Home / Blogs / tantric's Blog /

Blight vs Bordeaux Blue, Organic vs Sustainable

Category: food producing managed ecosystems | Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 9:44 am

---

blight is the curse of every tomato lover in the humid suburb-tropics of GA. specifically, early tomato blight, name, a fungus that infects all members of the nightshade family: tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, Brugmansia, all peppers, eggplants, deadly nightshade, etc (if you want to see what they have in common, look at the flowers.

tomato plants that have early blight require draconian pruning.l if it has those spots, the leaf is doomed. in some cases, the entire plant is infected, but still producing tomatoes - get all but the topmost leaves.

it would be great to use biosafety techniques to prevent the spread of blight, but right now it's ubiquitous, so i'm looking at containment. the pruned leaves should be put in plastic bags and removed or destroyed as you may.

after i prune i spray copper sulphate. technically, copper sulphate is 'organic' but then again, so is arsenic. this is the turquoise blue stuff, the first fungicide, invented in the Bordeaux vineyards. copper kills fungi, algae and snail by messing with proteins other organisms don't have. you probably don't want it in your compost, but who knows? i have a little one liter pump sprayer that cost $6 and is a wonder.

there is an official government enforced definition of 'organic'. i don't grow that kind of organic - that's a luxury item. feeding seven billion people involves makes some compromises. i'm aiming for sustainable, meaning i leaving the area better than i found it.

the normal way of doing agriculture is an absolute assault on the local biome. that has to happen, to a degree, but you always loose in the end when you fight nature. that's how my father does it - he couldn't understand why i wanted a pesticide that killed only one type of bug - he aims to kills all insect life.

i want to integrate my garden and the local biota. a well designed managed ecosystem should be low maintenance. my tomatoes plants are *not* low maintenance. but at this point i'm still don't know whether or not i should group all the Solanaceae plants. my dad does this, though i don't know why (eggplants and peppers with tomatoes).

btw, ecological science, state of the art, can create simple models for predator-prey systems, population growth, foodwebs with three or four levels and so and the models are accurate predictors. but nothing like a real ecology, not even a puddle. those are vast chaos systems. you can't stop them to study them - when you stop them they break. have to understand them intuitively, especially finding the key species and factors, including initial conditions.more concisely, the green thumb.

by grace of the Muir go i,
byron

This blog entry has been viewed 154 times

---

Home / Blogs / tantric's Blog /