Plant Predators & Weeds - Building Soils Naturally - page 250

Chapter 21
Plant Predators & Weeds
What kind of food does an aphid like? What about a disease such as powdery mildew? In
what kind of soil does a dandelion grow? To stop these things from being a problem, we
need to delve into a topic that most gardening topics brush over — why they're there in the
first place. This is relevant in a topic about soil because soil health is directly linked with
plant predators and weeds.
Why don't we start with what we look for in food. Humans and other animals prefer
plants that are healthy and full of nutrients. Sure, most of us seem to have lost a lot of our
ability to differentiate between a healthy plant and a not-so-healthy plant, but animals are
still very good at it and they choose the healthy stuff. Even farm animals will choose
healthy feed over the pesticide-laced, imbalanced feed that makes up the majority of what
is being fed to them. But why do insects and diseases eat our plants? It all comes down to
the same reason.
We tend to think insects and diseases are making our plants unhealthy, but actually, they
are there because our plants are unhealthy. This is one of the biggest shifts we need to
make in our thinking when moving to organic gardening practices, and to me it's absolutely
fascinating. While animals prefer healthy plants, insects and diseases prefer the opposite.
They choose plants that have a nutritional imbalance of one or more nutrients. They liter-
ally do not possess the enzymes necessary to digest healthy plants.
In Healthy Crops , Francis Chaboussou pulled together various research concluding that
this imbalance shows up as an excess of soluble nitrogen and sugars in the plant. This ex-
cess can be caused by many things: soil imbalances, an excess of soil nitrogen, the use of
pesticides and chemical fertilizers, water problems, physical damage, or anything that
would make a plant sick. For us, the most important concept to understand is that an optim-
ally healthy plant will not be attacked by predators. It's simply not possible. A lawn with a
balanced soil will not be overtaken by weeds. They could never compete with the grass.
Many of us are learning that human health follows the same rules, that a healthy diet
along with exercise and happiness prevent almost all of the diseases inflicting us. We need
to make this connection with the garden more. Sir Albert Howard figured this out during
decades of experiments at the beginning of the 20 th century, stating that “healthy, well-fed