Going Green... God's Way

This Spring we had an unusual problem that for me blossomed into such a blessing. We had just uncovered the pool from Winter, and the local frog population apparently thought that we had put in a giant community frog spa. Man they were loud at night!

Well it wasn't long before we found eggs at the bottom of the pool. So rather than let the pool skimmer destroy the eggs, I dug an impromptu frog pond in my garden, installed a pond liner, added a few aquatic plants like duck weed, some frilly oxygenators, Spanish flag and water iris, and bingo... instant frog nursery. Within a few weeks we even had water snails zipping around eating algae.

 In addition to populating the pond with the eggs that kept magically appearing in the pool, I would grab every toad and frog I could find at night and deposit them in or around the pond, trying to encourage them to steer clear of the driveway and our feral cat, who loves to harass frogs.

It wasn't long before we saw the first hatchlings emerging from the pond. The first to emerge were hundreds of baby Eastern Toads. These were followed shortly by bullfrogs, bronze frogs, and tons of beautiful little gray tree frog babies.

While the eastern toad babies are active during the day (I still have to watch where I step) the tree frog babies appear late in the afternoon and just before dusk. There are so many!

They have apparently decided as a collective that as cool as the pepper plants and collards are, the sweet potato vines get top billing as ideal froggy condos. They look like little emeralds sitting on top of the leaves.

Besides just being beautiful additions to my garden, these tiny babies have been incredible assets in the arena of pest control. At first I wondered how effective such little frogs could possibly be. Let me tell you. Until this week, I haven't seen a single aphid, and miraculously avoided a Colorado Potato Beetle outbreak, since these pests are small enough to be froggy fodder.

Even though I did find aphids on 2 lettuce leaves a couple of days ago, I correlate this with the seasonal change and the numbers of frogs declining as they prepare for winter by scoping out their winter burrows. Hey, if all I have to deal with is a couple of infected leaves... Cool!

One thing to remember when deciding on a pest control program is that when you use pesticides, you throw off the natural balance of things.

God has developed a natural predator/prey ecosystem that requires all participants, including those we deem as "pests." When we interfere and remove these pests, we remove a potential food source for other animals.

In fact, by adding the frog pond to the garden I have actually increased the local biodiversity. So far this year we have had copperheads, black snakes and brown snakes all snooping around looking for yummy mid-day snacks.

With the exception of the copperheads (which now mysteriously live in our neighbors woods) I welcome these slithery visitors because they keep the rodent population down. I just wish they'd leave me a note letting me know they are in the garden. I hate those kind of surprises!

By contrast, I recently spoke with a fellow farmer who uses conventional pest controls, specifically Sevin dust, one of the more toxic pesticides available, with an LD50 of 307, 3 times more toxic than Malathion which has an LD50 of 887. Pesticides are rated on how much toxin it requires to kill at least 50% of a test population. The lower the number, the more toxic the product.

He was complaining about the grasshoppers that had totally decimated his wheat field even though he had been using Sevin all season, and was currently spraying every 3 days! He was planning on talking to the extension office to see if there was anything stronger, assuming his local pest population had become immune to the Sevin.

Unfortunately, using such heavy pesticides combined with the use of mechanical harvesting and a hot dry summer were all the grasshoppers needed to find crops that were perfect for consumption and breeding.

My solution? Perhaps a bit unconventional, but it works. Knowing that grasshoppers dislike moist environments, I water my plants daily in the late afternoon or early evening, and I water them from above. I don't use drip irrigation. 

By wetting the plants, you flush the pests out of their hiding places. Squash bugs hate getting sprayed, and rush to the uppermost point on the plant they are infesting. Makes them easy pickings. Really irritates moths as well. When the grasshoppers appear, I grab them and feed them to the chickens.

I love to recycle.