pest control

Can I Grow Food Organically on a Sand Dune?

31 December, 2020 by amygwh 2 Comments

This past summer, I was told by a farmer at a local farmer’s market that growing food organically is impossible here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. However, I have found that to be not precisely true.

What is true is that my organically-managed garden is supplying a small but steady flow of veggies to the kitchen. What is also true is that a lot of those veggies have been eggplants and okra. As long as I love eggplants and okra, my summer veggie garden will be a smashing success. Ditto for radishes in the spring and fall.

Gulf coast early fall harvest of okra, peppers, greens, and one winter radish.

Unlike market farmers, home gardeners like me have the benefit of not needing to compete with the produce section of the local supermarket. We don’t expect our gardens to supply all the standard veggies the whole year round. This means we can focus our efforts on crops that don’t need chemical interventions to produce food in our yards.

It can also help if a gardener is a bit flexible in how to measure success in the garden.

Part of the path to success is identifying which exact crops will produce well in our gardens, then growing and appreciating those crops. Another part of the path is to keep in mind the part of the Serenity Prayer that reminds us to not get too fussed about the “things I cannot change” and focusing instead on knowing which things can be changed and which can’t.

My sand-dune-based garden

This Gulf Coast sand dune, 28 feet above sea level in plant hardiness zone 9a, is very different from the location of my previous 30 years of gardening in the red clay of the Georgia Piedmont region in hardiness zone 7b. In the “things that cannot be changed” category, the soil here is, as mentioned already, mostly sand. I can pile compost on top of it, but I cannot change the basic sandiness of the yard. I also cannot add more cold to our winters, which means some plants that need a lot of cold, like Rhubarb and many varieties of apples, will not thrive here. The flip side of that is that now I can grow some sub-tropical fruits.

Radishes pulled from the garden, with leaves still attached. Some radishes are round and red, some round and purple, some long and red. — November radishes, three kinds.

Many crops are more adaptable than Rhubarb and cold-loving fruits, especially the annuals that I usually grow in the garden. In our move from Georgia last spring, I brought seed packets for some of those crops left over from the past couple of years. Some of those crop varieties have worked well, and some haven’t.

I’ve already noted that eggplants, okra, and radishes have been wildly productive here. However, a whole lot of crops have been less happy here on my sand dune.

A sadness of beans

Bean crops, which always totally rocked the garden in north Georgia, have not done well here. The first planting gave us a few handfuls of beans, not the usual superabundance, before they died, and I was puzzled, but planted more. When the next planting died, I had to start thinking harder about what could be wrong. English peas planted in early fall met the same fate as the second sad planting of beans. They just faded away.

I can see a few possible reasons for the problem. One is a lack of some essential nutrient, and another is a high soluble salt content in the soil. Until I can deliver a soil sample to the state testing lab, those are both just guesses.

A third possible reason is the relatively high pH of my sandy soil, which is way above 7. Beans tend to prefer a lower pH. This year, as I prepare the planting beds, I will be digging in some sulfur to start bringing that down (sulfur can take years to have any effect). In addition, I hope to hunt up some gypsum to use for a calcium source, since that can also help alleviate the high pH — and it might help with the soluble salts, too.

There is a good chance that I can change the soil pH a little bit, and I can amend the soil to bring in missing nutrients. I might not be able to do much about soluble salts, since my garden is only five blocks from the beach. Salt is in the air! If salts are the problem, beans may never do well here. It will be interesting to find out.

Every crop turns a bit yellow as it grows

As my summer crops grew this year, I saw that they all became less richly green over time. Back in north Georgia, a little bit of Epsom salts (an affiliate link to the product), a source of soluble magnesium, would fix that when extra nitrogen (like in a fish-based fertilizer — see article at this link) didn’t seem to help.

I discovered that Epsom salts works here, too, but they need to be applied much more frequently. The sandy “soil” lets dissolved nutrients, like the magnesium in Epsom salts, wash away, down out of the root zone, very quickly. Clay soils, like those in north Georgia, hold on to nutrients much more tightly, keeping them up in the root zone longer.

This summer, I ended up needing to apply a weak solution of Epsom salts (two rounded tablespoons dissolved in two gallons of water, then applied as evenly as I could manage over two 3×12 foot beds) every couple of weeks to keep the plants looking healthy. For my fall crops, this schedule stretched out to 3-to-4 weeks.

One item on my “to purchase” list this spring is a big bag of a crushed-rock-magnesium source that will not wash down through the sand so quickly. Big, gravel-sized chunks are my preference, but more finely pulverized products are easier to find. I am considering Sul-Po-Mag and Azomite (two affiliate links) as possible sources.

With some additional research into sources and work in applying what I’ve found to the garden, there is a good chance that I can fix the low-magnesium problem.

Other crops that grew less well than preferred

My corn patch was a bust. We ended up with a few patchy ears of sweet corn, which was a disappointment. I think the cause was a mineral-nutrient deficiency problem. I plan to try again this coming year after amending the soil more intensively (I had added a lot of purchased compost this past spring.)

Zucchini squash was very productive for a very short time, then was killed off by squash vine borers. The winter squash did not do well at all. I had planted a butternut, which can withstand the borers, but the squashes that the plants produced were tiny. Then, the leaves all got mildewed and the plants died. For winter squashes, I will — again — keep working to improve the soil with composts and mineral amendments and also try some different varieties. I know that ‘Seminole’ pumpkin squash should do well here, but I am hoping for something thicker-fleshed, sweeter, and with a shell that won’t require a sledgehammer to break through (I have grown it before…).

