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garden pests

When Things Go Wrong in the Garden

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Our new garden on the Mississippi Gulf Coast already is providing plenty of food and education. So far, besides the early spring radishes, we have harvested ripe cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers, about a dozen zucchini, and several small bunches of green beans.

In addition, we have harvested a few gallons of wild dewberries not far from the house, and I have identified several other wild edible plants in our yard and neighborhood.

This all sounds amazing, right? Like we have moved to a land of abundance.

  • Zucchini
  • Early green beans
Swiss chard and Chinese Multicolored Spinach plants growing in the garden. Sticks standing around the plants deter squirrels from digging nearby.

Challenges in our Gulf Coast garden

Let me just list, though, some of the challenges facing the garden (and gardener!) in this yard, starting with zoological forms:

  • Fire ants — many, many colonies — which will take awhile to discourage. I have plans, though, based on my organic fire ant control articles, part 1 and part 2.
  • Moles, which have tunneled through the garden, damaging roots and making it impossible for some plants — the ones with tunnels right underneath — to develop deep root systems.
  • Squirrels, which dig random holes in the garden and uproot smaller plants as they dig.

In addition, other insect pests and the first diseases have already attacked. First, caterpillars destroyed the Swiss chard (Just like in Georgia!). When I finally pulled up the chard to replant that space with another kind of crop, the caterpillars moved to the tomato plants.

It took days and days of spraying the plants with an organic-approved Bt product for caterpillars (Thuricide) and hand-smashing the larger caterpillars to stop the infestation. I think that I finally got them all, but would not be surprised to find a couple more.

  • Powdery mildew on zucchini leaves
  • Evidence of pickleworms, hiding in the cuke

Then, the zucchini leaves got covered up in mildew. The cucumbers have been attacked by pickleworms, and then we had a tropical storm.

Backyard and garden flooded by rains from tropical storm Cristobal.
The vegetable garden completely flooded in Tropical Storm Cristobal

The storm waters have receded, but the ground stayed saturated for several days. Not all plants in the garden will recover from having their roots under water for so long. The okra looks fine, but the tomato plants are still wilted, the green bean plants are turning brown, and the rosemary (not surprisingly) is totally brown.

How does an organic gardener address these many challenges?

It helps if a gardener has a good sense of humor, a lot of patience, and a readiness to observe, experiment, and learn.

To reduce risks of flooding

We had placed the garden in the highest part of the back yard that gets full sun, but that was not high enough. For this particular garden, an obvious place to start addressing our challenges is in building raised beds, to keep the garden from drowning in future storms.

Considering where we live, future heavy-rains are a certainty. Raised beds would allow the garden to drain faster, even if it goes underwater again.

Raised beds might also reduce some of our mole-tunneling issues.

We didn’t start with raised beds, partly because we wanted to get things planted right away, but also because of the fire ants. I had observed in Georgia that fire ants seem to be attracted to raised beds. However, an underwater garden is worse than dealing with ants. Raised beds are definitely in our future.

How to address other garden challenges:

For other critter issues, bugs, and diseases, reaching for “products” is not, usually, my first choice. An exception is when I am caught totally off guard — for example, by unexpected rampaging herds of caterpillars.

Instead, these are strategies that I use:

  • Try different planting dates, to avoid the pest or disease that is causing problems. In Georgia, planting bush beans as early as the weather would allow meant I could harvest more beans before the bean beetles attacked the plants.
  • Try a different variety of the crop. Birds and other wildlife can be confused by varieties of crops that ripen to an unexpected color (when “ripe” is white or green instead of red, for example). Also, some varieties of cucumbers and squashes can stand up to mildew diseases longer than others, before dying. In addition, it is possible to find varieties of most crops that ripen sooner/faster than others, so gardeners can harvest more before an expected disaster strikes.
  • Switch to completely different crops. Some crops might be inappropriate for a particular garden. If the only way to harvest from the crop is to provide constant application of sprays/powders, that could be a clue that it is time to try other crops. Learning to love a different crop that is better suited to your yard is a strategy to try. (Note: I did not used to even LIKE beets, but now they are a favorite.)
  • Expect and be satisfied with a short harvest window for a crop. My zucchini plants produced veggies for about three weeks. Now the plants are done, partly due to mildew and partly to being underwater, and I can use that space for another crop. Even though I would love to have more zucchini from the garden, the ending of the crop is not a disaster. Instead, it is an opportunity to plant another crop. Maybe sunflowers…

Strategies in action for this current garden

We won’t have time to put in raised beds until fall. The house we moved into has had a lot of updates, but it was built in 1948. There are things that need to be done.

