Ask anyone who has a garden what could they grow without insecticides and they will tell you 'nothing'. It's the same with farmers.
Someone, who knows, told me the new pollution standards the EPA has passed om coal fired plants is so severe that if you have 'silver' fillings in your teeth there is more mercury in your spit than is allowed from a power plant emission.
So compared to pollution 50 years ago we don't have 'pollution' now.....
I think people live in a fantasy world now, where they think nothing bad can possibly happen to them...
No doubt. In the sixties, if you went into New York for a day, your neck got grimy. Just like the song said.
Chickens.
A fox murdered my three chickens back in May. They were five years old. I was not aware of how well they controlled the insect population till they were no longer here.
I miss my chicklets!
Without insecticides, I am growing tomatoes, beans, sugarsnap peas, arugula, lettuce, amaranth, peppers, melons, cucumbers, squash, artichoke, blueberries, raspberries, cherries and peaches.
Flea beetles stunted the eggplant, and Japanese beetles messed up some peaches and and they’re all over the bean leaves and some years the plum curculio is unkind to the cherries and peaches. But I’m freezing food and giving it away.
Now if my life depended on my garden and the insects were a problem I’d spray. But so far the let it be approach is working okay.
“Ask anyone who has a garden what could they grow without insecticides and they will tell you ‘nothing’.”
We have a gardening thread on FR, new one every Friday, and our Freeper gardeners grow all types of food without using harmful insecticides.
I learned to grow in containers and had 135 containers in my small garden with various foods growing in them. The vast majority of those food plants I grew from seed. I did not use insecticides.