Sweet potatoes were not nearly as productive as I would have preferred. The good news is that I did dig up about 20 pounds of sweets from the garden. My experience in north Georgia, though, shows me that a much larger harvest is possible from the number of plants grown. From similar space and number of plants in Georgia, the harvest was typically twice that amount.

Tomatoes from the fall plants, brought inside in late November.

Tomatoes in the spring were not very productive. A couple of plants just plain died (drowned, when the garden flooded) and the rest quit making fruit in mid-summer. Apparently, that is a normal occurrence here, caused by nighttime high temperatures. The late-summer tomatoes that I grew were only just beginning to ripen before our first frost on the last night of November.

These tomato issues can be fixed (I hope) with changes in the timing of my plantings. Luckily, this year I am already here, and the garden beds are dug, so I should be able to get tomato plants into the ground well before April. (Our last frost should be around the end of February.) Last year, I was just starting to prepare the garden beds in April, because we moved here at the end of March.

Beets have been a bust. I planted one set of seeds in the late summer, and they came up, but then the little plants faded away. A second planting produced more little plants, and most of them are still present, but they have not grown much.

Stink bugs! Caterpillars!

In addition to soil problems, there were some pests. This is not really a surprise, since tiny plant-eaters are everywhere. My two largest categories of pests were stink bugs and their relatives, and caterpillars of several species.

Immature leaf-footed bugs, the nymph stage, on Southern peas.

Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs damaged tomatoes, peppers, and the Southern peas. Most evenings beginning in early summer, I spent a few minutes out in the garden with a large plastic cup of soapy water, hunting for these pests. A whole platoon of immature leaf-footed bugs could be dislodged into “the cup of doom”, where they would drown, with one shake of the bean, leaf, tomato, or pepper on which they were gathered.

Caterpillars plagued the garden until late summer. Every leafy green vegetable that is normally recommended for the summer garden was attacked, in addition to tomatoes and peppers. Weirdly, though, the caterpillars that I expected to see on cabbage-family plants in fall never appeared. My kale, collards, and arugula have been unmolested. I count this as a blessing.

Fire ants

Fire ant mounds were all over the yard when we moved in. It took awhile for me to get around to dealing with them, but I did find that the Texas A&M recipe, noted in my second article on fire ants, that uses Medina Orange Oil (affiliate link) and Blue Dawn dish soap works great here. Smaller mounds were destroyed with one treatment. Larger mounds took two or three tries. As new colonies have moved in, I have continued using the DIY recipe. This recipe is not strictly organic, considering the range of ingredients in the Blue Dawn dish soap. When my giant bottle of Blue Dawn is finally empty, I plan to try using liquid castile soap, which does not include the petrochemical ingredients, as a replacement for the dish soap.

Before I started seriously hunting down and destroying the fire ant colonies, the ants were eating okra in the garden. It was a surprise that the ants on the okra really were fire ants, not like the kind of ants back in Georgia that farmed aphids on the okra. Figuring this out was painful. Welts from fire ant bites/stings take a long time to heal.

Some happier crops

Plenty of crops have done pretty well in my sand dune garden. Here are some happy pictures of examples:

The plan for now

One great feature of this garden is that digging holes and creating new planting beds is much easier than in the clay in north Georgia. Even better, wet sand never sticks to the shovel in huge messy globs like the red clay can. However, the big drawback is that the sand doesn’t hold onto much of anything. Water and nutrients — like from fertilizers — wash right through.

To improve this situation, I will keep adding composts — my own compost pile is far enough along to reduce the amount I need to buy this year. In addition, I will be buying those crushed rock sources of nutrients, to improve the health and productivity of my crops, as noted above. These additions should make organic gardening in the sand more successful.

In future posts (I promise, they will be more frequent in the coming year), there will be more information about the actual plants in the garden.

I hope that your gardening has provided good food through 2020, and that the coming year brings more garden adventures and successes! Keep well.

Squirrels in the Fruit Trees

10 September, 2019 by amygwh

Sometimes, I think squirrels are cute. Other times, they seem less cute, such as when they are in the attic, or chewing the siding on the house, or eating the fruit ripening on the carefully tended fruit trees in the yard.

One might think that such small animals would be easy to control, but that would be an error; they are wily and hard to discourage.

The squirrels I am referring to are not fox squirrels or flying squirrels (although those are also cute little trouble-makers that are hard to discourage). The squirrels eating fruit in trees in my area are usually the grey squirrels.

What we can’t control

If squirrels are having a “boom year” — high population because of abundant food following a mild winter — they will be much harder to deal with. A gardener might think about using humane traps to catch squirrels and move them to a distant area, but this is a bit like trying to bail a sinking ship with a teaspoon. More squirrels will just flow in from the surrounding neighborhood to take the place of the ones that are removed.

(NOTE: currently in Georgia, squirrels are considered nuisance animals, but the legality of trapping is not clear. You might need a nuisance animal permit.)

Aspects of the yard to consider

Getting rid of ALL the squirrels is not really possible, but there are ways to make the yard less attractive to squirrels, to reduce the numbers of animals eating fruit in your trees.

