Garden Klog

Stink Bugs

I went out the other night to hear a speaker at the NCTC . She was local -- a USDA researcher from the Kearneysville Ag Exp Station -- and co chair of the national stink bug research team. As the newspaper reported this morning, I wasn't the only one interested...in fact it was a record crowd -- nearly 400 people.! Local farmer Allan Balliett got a recording of the talk from Mark Madison of the NCTC and posted it on Vimeo (below).

 

Dr Tracey Leskey 02/09/11 "Emergence of the Invasive Brown Marmorated Stink Bug as Serious Ag and Nuisance Pest in the U.S.".

This One No Words Will Suffice

 

But a pair of fingers will...Death To Squash Bugs!!!! <G>

To The Rescue

 Two of the great mysteries of current life here in the Mid-Atlantic:  where do all the stinkbugs come from, and what can we do about it? I love my new camera - all $129 worth of it! - and carry it in my pocket pretty much all the time. That means I get to record a lot of stuff I see when I am down close with my plants. 

 Example? I was picking scales off the ailing 40 yr old gardenia I was given and noticed a new hatch of Harlequin Stink Bugs (thanks, Bug Guide for help with the ID) and as I cruised the rest of the plant for more, came across the other side of the garden friend - foe equation: a Mantis looking for a meal!

Death To Hornworms!

I certainly know I have read a lot about how the braconid wasp will use a tomato hornworm to feed its pupae, but we had so few hornworms in Vermont I never really got to see the process in action. Not so down here...the tomatoes grow to twice the size and hornworms can be come alarmingly abundant.

 Well I just went out to pick a tomato for my sandwich, and look what I found!  This is a classic wonder of an organic garden...and just think how many more braconid wasps I'll soon have protecting them 'maters!

Summer Transplants

Of course, as a gardener, I am driven by the weather, and today was no exception. I ordered a bunch of seeds for my fall crops right after I got back from Vermont, and got some of them into a seedling bed where the early squashes were before the squash bugs got into them...but I also bought some broccoli and cauliflower plants while I was there. They were in pretty bad shape, but I figured when I got back here to Bakerton I could put them in slighty larger containers and give them a shot of fish / seaweed mix and see if that would put them back on track.

It seems to have worked, at least well enough that I decided to put them in the now empty garlic bed ahead of today's forecast thunderstorms and give them a few weeks to prove themselves. If they do, well then I have another crop, and if they don't, I'll just replace them with the ones I started from seed last week. Either way I come out ahead.

I decided to document the process to go with the post I put together on starting summer seeds, and this time I decided to do it as a sort of gallery, with commentary, so scroll down and check it out. The whole thing is from this morning.

So:  Once the garlic was gone, I took the garden fork and turned over the part of the bed where the shallots had been a few weeks earlier and re-formed with the bedding rake. Once it was roughed in I spread about a pound of NCO Pro-Start (2-3-3) granular organic fertilizer so that the finishing process would work  it into the top 2-3 inches of soil.

After that I got a wheelbarrow load of compost from the pile I keep under the tarp over by the garage and spread that evenly across the surface, which with this 3 ft by 16 ft bed gave about a half inch depth.

With the bed formed and the compost and fertilizer applied, the next step wa sto hook up the drip irrigation (we cannot count on rain this time of year, though a thunderstorm might dump an inch two any given day).

It's a relatively simple process to put in a line to a new bed:  just cut into the solid header that runs along the ends of the beds and install a tee fitting.

If you have more money than time (time to check the drip lines frequently during use to make sure they haven't popped loose) you can assemble the whole system with hose clamps on every joint, but the system works at about 10 PSI so that really isn't absolutely necessary

Myself, I just cut into the header with a utility knife and insert the tee with hand pressure and use a much cheaper and simpler fitting to hold the drip line on.

Here is a closeup view of the finished fitting. The whole process takes about 30 seconds.

Looking at this picture it is hard to imagine just how bad the plants looked two weeks ago! They are perfect now, but it does look like they have been set back to their juvenile, vegetative state, so if I can protect them from too much transplant shock -- not a done deal with sunny, dry days and a heat index hovering around 100 F, then they ought still to produce a decent crop...but only time will tell.

This closeup of the root ball shows that they are the ideal stage for transplant, with tender, white, threadlike roots just reaching the margins of the pot. This is really what you want to see when you buy plants, too, even more than the size of the tops.

