated exception, right? It's just this isolated occurrence where they spray this one little leaf, they deal with the past and then we can move on. We get to harvest this perfect looking plant, enjoy it, and we all live happily ever after. But the truth is that our food system is connected to all the other systems, right? So we see just from these four things that it's connected to people and their livelihood. It's connected to bees and butterflies and other insects that we rely on to build our food system and to help provide really great food, all kinds of foods, for us as human beings. And then it affects our water, and then it even affects other mammals. So all kinds of animals, not just mammals. So there's this. It's a web. We're all interconnected. And so to think that we can just come into one little isolated farm field or set of plants and spray them and the occurrence just stay right there is kind of false advertising. It's not true. So here is some good news. And then we're going to talk about five ways for you to stay on the offense in your own garden and make a difference. So here's the really cool thing I learned, I don't remember maybe in the last five years, is that plants, organic plants, are better for you, not just because they haven't been sprayed with things, but because plants are made. Plants have the plants that have survived the seeds that you have, the plants that are growing in your garden or on a local farm. They are bred to survive. They know how to keep themselves alive, and they have inside of themselves systems to defend themselves. And the more that we come in and try to fight for them, we mess up the system and we mess up their opportunity to defend themselves. I like to liken it to parenthood, of course, like so many other things I do. So, you know, excuse me, if my kids, let's say I have a kid who is getting bullied at school. If I keep coming to the playground, you know, every single day and I watch, and every time the bully comes over, I jump in and I say, don't bully my kid. Leave my kid alone. And then I maybe even say something mean to the bully. And I do this day in and day out for a year. Well, I've now set up a situation where my kid knows nothing about defending herself or himself, and the bully is 100%. If I miss a day, if I don't show up and defend my kid, what do you think the bully's gonna do, right? He's gonna, like, he or she's gonna just attack my kid and be like, oh, your mom's not here now. What are you gonna do? You know? But the better thing would be to be at home and to be telling my kid, you know, like, hey, you're strong, you're this, you're that. Here's some things you can say, here's some tactics, here's some things that have worked for me. Here's some people you can call. Who can you stand with giving them some tactics and then letting them go out and deal with the bully. Right? And that's a much more sustainable, long term thing. And it also helps grow my child as a person into the person that I want them to be or they want to be. And that's how we. I know it's kind of a little philosophical and deep there, but that's what we're doing with our plants. So if you keep jumping in with your plant and taking over for your plant and fighting the bullies for your plant, then your plants never get to get strong. They never get to use the muscles that they have by nature. And then the plant is then totally 100% reliant on you because it hasn't built in those mechanisms to. It hasn't really used those muscles. And so if you don't show up one day, I mean, game's over, right? So the neat thing is, studies have shown that when plants fight pests, pests, when plants are literally attacked by pests, they put off more antioxidants. They literally become better for us, more nutritious for us than they were before they were attacked. There was this recent study from Texas A and M that I loved watching. So they took strawberries and actually poked holes in the leaves, just like would happen if those plants were being attacked by pests. And they found when they tested the strawberries, that the strawberries with the leaves with poked holes had more antioxidants, accidents and were more full of nutrition than those that were not. So basically, the second that those plants came under attack, they put up their defense systems and started fighting for themselves. And as soon as they did that, suddenly the fruit became better for the consumer. Is that amazing? So what we're actually doing when we step in and fight for our plants and, you know, punch the bully in the face and we keep doing that, we're not only doing all these bad things to the environment and creating like a big web of, you know, confusion and destruction, but we're also inhibiting, we're limiting the plant's ability to become more nutritious, more healthy, more strong, and even better for us, even if it's got holes in the leaves. So as you start first, we'll just talk about buying your food. Okay? So the four things you can do in terms of really kind of trying to break down the system, we've got this 90% of humans having pesticides in their body systems, Just a few things you can do is obviously prioritize buying organic food, especially the Dirty Dozen. So looking at that list from EWG Environmental Working Group and prioritizing buying organic food, supporting local farms, they're going to be less likely to be using big ag practices, asking them hard questions like, what do you spray your plants with? What kind of pesticides do you use? And really letting them know how important it is for you to have organic food, then planting your own pollinator garden. So let's do what we can to provide food, to provide healthy food when bees and butterflies are not finding it in these huge fields of crops. You know, what we can do is do our best on our little plots of Earth to create good, healthy, organic food for those pollinators and then finally grow our own food organically as much as we can. So I'm going to walk you through five steps when you start to see pests on your plants, and then we'll close up here. So first, the very first thing I want you to know, remember, go back to the beginning is that bugs eat healthy plants. So if you're