Reduce or remove any “cover” on the ground that might hide squirrels from predators like hawks and coyotes. Leafy cover in a yard might include vines, tall grasses, and low shrubs, for example. Small animals cross wide open spaces less often than they cross spaces that have lots of leafy cover to hide under.
Make sure trees are far enough apart that branches don’t interlace, forming squirrel highways from one tree to the next. Branches of my Asian persimmon tree are at least twelve feet from the nearest next branch. That tree loses very little fruit to small animals, partly (I think) because it is not easy to get to the tree without crossing open spaces on the ground. North Carolina State University Extension suggests 6-8 feet as adequate distance to discourage squirrel jumping.
Any gardener who is facing a squirrel problem who also puts out birdseed should reconsider the bird feeders. Squirrels and other small animals (chipmunks, rats, mice) thrive on all the seed that falls from feeders. This extra food can support a LOT of small animals, allowing them to have even more babies that will eat even more of your fruit.
Extension’s Ask an Expert suggests putting an alternate food source (like an ear of corn wired to a fence) at a distance from your fruit trees, to draw squirrels away.

Discouraging animal pests usually requires working from more than one angle all at once. After working to change aspects of the yard to make the whole place less squirrel-friendly, the next step is to work on the trees themselves.

Make the fruit trees unpleasant or hard to climb

If squirrels can’t get up into the trees, they will not be able to eat the fruit. If they manage to get up there in spite of your interventions, it may be possible to make the experience so unpleasant that the fruit won’t be worth the effort.

Ways to interfere with climbing

University of Missouri Extension suggests that wrapping a tree with metal flashing and/or adding a metal baffle below the lowest branches can keep squirrels out of the branches:

… wrap trees with metal sheeting or protect them with squirrel baffles, as you would the pole for a bird feeder. . . Wrap all trees within branch-to-branch jumping distance. Be sure to allow for tree growth when wrapping.
Tree squirrels: managing habitat and Controlling damage, by Robert Pierce

Extension’s Ask an Expert site suggests making the metal collar around the tree trunk two feet wide and six feet off the ground.

For baffles, I have not seen any for sale that would really work for most trees. Consider making one either from metal sheeting or from a couple of large aluminum roasting pans.

Use repellents to make the experience unpleasant

Repellents are products that taste bad, or smell bad, or are sticky enough that they are uncomfortable, or that otherwise offend the target animal.

Repellents work best when they are applied early — before the squirrels even know about your fruit trees. However, even if applied late, repellents can help slow the losses when their use is combined with other strategies.

Repellents for the ground versus for trees, fences, and structures

When I’ve had small animal problems, they have mostly been with chipmunks. I have used a hot-pepper based granular application that goes around the outside of the garden, that keeps them out. The one I use is organic-approved. To be honest, it has always worked to keep chipmunks from crossing into my garden, but it is not labeled for use on fruit trees or directly adjacent to other food crops.

I haven’t found any commercial repellents to use on the ground around fruit trees, but the granules I use for chipmunks (which also work for squirrels) might be useful in another part of the yard to keep the squirrels from running through. Just a thought.

Also, there is always experimenting with hot red pepper and black pepper that is liberally spread on the ground around the base of each tree. This would need to be re-applied after a rain, but The Old Farmer’s Almanac suggests that it may be worth a try.

Buy a commercially prepared repellent

The products I’ve seen that are labeled for use on food crops, including fruit, are not organic-approved. They mostly have names that are some version of “hot pepper wax”. I don’t know whether the lack of organic certification is due to the paraffin base that is in many of these, or the chemical that makes the paraffin flowable, or the hot-pepper extract, or any or all of the above.

If you are frustrated enough by squirrels to go without the organic approval, you might try one of the Hot Pepper Wax products, like the one from Bonide.

In general, all the brands of hot wax pepper products seem to be similar, and all have mixed reviews. They work in some situations and not in others.

DIY a batch at home

If you have a lot of powdered hot pepper already in your spice cupboard, making some of your own repellent is an option to try.

You’ll need powdered red pepper (the hotter the better), water and some liquid soap. In a large jug, stir 2 tablespoons of the pepper into a gallon of warm water, then add six drops of liquid soap. Stir well, put the lid on and let it sit overnight. Early the next morning, pour some of the solution into a spray bottle, shake well and spray your plants, fences, or whatever the squirrels are after. At dusk, you can apply a second coat. Continue this for a few days or until the squirrels get the idea. After that, you may only need to spray once a week. The mixture will keep for two to three weeks in the refrigerator.
5 ways to keep pests out of fruit trees, by Joan Morris, Mercury News

Hot pepper is a key active ingredient for most of the commercial repellents, which makes this option a reasonable one to try. I can imagine, though, that the powdered pepper might clog a sprayer, which is something to be aware of when choosing your sprayer. Use one that will permit powdered stuff to go through.

The wrap up

As in most wildlife control situations, the key to best success for managing hungry squirrels is to use two or more new strategies at the same time. Mix it up by installing tree wrapping or a baffle, removing leafy cover near the ground, pruning nearby branches from other trees, AND using repellents.

For all my fellow gardeners whose fruit trees are plagued by squirrels, I hope that this information is helpful. Also — thanks to Sally for suggesting the topic!

Is Gardening Really All About Bugs?

16 October, 2018 by amygwh

Some weeks, it may seem like this blog is more about bugs than about plants. Isn’t gardening all about the plants? Well, it probably should be, but our gardens exist in the natural world, which is crowded with many kinds of life, including insects. Some of the insects are helper-insects, like pollinators and predators (“beneficials”). Other insects are destructive, eating our plants or spreading diseases across our landscapes (“pests”).

