Useful Book: What's Wrong With My Fruit Garden?

A week or so ago, Wifey checked out a book from the library called, "What's Wrong With My Fruit Garden?; 100% Organic Solutions for Berries, Trees, Nuts, Vines, and Tropicals" by David Deardorff and Katheryn Wadsworth.

I don't know that I'd really say that we have anything wrong with our orchard (aka fruit garden), but I'm sure there are things we could be doing better.

As Wifey has been leafing (no pun intended) through the book, she came across a section about planting polycultures.  In that concept, you're doing interplanting of a number of varieties of different species of plants that can all benefit one another.  For example, under a fruiting tree, you can plant other plants that could attract pollinators, deter pests or critters, or provide other benefits.  Unlike what many people (me included) think of with an orchard, with a polyculture planting approach, you're more emulating a fruit forest and implementing more of a permaculture approach to gardening.

Basically, this is a larger scale approach to the companion planting I've been doing in my garden for years now.

One picture (and caption) that resonated with me mentioned an underplanting of rosemary that "helps protect an apple tree from deer as would other highly aromatic plants like lavender, thyme, and sage.  Herbs such as fennel and dil attract beneficial insects to help control insect pests.  Flowers like yarrow, cosmos, and rudbeckia also attract beneficial insects."  They also reinforce my approach to using French Marigolds to deter pests.

The authors also recommend attracting beneficial insects and critters to your garden.  This is a concept I've been gradually working on since the final years of the garden plot.  The authors mention:

• Pansies, violas, and other flowers with streaks or dark lines (aka guidelines) on their petals help attract bees
• Queen Anne's lace attracts parasitic wasps to kill caterpillars.  It also attracts lacewings, syrphid and tachinid flies, assassin bugs, and honeybees.  Dill, coriander (cilantro), parsley, cumin, and fennel do much of the same.  Fennel also is good to lure ladybugs (which are predatory insects) to the garden.
• Members of the daisy family (Asteraceae) attract a variety of bees and butterflies, and tiphiid wasps which help kill beetle grubs as larvae and pollinate flowers as adults.  Daisy family plants also lure other parasitic wasps, ladybugs, lacewings, syrphid flies, and soldier beetles.  Other daisy family plants include: tarragon, chamomile, cosmos, sunflowers, anthemis, echinacea, gaillardia, bachelor's butons, and yarrow.
• The mint family (Lamiaceae) attracts ladybugs and lacewings.  Other mints are: agastche, catnip, catmint, thyme, rosemary, hyssop, lemon balm, horehound, sage, and pycnanthemum.

They also identify a number of ways to get rid of a variety of insects such as the Japanese beetles that kept munching on the apple tree foliage this past year.

The takeaway

There's a lot of good info in that book.  This only represents the tip of the iceberg.  It also has application to the garden and property as a whole.  I think I may end up buying the book to have as a reference.