A quick count of the available transplants tells us we have 31 to work with, not counting doubles (we don't really want to split doubles -- like we did with the okra -- unless we have to because it just adds to the stress. I decided to segregate the broccoli at one end and the cauliflower at the other, rather than interplant them, so that if one does better than the other (broccoli is much more tolerant than cauliflower of tough conditions) I'll be able to clear a solid half-bed for some other use... So, the simplest way to arrange them was in a 2:1:2 Hex Pattern. I always lay out all the transplants before setting them so that the pattern works out and the spacing is consistent. That makes cultivation a lot easier later on.

With the plants set (slightly deeper than they were in the pot) I mixed up a four gallon can of seaweed / fish emulsion mix according to the label instructions to give them a good start and make sure there is some available moisture right around the roots even before the drip lines can percolate water out to the edge rows.

I put the fan on the can to apply the mix, and I do hesitate a bit longer on the edge plants because they will be the last to be reached by the drip line. A single four gallon can gives a pretty good drink to the 30 plants that ended up in the bed.

As soon as I finished the watering I took the shade cloth and hoops off the seedling bed planted last week, which has sprouted to whatever extent it is going to, and re-installed the hoops on the new brassica bed. Then I took a piece of floating row cover slightly longer than the bed and placed that over the hoops. It will raise the temperature inside a little bit, which is a problem, but it will also keep out flea beetles, which can really damage young brassica seedlings, and cabbage butterflies, which are constantly looking for a place to lay eggs -- eggs that hatch into cabbage worms and would pick up where the flea beetles left off.

The easiest way to counteract the heat increase caused by using the floating row cover for pest control is simply to add a layer of shade cloth over it. Fortunately for both these processes, it was a calm morning so the whole affair only took about fifteen minutes.

The finished project shows the new fall brassica bed neatly protected both from the heat of the sun and the pests that would harm the planting. The drip irrigation is on, and if these plants are going to make it at all, this is just about the best situation they could be in! 

Interesting to note in the precediing photo are all three variations on this setup: on the left is the second squash planting; it was started from seed so needs no protection from sun, but does need to be protected from squash bugs and cucumber beetles. In the center is the bed of transplants we just set. On the right is the lettuce we direct sowed the last time we had a few days of temperatures below 80F (so it would germinate), with a row of struggling broccoli down the center. It needs only shade to beat the heat.

Finally, here is a closeup of the fasteners for the covers. The clip at the top is just a folder binder bought in bulk at an office supply store. It is clipped directly to the hoops once the cover is tight. At the bottom you will see a red plastic "mulch peg" that you get from a garden center or building supply store. It is used to keep the sides from billowing in the wind and allowing insects to sneak in.

                         

Squash Experiment 2

 Well, that didn't take long!  Nothing like 90 F temperatures to get squash seeds up out of the ground; I planted on the 10th, and on the 14th, they were breaking ground, so I had to stop what I was doing elsewhere in the garden and get them covered up with floating row covers to keep off the cucumber beetles and squash bugs. You can see the first seedlings next to the still young cilantro plants in this closeup.

 On both beds that represented something of a challenge since both beds still have growing crops in them that I don't want to remove until the squashes really need the space. That effectively doubles the crop per square foot, which I consider one of the more essential -- and more interesting -- of high yield vegetable gardeing. Call it Square Foot, call it French Intensive, call it High Yield, call it Urban or Suburban Agriculture...whatever the term it means permanent beds, close spacing, interplanting, succession planting and season extension.

 The bed next to the porch just required that I bend the standard metal hoops to a slightly tighter (and thus higher) radius and be mindful of the adjacent shallots while putting on the cover -- not really any different than I did with the first planting back in April that just succumbed to the squash bugs last week. One hopes that the shallots will do better on the edge than the salad greens with that first planting did!

The other row -- the one planted beneath the bean trellis  -- was a bit more involved. In this case I had to rig my row hoops a little differently to fit under the existing trellis. What I decided to do was double over the length of row cover (effectively doubling its thickness) and instead of wire hoops used curved bamboo.

 The bamboo I chose was the older pieces that I had used years ago as a pepper trellis and whose "legs" had partially rotted from soil contact. By cutting the legs down from about 36 inches to 18 inches, I ended up with solid structure again, and a good height to fit under the bean trellis. 

The only problem with this second system, of course, is that the plants will fill the cover more quickly and it will have to come off. We'll look back at this experiment when we get to that stage.

Late Blight?

The internet is abuzz with stories of a developing pandemic of Late Blight (Phytophthora infestans), which is disastrously fatal to tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. This is the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, and is not to be messed with. 

A recent AP story on Yahoo quotes Meg McGrath, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, as saying that Late Blight is "worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants."