Some insects can be helpers as adults and pests in their larval stage. A lot of butterflies and moths are in this category. As adults, they pollinate flowers, helping plants to make fruits and seeds. As caterpillars (larval stage), they eat our plants. This dual life complicates a gardener’s decisions about how to manage caterpillars in the garden.

Which insects are “good” and which are “bad”? How can we know what to do when baby insects, like caterpillars, eat plants in our gardens?

Skipper butterfly on a late-summer zinnia. PHOTO/Amygwh

For me, the decision often comes down to whether the insect specializes on one kind of plant, especially if I am not planning to eat that plant. A lot of the skipper butterfly larvae eat turfgrass. Bermudagrass is not my most favorite plant, so I am not troubled when caterpillars are munching on the lawn.

However, the decision about how to manage pest insects in the garden could one-day disappear. You may remember the report last year of a study in Germany that showed a 75% loss of flying insects within the past few decades.

The authors of the study note:

The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity. While the gradual decline of rare insect species has been known for quite some time (e.g. specialized butterflies [9, 66]), our results illustrate an ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active in space and time.
Article appearing in PlosOne, 18 Oct. 2017

A recent article in the Washington Post, “‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss,” tells about another long-term study in Puerto Rico that shows the same trend. We are losing insects of all kinds, and in great numbers. Why should we care? The article offers a reason:

Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require pollination by bees, wasps and other animals. And arthropods are more than just pollinators. They’re the planet’s wee custodians, toiling away in unnoticed or avoided corners. They chew up rotting wood and eat carrion.
Washington Post article by Ben Guarino, 15 Oct. 2018

To some gardeners, no longer having to worry about pest insects may sound like a dream come true. Sadly, the good and the bad go together. If we lose our pests, we also lose our helpers. This means we also lose a lot of good food and our “wee custodians”.

Like melons? They are pollinated by insects.

It may be possible for us to live on wind-pollinated crops, like wheat, corn, and beets, and on self-pollinated crops, like most of the beans. I don’t think we’d like that diet, though. In addition, being surrounded by rotting carcasses would make the situation extra-unpleasant.

While I don’t expect total losses of insects any time soon (or even in my lifetime), the thought of such a catastrophic loss of beauty and helpfulness is sobering.

What can we do to change the situation? Well, any action that supports insect life could help slow the decline. Try this:

plant more wildflowers to support native pollinators,
allow more diverse plantings in our yards, to provide more places to live for more kinds of insects, and
refrain (as much as we can) from using pesticide products in ways that kill multiple kinds of insects instead of just the one pest that is “bugging” us.

One step that is both simple and difficult: plant clover in the lawn.

The Passing of a Gardener

9 October, 2018 by amygwh

If you spend enough time in a garden, it will tell you about its gardener. The garden of my Mom and stepdad, Bill, mostly tended by Bill, is no exception. It is full of flowers, vegetables, and herbs,

The flowers are for beauty and for butterflies. Bill loved butterflies. Don’t tell my butterfly-conservation friends, but back when his eyesight was good (decades ago), Bill caught butterflies to use in art, posed with dried plants in box-frames.

Right now, the cosmos are providing nectar for migrating Monarchs, but Bill is not here to enjoy either the flowers or the butterflies, because my stepdad, Reverend Bill Shaw, passed away on Saturday, just a few days ago. When he and my Mom married, back in 1997, he and I became gardening buddies.

Bill’s Oklahoma garden always grew more vegetables than his household could eat. Tomatoes would take over the kitchen and peppers pile up in any bare spaces. The overabundance meant there was plenty to share.

The herbs are mostly for my Mom. They show that he loved her very much.

Bill’s garden reflects his preference for a well-ordered and tidy space. The plants are spaced far enough apart that there is room to work around them. His garden also shows that he could outsmart the groundhogs.

When the groundhogs first invaded, he tried all kinds of traps and baits that didn’t work. The groundhogs ate the plants from below, while underground, which made catching them more difficult. Finally, Bill bought some plastic food-grade barrels, sawed them in half, then sunk the halves into the garden. He planted much of his garden in those half-barrels, which kept out the groundhogs.

Tomato plants, safe from groundhogs in the half-barrel in-ground planters.

This planting strategy shows the creativity of the gardener. No groundhogs were harmed, but the plants were protected.

Back when Bill’s hearing was better, we would talk on the phone about our gardens. He was my main source of information about old-time garden practices. I was his source for information about new varieties and crop diseases.

I will miss Bill and our discussions about his latest plans for the garden.

WWII veteran, U.S. Navy
At his 90th birthday party.

Something is Making Holes in My Squash Flowers and Stems

11 September, 2018 by amygwh

Over the past couple of days, I have noticed that several flower buds on my zucchini squash plants don’t look healthy. The flower buds have stayed small and turned pale and droopy. Today, I finally took the time to REALLY inspect my plants. What I saw is a lot of bad news.

The holes in the flower buds and the holes in the stems could — possibly — be caused by several kinds of insects. However, the piles of pale green, round globs like tapioca, and the yellow globs too, are most likely frass (poo) from caterpillars.

Around here, a major cause of this kind of damage is squash vine borers. The adult moths lay eggs on the plants. Then, the tiny caterpillars that hatch out of the eggs eat their way inside the plant, where they eat and eat until they have killed the plant from the inside.

I pulled up two of my five zucchini plants to try to find the culprits/caterpillars. As I dissected the plants, this is what I found:

What are pickleworms?

Pickleworms, the caterpillars of a night-flying moth, are a common summertime pest in the South. They are pests I have seen before, but I have not seen such extensive damage to plants from their activity before. Who knew that they would gnaw right into a stem? Not me. At least, not until now.

