Who Said I Can’t Grow Bok Choy

 

I have been struggling for years to grow Bok Choy. I would see it in the supermarkets, these perfect little bunches and every time I saw it, I would ask myself, what am I doing wrong?

I know that the Bok Choy in supermarkets is usually grown hydroponically and they spray them with chemicals to kill the bugs, to ensure they look perfect to the consumer. But I figure if they can do it, there must be a way to grow them without the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and in the ground so that they still present as well as the hydroponically grown ones.

I have finally figured out how to grow Bok Choy so that it looks fantastic and isn’t all chewed up by insects and covered in dirt.

There are two parts to the equation:

1. Keeping the vegetables clean
2. Stopping them from being ravaged by caterpillars, grasshoppers and white fly

Dripper Lines & Weed Gunnel

To keep the vegetables clean also requires a 2 part approach. Both are inexpensive.

The first is dripper lines, so that you don’t have a hand held hose or sprayers splashing dirt onto the Bok Choy.

The second is Weed Gunnel. This stuff is first class, giving a number of benefits:

• It keeps the garden clean and weed free
• It suppresses insect growth from the soil. Insects can have a number of growth stages and in many cases one stage is as a larvae in the soil. Weed gunnel prevents this stage.
• Weed gunnel helps reduce moisture evaporation.
• In winter it helps warm the soil as a solar collector
• It is biodegradable with approximately 18 months service life.
• It is inexpensive and easy to install.

Installing Dripper Lines and Weed Gunnel

I dug a trench down one side of the proposed garden bed and piled the soil from the trench up onto it. The Weed Gunnel was laid into the trench and the soil pushed back down onto it. The dripper lines were then laid onto the garden bed, after a bag of well rotted chicken manure had been dug into the bed.

A trench was then dug in the other side of the bed and the weed gunnel pulled over the bed and the

dripper lines. The finished bed looked quite neat and tidy ready for planting.

To finish the job, all I needed to do was plant some seedlings.

Part 2. of the plan to grow Organic Bok Choy that looked like it was grown hydroponically was to control the pests without using chemical pesticides. I needed to stop the cabbage moths using the Bok Choy as an egg repository that would hatch into leaf chomping machines. At least I would see them a lot easier on the black weed gunnel with no weeds disguising them.

There was one more trick I had. It is called

Chilli – Garlic spray. To make it, get about 30 of the hottest Chillis you can and a couple of bulbs of garlic. I was fortunate enough to find a friend with some West Indian chillis that must measure about 1 billion on the Scoville scale. They are that hot that my hands were burning after sieving. Next time I will wear rubber gloves.

Place the chillis and garlic in a blender with 2 cups of water and blend for a good while. Sieve the concoction into a 2 litre plastic milk container. Add some biodegradable dishwashing detergent and some vegetable oil. The detergent affects some insects and the oil makes the stuff stick.

Pour half of the mixture into another 2 litre container and fill both containers with water. This is your base solution that you will mix at about 50 ml per litre for spraying onto your plants.

It is best to spray early in the morning or late in the afternoon and start a spray routine as soon as you plant. It is better to prevent the pests from getting established than to try and get rid of them once you find that they are there. I find that a good spray every 3 or 4 days is keeping them under control.

It is very effective against ants, so make sure you spray the soil as well as the plants. Ants try to farm aphids, so keeping them out of your garden is a benefit. I have also noticed that grasshoppers and moths get out of range as quickly as possible when I spray around the perimeter of the garden.

A number of sites I have looked at regarding Chilli Garlic spray recommend using it within two weeks. I have had it stored in the shed for 4 months and it still workd very effectively. I tested some old stuff on ants the other day and it still knocked them over quick time.