The Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise Alabama. This is the world's only monument to an agricultural pest, and was erected as the bug was such a problem it forced agricultural and economic diversification in the area, for which the residents were later grateful, as the area couldn't rely on cotton due to the bug.
I grew Brussels Sprouts one summer. I didn't get to eat any.
At the time, I was trying to do a garden without pesticides. It turned into a real battle. The bugs ate all of my Brussels Sprouts. Combating insects turned into a losing contest and in the end, I resorted back to the sort of garden pesticide you use to dust crops.
Which caused me to ponder this question.
People grew Brussels Sprouts before pesticides became widespread mid 20th Century.
What did they do about the bugs?
2 comments:
Organic market gardeners use row covers or insect netting to protect their crops from insects, but I doubt if that was available a hundred years ago.
I might be mistaken, but I think there were some pretty nasty arsenic-based insecticides used in the late 19th century. But, I'd guess that some insect damage was just accepted as part of growing vegetables. Or, there wasn't as much insect pressure back then as there is now.
Insects are like weeds and seem to move into new areas where they never existed before quicker than you'd think.
I gave up on growing both grain sorghum and sorghum-sudangrass because of sugar cane aphids. They weren't present in OK until they showed up 4-5 years ago in a few fields of grain sorghum on the Texas border. Then a few years ago, sugar cane aphids were everywhere in Oklahoma grain sorghum fields and they were moving into Kansas.
A couple of years ago, they were all over a field of sorghum-sudangrass of mine. I haven't planted sorghum-sudangrass or grain sorghum since then.
I'd bet that vegetable farmers had something similar happen to them. They grew great crops for a while, then the insects started showing up, the farmers dealt with a little insect pressure and damage for a few years until it became impossible to grow certain vegetables. The farmers either switched to other crops or moved the farm to another area with little or no insect pressure.
Very interest Rich. I hadn't thought of the role in crop rotation in combating bugs at all.
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