starting to see pests on your plants, the great thing to know is, hey, guess what? I got healthy plants. I'm doing a good job. Think back to my great lady at the Nashville Farmer's Market and just remember that if caterpillars don't want to eat them, it ain't worth eating. Okay? So that's the first thing to do, is just keep calm and keep going. So the first thing you're going to do is remove visible damage. So as soon as I start to see holes in my leaves and damage, where it's very clear that a pest is eating from my plant, a buggy pest, then I go in, I'll probably go in either early morning or early evening and remove the leaves that are heavily eaten, never removing more than one third of the plant. And then I start to search. So I start to search for the pests. I search the underside of leaves and I search the soil area, the surrounding soil area in general. This is where the pests are going to hide out. And they're generally going to burrow and hide. They'll come out. They're more likely to come out when it's cool and when it's dark. So they're going to be more likely in the early morning and early evening. That's why I like to go out and search for them. Then make sure you use clean pruners when you are pruning. And you can bring a flashlight or just some way for you to get up close and start to look. And then I literally pick everything that I find. I pick it off and put it in soapy water. So just try to get rid of it in a very natural, easy way. Sometimes I just smush them right then and there. I'm just going to be honest. I know TMI for some of you, but anyway, so that's. The first thing is just remove the visible damage and do some searching and remove every pest that you can find by hand. The second thing to do is to remove additional plant stressors. So dead leaves, extra fruit, extra large growth on the plant. I like to liken this to, you know, if you have. If you have a. You can say a child or a family member, someone who's going through a lot, right? So they've got something going on at school, with a friend, some way that something in life is stressing them out a little bit. The last thing you want to do to a person that's going through something like that is give them something extra to hold on to, Right. I love Jim Gaffigan. He has this joke about having having an extra kid. And it's like, I forget how he says it, but it's basically like you're drowning and someone says, hey, here's a baby, and throws it to you. I forget I'm going to totally mess this up. I'll have to find the reference to the joke. I'll put it in the show notes. Anyway, idea being, when you are drowning, the last thing you need is for someone to throw you something else to hold on to, right? So when you see your plants that are being attacked by pests, you want to remove as much extra weight and burden as that plant has. Now, you don't want to take away a lot of the healthy leaves because those are going to help the plant photosynthesize and work through the issue. But you do want to take away any other part of the plant that might be weighing down. So if they're holding extra fruit or if it's just a way overgrown plant, you just want to say, hey, you know what? I'm going to take this from you. I'll take this responsibility from you, and you can focus on fighting for yourself. So I just say, just remove the extra stressors. The third thing you can do that I do is nourish the plant. So I like to say, you know, pesticides to me are like antibiotics. So it's like going and getting a prescription, you know, from the doctor. And my focus is more on giving vitamins so whenever you see a plant that's going through stress, that's got bugs eating at it or Peter coming toward it, then I do try to give the plant more nutrition. So you guys know me. I love to just give the plant compost. So putting compost around the base of the plant, watering it well, making sure it's getting all of its nutritional needs met, and saying, all right, go for it. So it's like, you know, yeah, it's coming at it from an offensive side rather than a defensive side. So making sure, remembering that the plant knows how to fight for itself. The plant is made to fight for itself. It has it in its DNA. And all you're trying to do is give it the ideal conditions so that it can do so. So that's the third step, is to nourish the plant and then help the plant fight for itself. The fourth thing to do is to start to do some studying and learning yourself. This is, I think, one of the most fun parts of it. And pick up some friends. So what I mean by this is discover your plants. Pests, predators. It's like two possessives there. The plants possess the pests, and the pests have predators. For instance, I went my first garden in Nashville, we were having. I think it was raccoons. Yeah, we were having raccoons come into the garden. Now, this is a much bigger pest, obviously, than a bug, but I went to the store, the garden store. I was like, what do I do for these raccoons? She said, oh, wolf urine. And I was like, excuse me? She's like, wolf urine. As soon as raccoons smell wolf urine, they'll run because they know the wolf's near and they're gonna. They're gonna eat them. And I'm like, okay. And she's like, and here it is for $20. I'm like, I'm not even gonna ask you how you got wolf urine in a bottle, because that's just. That's just crazy. Anyway, what it did do is it opened. I did not buy the wolf urine, by the way, for $20. She told me another way, which is. Should I say this here out loud? I don't know. She said to go home and feed my husband a steak and then have him pee on the garden. So there you go. I didn't do either of those, but I did learn a lesson. The lesson I learned is that there are natural predators that will help me in the garden. If you have not watched the incredible documentary Biggest Little Farm, highly recommend it. I loved the Vision of predators and the natural predators helping you. If you haven't seen the movie, it's like such a great depiction of this idea on a bigger level, of course. But what you want to start to do is research, okay, who in nature eats these things? Whatever thing is eating my plants, what are the things that will eat them? One of the most common