What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening

podcast. I'm Kevin and I'm here with Nicole Masters International

Agrocologist. You know we've been giving you guys some really good

information solutions,

you know practical solutions and theory as well about making sure you have really

healthy soil but there's a piece of this that we haven't touched on yet and it's a piece that we did touch on a little bit last month with Jessica Walliser relating to how insects and plants communicate with each other.

What attracts insects to plants and how you might even be able to

alter or change those signals to your own benefit in the garden. So Nicole why don't

we just kind of start out with basically what's actually going on here.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I think people just assume that there's insect pests, like, and that's a given.

And, you know, if someone gives me an organic apple and it's got a

coddling moth damage in it and they go here it's organic it's lovely I'll go no it's

garbage I don't want to eat it. If the insect is is in there and wanting to eat that it's

telling you something about the quality of that food. So they're there to indicate and

give you information basically so an insect pest is not a given.

They're very specifically they have a different digestive system than we do as humans.

They are attracted to different types of food so it's it's there's been

more and more research about this so I mean for the last 120 years there's kind of

been this mantra that you know healthy soils healthy plants you know or that

insects won't attack healthy plants and I think Dr. was it Howard, Albert Howard was talking about at the beginning of the organic movement and then a French

scientist Shabosa was talking about in the 1980s.

He did a thesis on and he called the process

...