#intercropping

This is my first year using straw, but I think it'll make a huge difference. Our clay soil hardens into huge slabs in the heat, and water permeates it REALLY unevenly once it does so even after several years of no till gardening in the ground here. Between winter cover crops, heavier intercropping, more top layers of additional manure & compost than I've added in the past, and heavy straw layers now that everything is in will keep things moist, permeable, and looser for worm and root movement.

[ID: A long in-ground bed against a fence, full of foot high beans squash corn and slightly taller sunflowers. They're all tucked in with straw. Additional beds in similar style are visible on the sides of raised beds]

@badboipointallocator introduced me to this method, a way to deter pests from crops without killing them!

Push–pull technology is an intercropping strategy for controlling agricultural pests by using repellent "push" plants and trap "pull" plants.

[...] intercropping a cereal crop with a repellent intercrop such as Desmodium uncinatum (silverleaf) (push), with an attractive trap plant such as Napier grass (pull) planted as a border crop around this intercrop. Gravid stemborer females are repelled from the main crop and are simultaneously attracted to the trap crop. (wikipedia)

While I haven't tested out this concept in full, I have used nasturtiums as a trap (pull) plant to save my tomatoes from certain pests!

Of course, every staple crop requires different push and pull plants (and preferably a variety among those plant species, too), but it looks like a fun project to work on.

For example, Turnera Subulata attracts ants, while lemongrass repels them. While ants typically aren't a pest to crops, their presence can reduce pollination rates and ants tend to farm aphids, whom do damage crops.

For example, if ants are a problem among tomato plants, you can plant lemongrass between the tomatoes, while turnera subulata goes around the tomatoes and lemongrass (with a bit of distance between)

Some intensive companion and inter-planting inspiration! This is how things should be grown - flowers inbetween to attract beneficial insects, diversity to encourage soil health, and close plant spacing to breed resilience.

(Sage, rainbow chard, rosemary ft. sage, cabbage and onion)

To do this weekend:

figure out more permanent containers (solo or mixed) for the remaining eggplants, yellow squash, butternut squash, lettuce, carrots, collards, and kohlrabi

see what I can find out about the tomato sproutlings: They sprouted pretty quickly but seem to have just stopped after that. Hopefully there is good stuff going on underneath the soil?

make plans for some light duty construction for next week (platforms / shelves / tiers, supports, shading)

(I've talked about dehesa systems here)

Jamón ibérico is the world's most expensive meat- running a heafty price of up to 5k for a leg. While the breed of pig is important, what makes the meat so delicious is it's diet; their last feeding is almost exclusively acorns. It wasn't uncommon for people in Europe to gather sweet acorns for themselves (usually for bread, like pan'ispeli), and feed the bitter acorns to their pigs. Cork trees are the preferred oak, because their bark can be harvested to make cork products (namely cork tops for wine bottles).

The Problem Pesticide use on monoculture farms tends to increase year on year. Not because farmers are careless — but because the pests are getting smarter. Literally. Pest populations that survive one spray cycle breed resistance into their offspring. Combine that with the fact that a single-crop environment is a perfect, undisturbed habitat for specific pests — and you have a self-reinforcing problem. Every season you don't disrupt their environment, they come back stronger.

The Insight Crop diversification disrupts the pest cycle at the ecological level. When you introduce a second crop, you're doing several things at once: breaking the food supply for that pest, introducing new plant species that attract natural predators (beneficial insects, birds), and changing the microclimate of the field so the pest's overwintering conditions are no longer ideal. Some crops also release natural compounds that actively repel the pests of their neighbours. This is what companion planting is built on — and it's been used for thousands of years before the first synthetic pesticide existed.

The Solution Start by identifying which 2-3 pests are costing you the most. Research which crops naturally disrupt their cycles. A classic combination: maize and cowpea together. The cowpea deters aphids and improves nitrogen. The maize provides structural benefit and a distinct microclimate. Together they perform better against pests than either does alone — without extra chemical input.

Takeaway Reducing pesticide dependency isn't just about chemicals. It's about changing the system that makes pesticides seem necessary. Crop diversity does exactly that — quietly, season by season.