Keeping your plants healthy in your garden can sometimes require a bit more than simply watering them and ensuring that you’ve given them adequate sunlight and spacing. There are diseases that will sometimes infect your plants, and can cause severe damage to your crops. But when you are trying to maintain an organic garden, you may find yourself at a loss when it comes to controlling and preventing disease. Here are a few tips that should get you on a good start.
Good Living Conditions
Ensure that your plants are living in the most ideal conditions possible. While it may not be the be-all and end-all of keeping your garden disease free, you want to ensure that they’re properly watered, have enough sunlight and are planted with enough space to promote circulation of air.
Control the Pests
Even if the insects aren’t going to eat your plants, exactly, they can carry diseases with them. So be sure to control pests as best as possible - even the ones that aren’t going to eat your plants.
Soil Care
Crops that have been infected with a disease can leave remnants of that disease in the soil even through winter, so crop rotation is highly recommended. Even with healthy crops, rotation is essential to keeping your crops healthy and at their best.
You also want to be sure that the soil in which you are planting is healthy, because healthy soil will provide nutrients necessary for your plants to be able to fight disease if it happens to come along.
Keep Tools Clean
Just as in the medical profession, where doctors do not reuse dirty implements on multiple patients, you do not want to use dirty tools. If you’ve used your garden tools on diseased plants, be sure to wash them in between so as not to carry disease over to the healthy crops.
There are other methods, such as spraying your crops with lime or sulfur, that will also help protect against plant diseases. If you decide to use one of these, be sure that you know the quality of your soil, as lime and sulfur both can affect the pH level of the soil, which can hurt plants and promote weed growth.
Keeping your plants disease free in an organic garden does not have to be difficult to do. As it is in the human world, so it is in the plant world: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Technorati Tags: Organic Gardening Tips plant disease organic gardening
Good Living Conditions
Ensure that your plants are living in the most ideal conditions possible. While it may not be the be-all and end-all of keeping your garden disease free, you want to ensure that they’re properly watered, have enough sunlight and are planted with enough space to promote circulation of air.
Control the Pests
Even if the insects aren’t going to eat your plants, exactly, they can carry diseases with them. So be sure to control pests as best as possible - even the ones that aren’t going to eat your plants.
Soil Care
Crops that have been infected with a disease can leave remnants of that disease in the soil even through winter, so crop rotation is highly recommended. Even with healthy crops, rotation is essential to keeping your crops healthy and at their best.
You also want to be sure that the soil in which you are planting is healthy, because healthy soil will provide nutrients necessary for your plants to be able to fight disease if it happens to come along.
Keep Tools Clean
Just as in the medical profession, where doctors do not reuse dirty implements on multiple patients, you do not want to use dirty tools. If you’ve used your garden tools on diseased plants, be sure to wash them in between so as not to carry disease over to the healthy crops.
There are other methods, such as spraying your crops with lime or sulfur, that will also help protect against plant diseases. If you decide to use one of these, be sure that you know the quality of your soil, as lime and sulfur both can affect the pH level of the soil, which can hurt plants and promote weed growth.
Keeping your plants disease free in an organic garden does not have to be difficult to do. As it is in the human world, so it is in the plant world: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Technorati Tags: Organic Gardening Tips plant disease organic gardening
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