Today, for example, we crawled under the house (18 inch clearance) and pulled out the dead animal that has created an awful smell and attracted about a million flies over the past couple of days — it was a possum.

However, we have considered some different options for raised beds, checked prices of supplies at the local hardware/lumber stores, and figured out how much of each supply we will need, when the time comes.

For changing the timing of planting — this is our first season of planting in this garden. I have recorded planting dates and crop notes in my copy of the Garden Planner and Notebook, so that next year I will know which crops — such as zucchini, cucumbers, Swiss chard, and green beans — I should try planting earlier. Because I have kept notes, I will be able to compare results from the different planting times.

For switching out to different crops — I already have switched out the Swiss chard to something completely different. Peanuts are growing in that space, and the plants withstood the flooding like little champs. The seed packet is leftover from 2013 (!!!). I don’t really know why I kept the packet, because it took up a lot of space in my seed box. Glad I did, though. The seeds all came up.

I am still looking for edible greens that can withstand the heat, humidity, caterpillars, and other hazards of a Southeastern US summer. I have tried Malabar spinach in the past, in Georgia, and it does well, but I have been unable to love it.

My parsley is still too small to provide greens for the kitchen, and so is the purslane. I might try Good King Henry next, even though it is related to Swiss chard. Maybe as a “wilder” type of plant, it will not be as attractive to caterpillars.

Ripe red tomatoes, green tomatoes, smaller cherry tomatoes, a cucumber, and small butternut squashes all harvested from the garden, set on a tray indoors.
The good news — harvested from our garden. Green tomatoes are from wilted plants.

To address the challenge of a short harvest window, the best move might be to just plant LOADS of whichever crop is going to have only a few weeks of productivity. Even if the garden is small. Then when the crop comes in, it will be glorious, for just that short time.

This is the strategy I will likely try for Swiss chard next year. In addition to planting it earlier, I will plant more seeds closer together and harvest them smaller. At the first sign of trouble, I will harvest the whole crop to bring into the kitchen. We can luxuriate in the Swiss chard for awhile, then move on to another crop.

Protect Seedlings with Paper Collars

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When I planted part of my new garden a few weeks ago (zone 9a!), the seeds set directly into the garden included zucchini and cucumber seeds. The cucumbers all came up, but no zucchini plants appeared.

I checked the zucchini seed packet — it was stamped for use in 2019, which is plenty recent, and it was stored in the same container, in the fridge, with the other seed packets. The zucchini seeds should have been ok.

There was no sign of critter activity above ground. No holes had been dug, no remnants of the seeds were visible nearby. When I dug down to look for the seeds, they were just gone.

Zucchini seedlings coming up within protective collar.
Seedlings in paper cup collar.

I suspected a critter, but the below-ground kind, something similar to a cutworm.

To verify this idea, and to thwart a future loss, I planted the next set of zucchini seeds inside collars that I made by cutting up a saved paper cup.

I pressed the collars into the garden soil and planted a couple of seeds in each one. The good news is that the collars worked. We now have little zucchini plants.

If your garden experiences a similar seed failure, consider using the paper collar method of protecting seeds and seedlings. First, though, consider some of the many other reasons that the seeds might not be sending up little plants.

The actual seeds

Seeds need certain conditions for them to stay “viable”. If the seeds are old or were held in poor conditions for too long, they may have lost their ability to grow. Ask these questions:

Seeds in their storage box, with a gasket-type seal, to use in planning this year's garden.
Seeds in storage box.
  • How old are the seeds? Seeds for some crops are only “good” for two-to-three years. If the seeds are older, they might not be able to grow.
  • Have the seeds been kept in cool, dry conditions? If seeds have been exposed to warm, humid air for long (like being left in a hot car for a few hours sometime last summer), then they might not be able to grow.
  • If the seeds are from older packets, not newly purchased this year, have they been stored properly? Vegetable seeds keep their ability to grow longest when they have been stored in airtight containers in the fridge or freezer.

