This topic contains 3 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by Nightgardener 10 years, 7 months ago.
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I been have pulling wonderful carrots all season!
The Carrots were completely free from carrot fly damage due to veggie mesh, my sprouts on the other hand have been destroyed by the diamond backed moth (The solution I know is more veggie mesh
)My question is how did farmers in olden times survive pest attack without such fine meshes (and obviously no chemicals). I can imagine them squishing the small grubs of the moth from their brassicas but their carrots must have been riddled ( n.b I don’t believe companion planting works effectively)
Just satisfying my idle curiosity.
Well done on your carrots, and I wonder the same thing abut managing without modern aids.
However…. there are other points to consider. For example I have not meshed carrots at all this year and have experienced no fly – they are having a year off in Somerset.
Brassicas: we don’t know how prevalent the butterflies were in olden times, perhaps with less rape grown, they had less hosts and were less prevalent. Also with cleaner air and soils, and home-saved seeds, perhaps plants were stronger. Perhaps people ate less than we do! On the other hand there were famines, so maybe not.I wish I could see a garden of three hundred years ago just to have an idea of plants’ strength and size. And how much pest damage there was.
Perhaps before the days of fossil-fuel-burning, radiation and other pollutants, plants just grew more strongly. But I don’t know how to compare.
I heard a really interesting documentary on the radio about Heston Blumenthal going back to the medieval cookbooks to re-create those dishes. I wonder are there any medieval gardening books?
“A little history of British Gardening”, Jenny Uglow says of the medieval peasant:
To add to the grain for bread and the beans and peas … which came from their strip fields, villagers grew cabbage and kale, onions and garlic and leeks”.
There are references to turnips and parsnips being grown in the monasteries; but not to carrots.
I don’t think we should underestimate the technology available; they knew how to make fishing nets and grew hemp for clothing so it’s not impossible that the villagers netted their cabbages. Or perhaps (without the distractions of education or iPads) they sent the children out to pick off caterpillers and sit in the fields to scare off birds?
Perhaps the were growing things that were relatively pest free; no reference to carrots, perhaps carrot fly was a problem, and of course no concerns about blight as no potatoes or tomatoes until much later.
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