Outbreaks have been identified in most of the eastern states, including West Virginia and Virginia, where most of the plants in our garden came from. I haven't seen many signs of infection anywhere in our garden except perhaps on the first fruits of the Early Girl tomato plants we bought over at the Southern States store, which sources most of its seedlings from the same supplier (Bonnies Plants) that the big box stores do.  The plants themselves (as well as the rest of the tomatoes) look very healthy, and are starting to set fruit like crazy. Fortunately for us -- unlike more northeastern states -- we have not had a lot of rain, which is the main way the blight spreads. Also, I have done one spraying of a compost tea which includes Bacillus subtilis, and beneficial competitor to the Late Blight fungus, and that may be helping as well

Nonetheless, we will be on the lookout for symptoms, and so should you, especially if you live in an area that has seen a lot of rain recently. Cornell has an excellent web primer on Late Blight, including photo identifications. Ohio State also has a nice fact sheet that will help you determine if your tomatoes, potatoes or eggplants are infected (peppers are less bothered). One key element to understand is that Phytophthora infestans cannot survive without live tissue to colonize, and so if you do identify symptoms you really should yank up the plants to prevent its spread. No spray, organic or synthetic, is going to stop it once symptoms are present. So just do it!

Compost Tea and Early Blight

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post yesterday by Adrian Higgins about the wet season we are having -- after a multi-year drought, we have already gotten something like 30 inches of rain this year -- and its effect on the garden.

One of the most pronounced effects, which Higgins discusses in some detail, is the prevalence of foliage diseases and fruit rots in wet seasons. We've certainly seen that here:  our cultivated cherries had serious fruit rot problems due to the huge, tightly packed clusters of fruit (the smaller, less densely clustered wild sweet cherries along the driveway did not have this problem).

On the subject of foliage diseases he notes that the season for early blight on tomatoes is here and especially bad. I have spent many a year trying to solve the early blight problem, as it is present in virtually all the soils of the eastern US and even the organic sprays to control it are noxious:  Bordeaux Mix or some other formulation of copper and/or sulfur. My solution in the past has always been to get the plants up off the ground and use a deep mulch to prevent the spores of this fungus from infecting the plants in the first place. The spores land on a leaft where there is sufficient moisture, especially with a wound, and if the moisture stays around long enough they germinate; next rain (or irrigation) they spash to adjacent leaves and the disease moves up and across the plant. (For an excellent discussion of early blight, see this Cornell website.)

This year I tried something different, or additional, really. I have long foliar fed my plants with a combination of liquid seaweed and fish hydrolysate like Neptune's Harvest or Sea-Plus. But finally the technology has gotten really good for the manufacture of compost teas that have a wide range of "farmed" microbes in them. I'll have more to say about them at some point but for the moment the part that is of interest is their use to restrain early blight.

So for the past couple of months I have been spraying compost tea on my tomato plants after each rain based on the theory that if you establish a rich community of beneficial microbes on the foliage, it will be more difficult for the early blight spores to establish themselves. It seems to have worked like a charm.

If you look at the trellised plants -- where I also did my usual thing of removing all the lower foliage and mulching deeply -- you'll see there is almost no blight. Having that open under-canopy made it possible for me to get the spray head up under the plants and spray upward to coat exactly the foliage that would be first infected because of it proximity to the ground.

Look at the pictures of the determinate paste tomatoes, which, because of the cage that supports them could neither be pruned, not sprayed from underneath, and you'll see that the blight is much more prevalent. And since it spreads by splashing from leaf to leaf, those plants are goners eventually...usually the best one can hope for is to get off a crop before the plants are defoliated, and I think my chances are good on that with these Roma tomatoes.

The biggest problem I have is that because I was mixing the tea (which has no technical fertilizer value) with my usual foliar feed -- and it rained so often -- I am afraid I grossly overfed the plants before realizing a week or two ago that I better stop adding the fish-feed.

Those trellised heirloom indeterminates are a solid nine feet tall and have long since grown off the top of the teepees, fallen back, and then started up again. And while there is fruit, I am sure there is not as much as there will be once the fertility starts to settle down again (too fertile conditions promotes plant growth at the expense of early fruit).

The Roma tomatoes are just as bad/good in that a determinate variety like that shouldn't get to much more than 2-3 feet tall (hence the height of the cage, which is meant to support the fruit) but these are probably a solid five feet already and I haven't seen the terminal shoot yet!

Oh, well!  Live and Learn.  BTW, The two products I have been using are one called 1-2-3 Compost Tea and one called Bio-Balance. Both of them contain dozens of beneficial bacterial and fungal species. A friend in Vermont, Angie Higuera, has also been testing Bio-Balance as a cutlfower preservative and reports that his customers have been thrilled with its effect on the bouquets they buy.