fighting garden pests

Its that time of year.....
- Slugs ate 80% of my red runner beans but none of my Chinese beans (thank goodness). Time for Sluggo.
- Slugs are also eating my basil, and I'm finding baby slugs inside the lettuce heads when I wash them. I transplanted the basil to fill in the holes and sprinkled on some Sluggo.
- Leaf miners are all over my beets greens. I should have covered them earlier, but did not. I'll just ignore them and hope some new leaves can out grow the miners.
- My potatoes and tomatoes have buckshot holes from flea beetles, but not too bad. This pest is short lived, with a spring life cycle of about 1 mo.
- I can't see my cabbage, broccoli or kale because I covered it last week to keep the cabbage worm off. I think its doing well.
- The chipmunks ate my first big red strawberry today. I have some chicken wire covering ready to go on tomorrow in hopes of having a nice strawberry martini for myself soon.
- Chipmunks also have been eating the sunflower seeds from the roots of my sunflower seedlings. That basically kills the plants....I suppose a chicken wire cover in the top of the soil wold help if I grow some more sunflowers.

bugs on the vegetable seedlings

Most of the bugs I have seen in my garden this year have only been eating the very young seedlings and have gone away as the transplants have established themselves.

I was very disappointed by the heavy leaf miner damage to the beet seedlings.  I don't know any remedy for this, so I just ignored it. Now it seems that the new leaves are not getting the same damage. Hopefully the plants will continue to outgrow the miners.



My potatoes have a bit of flea beetle damage - not bad. This is a pretty regular problem in my garden early in the season. The flea beetles like the dry dusty weather, and the rain we are having now is probably reducing their numbers. Sometime I plant marigolds to chase them away, but I'm afraid these only look pretty and don't do a lot for the beetle problem. They look pretty and then they get covered by the vigorous potato plants.

 

I was surprised to see squash beetles already.  A couple weeks ago, there were striped beetles on nearly all of my baby seedlings. I gently tapped the plants to knock the beetles to the ground and then (yuck) squished them (eeu). I haven't seen any since. Fingers crossed. The photo below is a particularly hard hit plant - others are looking much better than this.



I also have some unknown pest damaging spinach and bok choy. I can't see any bugs and its eating fairly large holes in the plants. So my guess is slugs.Oh well. I know there are lots of organic solutions. I will have to look these up. (Or cheat and buy some slug pellets.)




Earlier in the season (a month ago), my broccoli was badly eaten by some pest. Entire young plants were eaten to the stem. I was thinking slugs, white cabbage worm or maybe even chipmunks. Since I didn't see any of these on the plants, I covered the patch with floating row cover. The plants are really beautiful now. I have left the cover on but the plants are starting to burst out if it. I love it when something as simple as row cover can solve a problem.

parasitic wasps

My first shipment of corn worm parasitic wasps arrived 3 weeks ago. They need to go out to the field within 24 hours, so I ran over to the community gardens and distributed the four cards. Each card has pin head size wasp eggs glued to it. I searched through the plots and found about 10or 12 patches of corn. In four of them, I hung a card of eggs.

I am receiving more eggs about once a week and each time I place the cards in different patches.

The wasps parasitize the eggs of the European Corn Borer. Its an experiment to see if this helps with our worms. From looking back to my old photos (below), the worms I had two years ago were Corn Ear Worms, not Borers. My understanding is that the Ear Worm lays its eggs singly so its hard for a wasp to be effective against them because it has to find every egg. On the other hand the European Corn Borer lays eggs in a cluster, so the wasps can effectively parasitize all of them. It seem like a fantastic, organic method of pest control, so I am trying the experiment anyway.