How did the the bugs and diseases teach your plants how to be strong in during the past growing season?
Was it hard to watch it happen without saving every plant?
I’m working on a few ppt slides and getting a bit tired of my own photos…
Extra special would be photos that show healthy and susceptible plants of the same species in the same photo.
In my cabbage rows if a plant died I would replace it with a miniature marigold plant. As the season progressed I noticed the cabbages with marigolds near them did not have as many butterfly larva on them. Of course I had 150 cabbages so they could avoid the marigolds. I didn’t take pictures. I’m planning to really test it this year. So I’ll let you know.
I don’t have a ton to say without thinking this over because til now I don’t keep good documentation. I’m also new to thinking about gardening in this way, and in the great scheme of things new to gardening. But I’d like to see more on this thread. I’m sure many growers here aren’t trying to actively manage pests.
We’ve had at least one tunneling critter in the garden at least two seasons now, despite barriers intended to keep them out. Seems likely based on what they’ve done and the size of the tunnels that they are voles or vole-adjacent. Moles are another good possibility - - our property and the surrounding land is full of them, but they don’t eat plants.
The tunneling, root-nibbling, and of late even leaf-nibbling (another critter?) means that these conditions may have selected for any of the following:
We also have a lot of fungus in the garden and on the property. I say this because we get so many mushrooms, and there’s visible hyphae when looking at disturbed soil in the garden. This means plants that aren’t resistant to these kinds of pathogens, regardless of the nature of that resistance, don’t make the cut. There are gardeners who would think I’m nuts for not solarizing my soil to deal with our fungus problem. I think they are are nuts. We’ll have to agree to disagree 
We’ve also gone three seasons on the same original inputs and no cover.
We may be selecting for:
I don’t really understand much about how plants talk or think, let alone talk to fungus, but I want the ones that think “Oh hey friends! Want some root juice? I make it myself” 
, not “Who are you?! No, stay back! Get away!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOooooo_____…” 
As far as non-intervention with ailing plants is concerned, I’ve found watching plants sicken and die to be quite valuable. It’s helped me get much better at reading plant cues, reasoning about their possible and probable next steps in life, and to learn a teensy bit about teasing out a plant’s story from the story of the system it’s participating in.
Oh, I don’t have any photos, sorry 
No time for a photo now. But i made an observation.
A kale invested by aphids had dropped it’s formerly formidable erect flowerstem to soil hight close to another much less infested kale blooming and towering proudly over it.
The kale that was infested was like asking for pollen to drop down onto the bottom one.
Surely i’m imagining things.
Maybe you’re not imagining… plants can choose which pollen grains to accept so it’s only a natural next step I suppose that they could change location. Looking forward to the photo. For our future book!
Sorry Julia I’d have to do better for the book than phonesnapshot. But i’ll be on the lookout for better examples.
Here are some photos by Marcos Cortez Bacilio (creator of the Center of Origin course) in Guerrero.
The photos below are of the giant storm that destroyed parts of Acapulco in October. Lots of destruction but they did harvest some corn from the milpas.