Planting and care of the seeds

Planting depth, soil moisture, and soil temperature are three factors that can have a huge effect on whether seeds will unfold into little plants that are able to push up to the soil surface.

  • One big reason for seeds to not come up is that they have been planted too deep. Think back to the day of planting. Does the planting depth match what is recommended on the seed packet, or did the seeds get pushed, or slip down, more deeply into the soil? Seeds that are too deep may unfold down under the ground, but they might not be able to push up through all that soil to the surface.
  • Was the soil kept evenly moist? If the garden soil dries out, seeds will not come up. If the soil dries out after the seeds begin to unfold, the little plants will die before you ever see them. Soil that is too wet is just as bad as soil that is too dry. Seeds and their unfolding little plants can drown and/or rot in soaking-wet soil.
  • Was the soil warm enough? Some seeds need warmer soil than other seeds. If you are still waiting to see your okra plants, for example, be prepared to wait a while longer. Okra seeds unfold faster in warmer soils.
  • Have you waited long enough? Some seeds take longer than others to come up, even with the right warmth and water conditions. For example, parsley seeds can take a couple of weeks (or three, or four) to unfold their inner plants.

Critters

A gardener can have done everything right, using excellent seeds and providing perfect care to the garden, and still not see the expected little plants emerging from the soil. After thinking back carefully to consider where else in the steps something could have gone wrong, the gardener may then need (like me) to consider critters as a possible cause.

Seedling in the garden, with its leaves bitten off.
Common type of critter damage.

A wide range of critters dig up and eat seeds, both the newly planted seeds and the seeds that have begun to unfold into little plants.

The helpful thing about most critters is that they tend to leave signs, or clues, about who they are.

  • Some birds will scratch up seeds to eat, and crows, in particular, will pull tiny plants (especially corn) out of the ground. You may see tossed-aside leaves that are their left-overs.
  • Small mammals, like chipmunks, rats, and squirrels sometimes dig up seeds and seedlings to eat. They may leave holes in the ground, or dirt may be kicked up around the planting area. Sometimes, too, they leave footprints.
  • Rabbits and deer may bite off the tops of the plants, leaving a shortened stem standing in the garden.
  • Underground pests, like cutworms, can destroy seedlings, and other similar larvae can eat the softened seeds. The damage from these may be harder to spot.

Paper collars when there are no cups

Paper cup cut apart to make protective collars.
Paper cup collars for seedling protection.

When I have planted corn inside collars, the birds have left it alone. Corn was the first crop that I protected in this way.

In a small garden, using paper collars to defend your seeds and seedlings is not too much work. Finding enough material to use is the biggest challenge. Right now, we are short on saved paper cups.

However, my Louisiana sister told me this morning that she has used paper-towel tubes and toilet-paper tubes, cut to shorter lengths, to protect seedlings in her garden.

I am pretty sure I can find some cardboard tubes to cut into shorter lengths (an inch-and-a-half or two inches), which is good, because I have more seeds and little plants to set into the garden this weekend.

I hope you are all keeping safe and well and enjoying your gardens, no matter how small.

Duct Tape for Pest Control

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At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden where I volunteer, squash bug eggs have shown up on some of the squash plants. The eggs stick very tightly to the leaves, making them difficult to remove by hand. Duct tape, though, can help with egg removal.

Why are squash bugs “bad”?

Squash bugs aren’t essentially bad, but their activity on our plants can have a bad result. North Carolina State University’s Extension tells us that squash bugs suck the sap out of our squash plants.

Even if the plants don’t die directly as a result of this feeding activity, it can weaken them. The result is that they can make fewer squashes and become wilted. Neither of those outcomes is good. Getting rid of the eggs can slow the infestation down.

How to use tape to remove squash bug eggs from leaves

Cluster of tiny, shiny, bronze colored eggs on a green leaf.
Cluster of shiny, bronze colored squash bug eggs on a squash leaf.

First, identify the clusters of eggs.

What the eggs look like

Squash bug eggs are pretty distinctive. They are shiny, hard, bronze-colored, and appear in clusters on the leaves of squash plants. Sometimes, they are on the stems, too, but this is less common.

Why remove the eggs, rather than smash them where they are? These particular insect eggs are difficult to smash without damaging the leaves. Removing the eggs completely from the plant is the best hope for keeping the numbers of hatching eggs to a minimum.