If the damage had been from squash vine borers, I would have pulled up all five of the zucchini plants and called them an interesting late-summer experiment that I never need to repeat. Since the damage is from pickleworms, I am trying another option. That second option is the use of an organic-approved product for caterpillars.

Organic control for pickleworms

I have mixed up some “Bt for caterpillars” – the product at my house is Thuricide, but others are available – and I’ve sprayed it all over the stems and flower buds of the remaining zucchini plants and my little patch of cucumbers. The name “pickleworm”, if you haven’t already guessed, alludes to a fondness for cucumbers. Since I like cucumbers, too, it would be nice to bring any cucumbers that these plants make into my kitchen, without caterpillars inside.

I planted seeds for cucumbers the same day I planted the zucchini. With a time-to-maturity of 65 days, they seemed less likely than the zucchini to make a crop before the first frost, but they are another late-summer garden experiment. Since they have plenty of flowers on them, the odds look good that I might harvest a couple of cucumbers before the end of October.

This hope for cucumbers depends on me and the Bt. It will need to be re-applied every week, and after every rain, for the Bt to work well.

Wish me luck?

Are Ladybugs Eating My Squash Plants?

5 September, 2018 by amygwh

The little orange, dotted beetles that are eating my squash plants actually are in the ladybug family. Most beetles in the ladybug family do not eat plants; instead, they eat pests like aphids and whiteflies and are great helpers in our gardens. Mexican bean beetles and squash beetles, which look a lot alike, are exceptions. They are garden pests.

Right now, it is squash beetles in my garden, eating my squash plants.

It may look like ladybugs are eating my squash plants, but it is really squash beetles doing the damage.

How to identify squash beetles

The first big clue that they are not Mexican bean beetles is that they are on my zucchini, not on beans. Squash beetles eat plants in the squash family, like zucchini, squashes, and cucumbers. Bean beetles eat plants in the bean family.

Another is that their babies, also called larvae, have dark spines. The spines on Mexican bean beetle larvae are yellow, with dark tips as they get older.

Another clue is the method of eating. Both the babies and adults often gnaw a trench around the patch of leaf they are getting ready to eat. You may notice semicircular lines at the edges of damaged leaves.

One theory about why they do this is that the trenching prevents sap from running into the desired area. The sap may carry nasty chemicals that would interfere with the beetles’ eating.

Organic control of squash beetles

For now, I am hand-picking and smashing the beetles, both adults and larvae. The damage on my plants isn’t severe, and the number of beetles is low. Today, I found and smashed seven adults and one larva.

If the infestation gets bad enough that smashing is insufficient, there are a couple of organic-approved options to try. University of Connecticut agrees that hand-picking can work in small gardens but suggests that products containing spinosad might help if a beetle-damage gets very bad.

Another pest in my garden right now is armyworms

Armyworms have eaten all the leaves in this patch of cleome. — Armyworms have eaten most of the leaves in this patch of cleome.

I found armyworms in the garden today, too.

They were on both patches of cleome (spider flowers), and they haven’t left many leaves. When I realized what the pests were, I removed all the plants, with caterpillars attached, and stuffed them into a large bag.

That bag is now sealed up and ready for the municipal compost truck to pick up on Friday.

Armyworms can eat a garden to the ground in just a few days, which is why extreme steps are needed. If you see these in your garden, do not delay even one day in removing them!

Better news in the garden

First leaves on carrot seedlings are strappy and narrow; the next leaves are more feathery. PHOTO/Amygwh

Elsewhere in the garden, the carrot seedlings are sending up the “true” leaves that come after the first leaves. The first leaves that come out of a seed rarely look like the leaves on a mature plant.

For carrots, the first leaves are narrow and strappy. They are the ones that unfolded out of the seed, which is why the first leaves are often called seed leaves.

Do you see the seedling on the far right in the photo? The one leaf that is wider and more feathery gives a clue what the mature leaves will look like.

Also in the garden, there are tiny caterpillars on the pipevine plant. I planted the pipevine with these caterpillars in mind. If all goes well, a few of them will survive to become pipevine swallowtail butterflies, which are beautiful.

Caterpillars on a leaf of pipevine. If all goes well, they will mature to become pipevine swallowtail butterflies. — Caterpillars on a leaf of pipevine. PHOTO/Amygwh

Many Kinds of Chicory

27 August, 2018 by amygwh

My family has been growing and eating chicory for years.

Some of the many kinds

The first variety I grew may have been ‘Italiko rosso’, a loose-leaf type with red leaf-veins running through its dark green leaves. Others have been ‘Pan di zucchero’, a less bitter variety that makes a head like Romaine lettuces, and ‘Catalogna’, an all-green loose-leaf type. Including chicory in our meals turns out to have been good practice for traveling in Italy, because at restaurants we visited, the cooked greens served with the second course of a meal often were chicory, not spinach.

Emptied seed packets for two kinds of chicory. — Bringing home seeds from Italy isn’t allowed, but these two packets were emptied prior to travel. The packets are 7.5 x 4.5 inches — huge!

Radicchio, a heading-plant that is usually red instead of green, is also a kind of chicory. Endive and escarole are other forms of chicory that are familiar in the U.S.

These are all good to think about right now because they are cool-season crops that we can plant in our fall gardens. In general, the loose-leaf forms mature in 45-55 days, and so do most of the radicchios. Those can be planted in my area (zone 7b, with a first frost around Nov. 1) in a couple of weeks.

