I LOVE BUGS
Whenever I show people around Michel-Schlumberger I usually start the tour in the organic vegetable garden. It’s simply a matter of scale – I find that our farming practices in the vineyard are easier to show and describe at the much smaller garden level. The scale and crops may be very different but the sustainability concepts are exactly the same. Working with Nature. Finding balance. And one of my favorite indicators of natural balance in the vegetable garden is the bugs. These are “The Balancers” – no pest can get the upper hand in this crowd. And rather than spraying pesticides which harm all insects (even the beneficials) and rather than spraying herbicides which destroy insect habitat we work hard to encourage our tiny friends to stick around. Stroll the beneficial insect attracting flowerbeds that surround the garden and you’ll find beautiful, happy plants teeming with flying, crawling and hopping insects.
And if you take a real close look you’ll find incredible diversity as well as abundance – native bees, wasps, flies, beetles, ants, and, of course, the honeybee. But that’s another story…