examples of this that most everybody knows is that ladybugs love aphids. And so, you know, having a garden that welcomes ladybugs, that has ladybug food in it, that's set up to be a great environment for ladybugs, is obviously such a great thing to do because you're literally welcoming the plants, pests, predators. So take some time. This is a time where you start to research, okay, what pests? What is this pest? What's the name of it? And then what are some things in nature that like to eat this thing? And then how can I create an environment that won't harm my garden, but that would bring more of this predator into my garden space? That is a really, I think, just such a cool road to go down. It's essentially permaculture. It's creating, basically trying to recreate nature in your own little garden space. And it's such a more holistic and neat way to look at pest protection and to look at the way that nature is meant to be. All right? The fifth thing to do is to wait and see. So, so many of us are very used to one and done to instantaneous gratification, and the garden just is not that way, you know, even for setting it up and definitely for growing, but also for passing. So what I like to do is stay on those plants for the next two weeks. So what I'll do, as soon as I take those first four steps, then I will watch the plant every day. So I make it a point to head out, check out the plant around the same time, you know, every day, and see if the paths show up, see if there's new damage on the leaves, or see if it looks like I've gotten them. Now, this is going to be a little bit gross, but if you think about it, if you've ever had a child or yourself, get lice. I gave this example inside of our kitchen garden academy, and everyone was like, ew. But really, it's the same thing. I mean, it's a pest, right? So the thing with lice is, like, you get rid of all the lice, and then you have to keep checking because the lice had babies and you've Got to be ready for when the babies come. And so then you attack the babies when they come, and then you're kind of done. But you have to be pretty vigilant for like two to four weeks. I mean, it's crazy. So I won't go into lice here. No worries. But it's the same kind of concept with pests in your garden. So these little guys are minuscule, and they have minuscule little babies. And so you're going to have to stay on your plants as the days go on, especially over the first few weeks, just to make sure that you really got the pest out. And if you see any new damage, then you're going to basically go back to step one and go back through the steps again. All right, so those are the five steps. Number one, remove visible damage, search for the culprit and get them out of there. Number two, remove any additional plant stressors. Number three, nourish your plant. Number four, discover your plants predators, your pest predators. And number five, wait and see and start over if necessary. Now, if you notice in here, I didn't include any sprays or treatments. Now, you definitely could do treatment, but I'm just telling you a way to go after it without necessarily having to. So you can definitely. I mean, there's kind of prescribed treatments for all different kinds of pest situations that can be organic. But I wanted to give you an alternative way to view pest protection that literally doesn't include a spray bottle at all. Pretty cool, right? I think so. All right, so that pretty much concludes today's episode. I hope that it has opened your eyes to what's really going with the food that you're eating. I hope it has helped you see the beauty of staying on the offense, of getting away from the other side of the field and viewing your plants in a new way. Thinking of your plants as, wow, they are set up and ready to fight the pests, to fight the things that come against them. And actually, it is so much better for me, for them, for the environment and for the world. You know, as a whole, if we let plants do their thing and just kind of relax a little bit. So when the bugs show up, it is a sign that, hey, if those bugs don't want to eat that plant, then you probably don't want to eat that plant either. So we can relax a little bit. We can know that probably pests are just going to be part of the system of an organic garden, but that doesn't mean that they have to win. And it also doesn't mean that there's no use in trying, or that you know that giving up on growing organically is really the best option. So I hope that this gives you a much more holistic view of your own garden and of the food that you're buying from the grocery store. I want to encourage you to check out local farmers, check out your farmer's market, ask important questions from those people who are growing food for you, and then just enjoy the process. Watch the wonder of what's happening in your own space. And the next time you see a bug, don't be bugged so much. Be comforted by the fact that nature is doing its thing, that you're growing beautiful, healthy, organic food in your garden, and that you're just going to have to beat those pests to the plant so that you get to eat it before they do. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I love you for it and I will see you next week. Don't forget that today's episode is brought to you by Gardenary Garden Coaching. Listen, if you haven't gotten your garden set up yet, it is not too late. No, no, no. And all you need is a garden designer to help you. We have Gardenary Certified garden coaches on the gardenary.com site. We will create a custom raised bed kitchen garden design just for you in the exact spot that it needs to be to grow healthy and beautiful the way the rest of our Gardenary gardens do. So whether you need to get caught up and get your garden set up, or if you're getting bugged by bugs in your own garden, you got to get help from a Gardenary garden coach. So go check it out@gardenary.com you can schedule a virtual session with a coach almost anywhere around the US and we will help you grow to the next level right away. Check it out@gardenary.com coaches or on the blog today. Gardenary.com blog thanks so much for listening to Grow Yourself and I will see you next week. Sam.