The heading type ‘Pan di zucchero’ takes 80 or more days to mature — it should already be coming up in the gardens of anyone nearby who wanted to grow it. Gardeners south of Atlanta, with later frost dates, still have time to get that variety started.

All of the above chicories are grown for their leaves, which are a lot less bitter in fall/winter/spring than in summer.

Chicory in the kitchen

I haven’t served chicory as a pile of cooked greens, Italian-style, at home, even when they haven’t been bitter. I am not a huge fan of cooked greens. Instead, I usually add raw leaves to a salad or to soups or sauces, where they end up cooked.

If I were going to cook chicory as a “mess of greens”, I would drop them into boiling water, let cook for about half a minute, drain off the water, then finish cooking in fresh water, just like for any other potentially-bitter green (collards, mustards). When we cook greens this way (because Joe does like greens), much of the bitterness goes down the drain with the water that we pour off.

The chicory in my garden right now

This year, I planted seeds for ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, a variety that has a bigger, tastier root for making chicory coffee.

The seeds went into the garden a few weeks before we left town, but the seedlings were not big enough for me to mulch their patch before we left for the summer. When we got back, the patch was a weedy mess. Among the weeds, though, were some chicory plants.

I weeded as carefully as I could but ended up pulling some chicory plants with the weeds in spite of the care. A few days later, yard-bunnies found the patch and nibbled it nearly to the ground. Wild yard-bunnies can be hard on a garden.

Deciding what to do about wildlife damage is not easy. There are many options for “pest control”, most of which don’t work. In the end, I poked some sticks into the ground near each plant, thinking that the sticks would be an annoyance for the bunnies.

As the plants regrew, the bunnies returned. Last week, I added a lot more sticks to the bunny-blockade. The more-crowded assemblage of sticks looks strange, but it seems to be working.

If all else fails and the bunnies are undeterred, I may be able to find a patch of wild chicory to use in making coffee. The bright blue flowers are easy to spot. The hard part will be finding a patch in an unpolluted place (not by a road, for example), where I can get permission to harvest the roots.

Chicory flowers are the same here as in Italy. — Chicory flowers in Italy are the same as those that grow wild here. PHOTO/Amygwh

Beneficial Garden Insects: Flower Flies

31 July, 2018 by amygwh

While I’ve been walking outside our little town in Italy, missing my vegetable garden, I have paid attention to the local plants. On good days, I see a lot of flowers and pollinator-insects. At first, I thought the pollinators were all bees. Then, I looked closer. Many of them are actually flower flies, a different group of beneficial garden insects.

Flower flies, which are beneficial garden insects, look like bees but without the sting. — Flower flies are beneficial garden insects.

What are flower flies?

Flower flies really are flies, but a lot of them look like bees. It is possible that looking like a bee prevents some predators from eating them. I don’t know if that mimicry really works, though. We used to have a dog that ate carpenter bees when she could catch them. The stinging inside her mouth didn’t seem to stop her from catching and eating more.

Flower flies do not sting or bite, but they do eat nectar and/or pollen as adults. As they visit flowers to gather food, they pollinate the flowers. Flower fly babies (larvae) eat aphids and other small insects. These are definitely beneficial garden insects!

Organic gardens, in particular, rely on pollinators and predators in the garden to increase harvests and reduce pest problems. We can wait for our helpful predators (like flower flies, wasps and ladybugs) to eat the aphids, no spraying required!

Flower flies are also known as syrphid flies and as hover flies.

How can I tell which is a flower fly and which is a bee?

With only a brief glance, it is not easy to tell bees and flower flies apart. If you have the fortitude (and lack of bee-allergies) that allows you to look a little longer, you might see the difference.

Check the antennae

Flower flies have short, straight, stubby antennae. The antennae may be so short that they are hard to see. Bees have longer antennae, and their antennae are more likely to bend.

Check the wings

All flies have only two wings (one pair), and you can easily see them. One wing is on each side of the body.

Bees have fours wings (two pairs). The larger front pair of wings is easy to see, but the hind-wings can be hidden below the front pair. You might not be able to see that there are four wings.

Check the eyes

Eyes of flower flies are larger, and more on the front of their heads. Bee eyes are shifted a little to the sides of their heads.

Check the back legs

Flies do not collect pollen in clumps on their back legs. Some kinds of bees, especially our native, solitary bees, also do not collect and carry pollen on their back legs.

However, bumble bees and honeybees often store clumps of pollen on their back legs, to carry back to their colonies. If you see a bee-like insect that has pads of orange, or red, or yellow on its back legs, that is a good sign that the insect is some kind of bumble bee or a honeybee.

How can I attract flower flies to my garden?

University of California has published an easy-to-use table of plants that attract flower flies (see page 16). The table is deep within a document that is not super-easy to read, and not all the plants will grow well in the Southeastern US, but many will.

Here is a short list of plants that are known to attract and/or support flower flies to your organic garden, that I know will grow in the Southeastern US:

buckwheat, coriander/cilantro, thyme, Italian oregano, sweet alyssum, fennel, tansy, white-flowered yarrow

Summer Squash in the Southern Garden

11 June, 2018 by amygwh

One of my most-favorite lines ever in a UGA Extension publication is about summer squashes. The line is in a table that lists recommended varieties for each type of crop. It says, for which varieties of summer squashes (including zucchini) to plant in the garden, “all are good and easy to grow.”