Duct tape egg removal technique

Actually, the blue painters tape works, too, if you don’t have duct tape. It is likely that clear package-sealing tape would also work, but I haven’t tried it.

Bronze-colored bug eggs and hairy yellow larvae stuck to the sticky side of a piece of duct tape.
Duct tape can lift eggs and squishy larvae from leaves of your garden crops.

Just press the sticky side of a short section of tape to the squash bug eggs, then peel it away from the leaf. Most of the eggs will be stuck to the tape.

You may need to press a fresh section of the tape to the eggs a second time to get them all, but the tape works. With little effort on your part, the eggs will be gone from the leaves.

Now, of course, those shiny eggs are on the tape. When your piece of tape is “full”, fold it over and smash the eggs as well as you can, before putting the tape into a trash bin.

Duct tape can lift away other pests, too

You may have noticed that there are some yellow fuzzy things on the tape pictured above, along with the squash bug eggs. Those fuzzy things are the larvae (babies) of squash beetles.

Normally, I just smash those beetle larvae with my fingers, but I already had the tape in hand. Picking the larvae up with the tape was convenient, easy, and less icky than my usual method.

You can read about squash beetles and the damage they can inflict on your squash patch in my 2018 article about those particular pests. Older articles, from 2015 and 2012 confirm that this is not a new pest for my area.

Upbeat pictures, to end a “pest post”

After thinking about pests for awhile, it is good to switch over to thinking about more of the positive parts of gardening and being out of doors. These pictures might help:

  • Yellow swallowtail butterfly resting on a large yellow squash flower; several bees are clustered in the center of the large flowers
    Yellow swallowtail butterfly on large squash flower, that also has several bees working at the center.
  • Tomatoes, squash, cucumbers in a cardboard box.
    Home garden vegetables from a recent morning’s harvest.
  • Frog on the table on our back deck.

Planting Dates for Summer Garden Vegetables

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As spring advances and weather warms, the urge to plant the summer garden becomes almost overwhelming. Knowing which crops can stand a bit of cooler weather and cooler soil can help us make good choices about what to plant when we just can’t wait any longer.

Understanding the last frost date

Most of the garden vegetables that we grow in summer are frost tender, which means that they won’t survive freezing weather. This is why most seed packets use the “last frost date” — the expected date of the last freezing temperatures — as a marker for when to plant summer crops.

Where I live, the average date of the last frost in spring is in mid-April. The date is not exact; we estimate the date based on the dates of the last frost in previous years. Annoyingly, we won’t know the exact date of the last frost for this year until we are well past it. Some years, the last frost in my yard is in March, and one year my yard had a frost on April 23rd.

The role of soil temperature

Cucumber seedling with three true leaves, already planted in the organic home garden.
Cucumber seedling transplanted into the garden in April.

Part of finding the best time to plant vegetables is knowing the best temperature for seeds to sprout and for plants to grow. Texas AgriLife Extension points out that these two temperatures are not necessarily the same. For example, bean seeds may sprout best at a soil temperature of 85 degrees F, but that temperature isn’t best for plant growth and productivity.

The AgriLife article lists reasonable, “compromise” soil temperatures for planting many crops:

  • cucumber (64°F)
  • cantaloupe (68°F)
  • okra (73°F)
  • pumpkin (75°F)
  • squash (70°F)
  • watermelon (72°F)
  • beans (72°F)
  • beets (45°F)
  • tomato (55°F)
  • turnip (50°F)
  • corn (55°F)

From the list, you can see that beets and turnips (cool-season crops) can do well in cooler soil, corn and tomato plants slightly warmer, and cucumbers and cantaloups a bit warmer still. This information can help in planning your schedule.

Recommended date ranges from University Extension programs

UGA publishes a Vegetable Planting Chart that shows suggested planting dates for garden vegetables. The dates are for middle-Georgia (a line through Macon across the state), which means that the dates need to be adjusted for areas north and south of that line.

Tomato transplants for the organic home garden, indoors under lights on a cold day.
Tomato transplants for the organic home garden, indoors under lights on a cold day.

For my area, just north of Atlanta, I would add about two weeks to the ranges in the UGA planting chart to get a reasonable planting date range for my garden.

