Controlling pests and diseases

As a gardener, you have at your disposal a huge range of agricultural poisons to control the pests and diseases that are attacking your plants. At last count there were something like 74,000 registered man-made poisons and the vast majority of which were designed to fight pests and diseases in agriculture.
The downside of this approach is that a recent study of thousands of American schoolchildren showed that all of them had traces of one or more agricultural poisons in their bodies. You are told that these chemicals are safe, but the toxic smorgasbord of chemical used by many commercial farmers, has unintended and undesirable side effects, including poisoning the soil, water and soil micro-organisms.
Governments have an interesting method for determining the "safe" level of toxins in food. When actual levels become higher than the "recommended safe level" they increase it! The European Union has raised the legal daily limit of glyphosate (the active ingredient in most herbicides and weedicides) residue to 20mg per kilogram of food. This is sixty times higher than the limits recommended by the World Health Organization. The EPA in the United States has raised the legally acceptable level to 100 mg per kilogram of food. This is 10 times the level at which birth and reproductive anomalies have been observed in animals.
An interesting side effect that comes from using a chemical to control a pest is that the rich suite of biological compounds that plants naturally synthesise in order to protect themselves, are not produced. This reduces the flavour, nutritional value and even medicinal properties that plants offer because beneficial bio-chemicals have been replaced by toxic, man-made chemicals.
Most gardening books and magazines you read, place huge importance controlling disease and eliminating insects. Even the "organic gardening" advocates suggest companion planting and safe, non-toxic "natural" sprays.
You don't have to worry about poisons and insects when you have healthy, nutritionally balanced soil with a pH of 6.4.
Healthy soil produces healthy plants. Insects and diseases hate healthy plants. Healthy plants are full of minerals and sugars, which give insects alcohol poisoning. This makes sense when you realise that insects and diseases are nature's garbage disposal agents. They get rid of the rubbish! There's no prize for guessing who eats the rubbish when we eliminate the insects and diseases with poisons.
Even the scrub turkeys won't eat your vegetables when they are grown in healthy soil. I have a very frustrated scrub turkey. He ransacks the compost heap every day and regularly wanders through the garden in the forlorn hope that there will be something to eat. He never does any damage. He brings friends occasionally. They don't stay. There is nothing to eat! Hares occasionally eat the carrot tops. This tells me that in that part of the garden, I've not got the soil balance quite right.
Plants have defence systems to fight against insect attack and disease. This may take the form of thick skin on fruit, or spines or hairs on the plants. It may involve feedback systems of bio-chemical pathways, which operate in a similar way to our immune system. An external cue, such as an insect sting, prompts a cascade of responses that triggers the production of bio-chemicals. These deter or kill invading pests. This response takes only minutes in a healthy plant but unhealthy plants do not have adequate energy resources to activate their defences. To ensure we have healthy plants we need to maximise soil health including soil life diversity including the billions of microbes and fungi that provide food to the plants. Kelp, rotted animal manures and plant compost, microbe food such as carbon and inoculations of microbes using compost teas all help to build a diverse soil micro-organism population.
For more information go to www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com