This line still makes me laugh. In a way, it matches my experience. In early summer the plants look great and produce plenty of flowers and small squashes. Unfortunately, it could also read “all are finicky and frustrating to grow”, since many summer-squash plants seem to drop into wilted piles of yellowing leaves in mid-summer, long before we have eaten too much squash. When I first started gardening in Georgia, I was lucky to get five or six good-sized squashes from a plant before it keeled over.

Southern Vs. Northern Experiences with Summer Squash

I am not the only Southern gardener to be troubled by a too-small squash harvest or plants that die too soon. However, Northern gardeners do not seem to have this problem. The complaint I hear from Northern gardeners is quite the opposite – they have mountainous harvests of zucchini and yellow squashes that keep coming all summer long.

Really, the complaint is one that doubles as a brag – their squashes are so very productive that, when the harvests begin, it is risky to leave your car windows open. The risk is that gardeners who have a superabundance of squash are likely to drop a large bag of squashes into the car as “a gift”.

Legend has it that over-squashed gardeners also will fill a bag with squashes, hang the bag on the doorknob of an unsuspecting neighbor’s home, ring the doorbell, and run. By the end of August, people are totally tired of squashes, especially zucchini.

I have never had so much summer squash and zucchini that I was not happy to find another one in the garden. Happily, as I have gained experience and understanding of what is going on in the garden, my plants survive longer and the harvests are larger. I have found that it is possible to have plenty of summer squash in the Southern garden, with a little planning.

Problems with Summer Squash in the Southern Garden

Squash Vine Borers

These are the cause of much anguish in the squash patch. The borers are larvae (caterpillars) of a day-flying moth that lays its eggs on stems of our squash plants. When the eggs hatch, the babies bore into stem, where they eat the soft part of the inside of the stem. The borers seem to not eat the toughest fibers, because one sign that borers have caused your squash plants to wilt is that the stem looks frayed. You may also see some frass (caterpillar poo), a golden-orange-brown, granular-looking mush, around or in the damaged section of stem.

What to do? If the plant is already a wilted mass of yellowing leaves, it may be too late to save the plant. If, though, you look at the lower part of a squash stem, see little holes in the stem and maybe a little frass nearby, but the plant looks otherwise healthy, it is not too late!

Step 1:

Locate the sharpest blade on your pocket knife and use it to make a long slit in one side of the squash stem. The slit should run lengthwise on the stem; it should start below where the damage seems to be and extend above the damaged area. Use the tip of the knife blade to pry the slit open, so you can look inside and find the squash vine borers. Use the knife tip to remove (or kill, depending on your philosophical stance on garden pests) the borers from the stem. You might find just one, but you might find a half dozen or more.

Step 2:

Saturate the inside of the stem with a product that contains Bt for caterpillars (Thuricide is the brand I have been using – bought a few years ago and still works), and spray up the length of the stem on the outside, too. If any borers are still alive inside the stem, the Bt for caterpillars (organic approved) should reverse that status fairly soon. If your Bt is powder form instead of liquid, do your best to fill the stem with the powder, and then liberally apply it along the outside of the stem.

Any Bt applied on the outside of the stem will wash away in the next rain or watering-event, so you might want to re-apply it a few times.

Step 3:

Mound up garden soil over the damaged section of stem. If you are feeling very industrious, you can try wrapping the damaged section with aluminum foil, but I find that just piling up some good soil over the damaged stem protects it from invasion by other pests. Also, squashes sometimes will send out new roots along buried sections of stem.

Step 4:

Consider the health-status of your plant. Summer squash in the Southern garden should be lush, with huge, dark green leaves. In my garden, the largest, fastest-growing squash plants survive squash vine borer damage much better than less-lush plants. If your plants are on the puny-side, side-dress with some organic fertilizer or a shovel-full of compost or composted manure.

Squash Bugs

Squash bugs look a lot like stink bugs as adults. As youngsters, they are called nymphs, and they move around in groups. The nymphs do not look at all like the adults, but if you see groups of insects scuttling around on your squash plants, they probably are squash bug nymphs.

Squash bug eggs on a leaf of summer squash in the Southern garden — Squash bug eggs on a leaf. PHOTO/Amygwh

These feed on the squash plants – leaves and fruits – and they can cause a lot of damage. An even bigger problem is that they can carry a squash disease called Cucurbit Yellow Vine, which can definitely kill your plants.

The adults and nymphs can be removed by knocking them into a tub of soapy water. It is a good idea, though, to check your plants for squash bug eggs.

You can use a piece of clear packing tape or a piece of duct tape to remove the eggs from your plants. Just press the sticky side of the tape to the collection of shiny eggs, remove the tape, fold it over, and smash the eggs inside the tape. Simple!

Removing all the eggs will help keep the population of adults and nymphs to a much lower level, which will limit the amount of damage they can do to your plants and reduce the risk of Cucurbit Yellow Vine.

Mildews

Summer squash in the Southern garden also is attacked by mildew diseases, both downy mildew and powdery mildew. If your plants die earlier in the summer, then these will not be a problem, because the mildews usually appear after mid-summer.

Downy mildew arrives at a slightly different time each summer in upper parts of the South. It can’t survive our winters, but it comes up from Florida where it survives just fine. If the petioles (leaf stems) are still standing up on your plants, but the leaves look brown and droopy, then downy mildew is a likely cause. There is no effective spray or treatment for downy mildew, but preventive care can help.