North Carolina State University Extension publishes a planting chart for Western North Carolina. The dates are similar to those that I would use for my garden.

You may notice that the recommended date-ranges in the linked publications for spring planting can be quite large – up to six weeks for some vegetables. The whole range of dates might be good theoretically for a particular crop; however, for organic home gardens, there are some good reasons for choosing to plant either at the early end of the range or the late end.

Reasons to consider dates at the edges of the recommended ranges

For both bush beans and pole beans, I usually plant as early as I think the plants can survive the experience. The early planting — as early as the first week in April, if the weather forecast looks ok — means that I start harvesting beans before the end of May. By the time the Mexican bean beetles show up to demolish the plants, I will have harvested plenty of beans.

I also choose an early planting date for cucumbers, squashes, and melons. Those plants all are attacked by mildew diseases in late summer and an assortment of pest insects in mid to late summer. Early planting allows a larger harvest, before the plants are affected by whichever problem attacks first. For these crops, planting seeds in the first week in April, or transplants a week or two later (when the soil is warmer), can make a big difference in how much food I can harvest before the plants die.

Okra and sweet potatoes are two crops that I plant at the later end of the recommended planting date range. Both of those two crops grow slowly in cool weather, and I have found that keeping ahead of the weeds, which grow faster, is more work when these two crops are planted early. When okra and sweet potatoes are planted later, in early or mid May in my yard, they grow fast enough to shade the ground sooner, and weeds have less chance to take hold.

Tomatoes are another crop that I plant later than almost every other gardener I know. My experience is that later-planted tomatoes, like at the end of April or early May, are less troubled by blossom-end rot than earlier-planted tomatoes. They also are more likely to survive whichever soil-borne wilt disease is in my yard, and infection by the ever-present early blight disease is usually less severe.

Organic gardeners won’t use the chemicals that are available in garden centers to control all the above problems. Instead, we have be a bit wily about getting around the diseases and pests that can reduce the productivity of our organic home gardens. I have found that adjusting my planting dates to the edges of the date ranges, for some crops, is all the “control” I need.

Of course, keeping a good attitude about the vagaries of the natural world also helps.

Amy’s planting schedule

In case you are curious, this is when I plant the standard summer crops, most years, in my garden, zone 7B, just northwest of Atlanta:

  • first week in April – plant seeds for bush beans and pole beans if forecast is ok; if a freeze is in the forecast, I start these in a flat or tray, to transplant to the garden after a couple of weeks. I also start squash-family plants – cucumbers, zucchini, winter squashes, melons – in little pots this week, to transplant to the garden when the soil is warmer.
  • mid-April – plant corn, if any is planned. For me, that is usually popcorn. Early planting for corn reduces problems with corn ear-worm. Later plantings almost always have more ear-worms. Plant the transplants (beans, squash family plants) when the first true leaf is a couple of inches across.
  • late-April – plant pepper plants, and seeds for Swiss chard (if planned).
  • early May – plant tomato and eggplant transplants, seeds for okra.
  • mid-May – plant sweet potato slips.
  • mid-summer – plant Southern peas when one of the earlier crops comes out of the garden (bush beans or cucumbers are usually the first to go). After bush beans have been gone from the garden for a couple of weeks, if there aren’t any pole beans also in the garden to harbor more Mexican bean beetles, plant a new patch of bush beans.

What the above schedule doesn’t show is that I start tomato and pepper plants from seed, indoors, in early March. It also doesn’t include annual herbs, like basil or borage, or flowers, like nasturtium and Zebrina hollyhock, that I plant most years.

Protecting early-planted crops from frost

The summer crops are frost-tender, but I plant some of these crops early enough that the risk of frost is high. A couple of different strategies can be used to protect your crops.

The first strategy is the use of transplants to allow an early start for some crops, like beans and cucumbers. This strategy takes some planning, and it takes space in your house. It also, though, protects plants from cooler weather, since they are indoors. The plants can be planted into the garden when the risk of frost is lower.

The second strategy is the use of row covers to protect tender crops in the garden from a light frost. If a hard freeze happens and the row cover does not fully protect a crop, some replanting might need to be done. The good news here is that most seed packets contain enough seeds to replant a small home garden.

For further reading, my older post about planting seeds in the garden contains reminders about planting depth and plant spacing that might be helpful.

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