Leaf diseases like downy mildew (and powdery mildew) need leaf wetness to infect the leaves and grow. Keeping the leaves dry as much as possible, by careful watering, can delay infection. Increasing air-flow around the leaves, so they dry faster after a rain, also helps. Remove weeds as much as possible, and allow plenty of space between plants.

Also, healthy, well-grown plants get less disease than puny plants. Just like for squash vine borers, consider whether you might need to side-dress your plants with fertilizer or compost to improve their condition.

Powdery mildew becomes a big problem in warm, humid conditions. Since that pretty much describes several months of weather across the entire Southeast, it is a safe bet that powdery mildew will find your plants eventually.

Treating Mildews in Organic Gardens

For both downy and powdery mildews, the bacterial product Serenade, which is organic-approved, can slow down the rate of infection. It should be applied to plants every 7-10 days, before any sign of infection is seen. If you see signs of disease on your plants (mottled or brown spots on leaves, for example), it is too late to get much benefit from using the product.

In a couple of Cobb County community gardens, the use of Serenade has helped extend the “squash season” for local gardeners. If your squash patch has suffered from mildew attack in past years, you might consider trying the spray, but do not wait much longer to start. By July, infection may already have begun.

Another option is to spray with homemade products of either compost tea (one gallon of well-aged compost in a five gallon bucket filled with water, soaked for three days, then strained to use in a spray bottle) or a baking-soda spray, both of which can slow down an infection. Neither of these has been shown to work as well as Serenade (which works less well than chemical fungicides), but some gardeners like to try the DIY route first.

If you are a DIY gardener, this is the recipe for baking-soda spray recipe from one of my Rodale gardening books:

Dissolve 1 teaspoon of baking soda in a quart of warm water, with up to a teaspoon of dish soap or insecticidal soap added. Spray the leaves, including the undersides.

If you would rather treat your garden crops with compost tea but do not currently have a source of good compost, try the Sustane Compost Tea Bags. Not-needing to strain the finished compost tea before using it in a spray bottle makes the “tea bags” extra-convenient.

For both compost tea and the baking soda solution, apply to plants much more frequently than the Serenade.

Hoping for Plenty of Summer Squash from the Southern Garden

Summer squashes seem to be an essential vegetable in the South. They are the base of many favorite “church casseroles” – dishes that fill the tables at summertime potluck suppers and appear at your door in hard times. I don’t remember seeing squash-casseroles when I was growing up in Oklahoma, but I certainly have seen (and enjoyed) many since moving to Georgia. In the South, the squash harvest is important.

The garden/farm where Joe and I used to volunteer got around squash-plant losses by planting MANY squash plants over several weeks. Even when some plants died, more remained and produced squash. If the squash harvest didn’t look abundant enough, we just planted more.

In home gardens, this approach is not really feasible. Hence, the long blog post about upcoming problems with summer squash in the Southern garden.

Best wishes for a squash-filled summer!

-Amy

Striped Caterpillars in the Garden, Eating the Dill

12 May, 2018 by amygwh

Several weeks ago, while I was working in the garden, a battered, tattered black swallowtail butterfly flitted into my dill patch. While she was there she laid some eggs. Eventually, some of those eggs hatched, and then there were caterpillars in the garden, eating the dill.

They ate and ate. After awhile, some of the caterpillars disappeared. I assume other wildlife, such as birds, ate them. The last time I saw them, a few days ago, there were three left, fat and striped and still eating the dill.

Caterpillars in the garden are not always a problem. This one will be a black swallowtail butterfly. — PHOTO/Amygwh

They have all gone now, which means I can finally harvest the dill. The plan is to dehydrate most of it, for use this winter. I am thinking of using it on fish, in particular. It is also good in spanakopita, but I don’t eat cheese like I used to, even feta, so that recipe is no longer “in the rotation”.

What to do about caterpillars in the garden?

Even if these striped caterpillars were more voracious eaters, gnawing my dill plants down to little nubs, I probably would just make a note to plant a lot more next year. Accepting some insect-damage is part of the organic gardening way.

In addition, the world has been losing pollinators over at least the past couple of decades, probably longer. Even though butterflies are not our most effective pollinators, removing these with either an organic pesticide or a mechanical method like smashing would not be good for the future of food in the world.

Luckily, the caterpillars have left plenty of dill for us humans.

When other caterpillars in the garden eat so much that a plant is nearly bare of leaves, then control measures may be desired. As usual, the first would be to keep the adults, the butterflies, away from the plants completely. Draping small-meshed netting or a spun row cover on a support structure over the plants can keep adult fliers away (see post about cabbage butterflies and moths).

What else do these caterpillars eat?

These caterpillars are sometimes called parsley worms, because they eat many plants that are in the parsley family. If you guessed that one of those plants is parsley, you are right! Fennel and carrots are other garden plants in the same family, as is dill.

University of Florida has published a fact sheet about the Eastern black swallowtail butterfly, its lifecycle and ecology. The fact sheet includes a list of other plants these caterpillars will eat. Some are native plants, like mock bishop weed and water hemlock. Some are not native across the entire U.S., but have been introduced. One that many people will recognize is Queen Ann’s lace.

Where did the caterpillars go?

Surprisingly, Joe and I found a chrysalis way across the yard, in a flower bed, on Thursday. I almost never find these, so this one made my day.

Chrysalis of black swallowtail butterfly from 10May2018, in Georgia. PHOTO/Amygwh

The chrysalis is on a leaf of a hardy amaryllis, given to me by my mother-in-law many years ago.

Which beautiful pollinators are in your garden?