23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
it is probably voles. I found that, if you have raised beds, it is easy to find them. Their tunnels run parallel to the sides. If your soil is soft enough you can punch a hole with your finger, drop some warfarin laced stuff, and close.
To minimize all this, I keep a large pile of leaves at a distant place from my garden, and I try to minimize winter mulch. The con is that come June you are laboriously mulching around half-sized plants, but mulch attracts them specially in late Fall, when they are trying to establish a home for the winter.
Thanks everyone.
We live in the middle of woods, and are very familiar with them in the house. :( They love our crawl space and its a constant battle. We also discovered that they were getting in the tiny cracks in our exterior chimney. We had tons of them, until we patched that up and their numbers dropped almost to zero........but I had to wash everything in our kitchen....everything!
The ones in the garden are dark, and look like mice......but I'm not certain. We cleaned up the garden last Fall and I left the gate open.......to make it easier on cats to go in there if they wanted to. I haven't seen any yet this year.......but something bit off some of the snow peas at the bottom.
There's always somethin', right?
A few years ago I read an article in an old (20 plus years I think) Organic Gardening about cutting the tip of butternuts to keep the vine small; I belive this was before good bush varieties were developed.
I have trouble with squash bugs, so this technique increased the likelihood that I'd be able to patrol the plant, checking under every leaf. Since then, it's worked quite well. I wait until I have plenty of fruit set, then twice a week i patrol for eggs and pinch tips at the same time.
From the volume of bugs you have described then I'd say no you don't need nematodes. The cost of them is only justified with severe infestations and that isn't the case here.
As for the care while gone, I've never been able to reconcile vacations during spring garden time. MId to late summer works better but spring is just too active in the garden for it to be ignored for any length of time.
It just doesn't work unless one is willing accept the damage that will be done while you're gone. So for the best garden results, vacations are stay-at-home types. :)
Row covers over the bed will help some but they won't prevent all the damage. Just accept that it will happen and psych yourself up to deal with what you find when you get back.
Dave
Thanks Dave, that is good advice. I guess I will harvest what I can before I go and survey the damage when I get back. These bugs are crazy! I guess I should have expected this, but somehow it came as a surprise.
Last night I saw two beetles on my strawberry blossoms (squashed them) and discovered my parsley stems literally covered with tiny black aphids. Also a couple of green caterpillars on the parsley, but they didn't look like the black swallowtail caterpillars (which I would have welcomed). I picked them off but didn't squash them as I wasn't sure what they were. And no idea either what kind of beetles were on the strawerries. But they will be back, I am sure.
"It must be a serious project to keep plants from cross pollinating on a commercial scale
If you are producing seeds for sale, yes it is. Often they use row covers and hand pollination.
It's always a shock for novice gardeners who have saved some seeds for next year. They end up with mutts most of the time.
There have been many "mystery squash" posts here in the past and the answers are always the same. Because of hybrids and/or cross-pollination they could be anything. Here are just a few posts:
Not sure what type of squash this is....
Squash lovers: please identify
Mystery Squash
Unusual squash(?)
"squash would almost always cross-pollinate in uncontrolled environments?"
Yep. And there is no way to know what kind of strange things will happen as a result.
Rodney
This post was edited by theforgottenone1013 on Fri, Jun 13, 14 at 10:24
It could be the salt in the air. I am keeping a journal and complete list of my garden so I will not replant what has issues and doesn't do well. I did find an infestation of whitefly (but not on the German queen) and used un-adultered Ivory soap and water. Thankfully it rained later in the night so it saved me from washing the soap off in the morning so the hot sun wouldnt burn the leaves. I have found that even a weak solution of baking soda can cause burn with the hot sun. Will have to spray all shrubs this weekend with soap to help knock them out. Waiting on my blooming dill plants to fill up with ladybug larvae to help fight them.
Hard to tell without a picture, but if hard and black (don't know about holes) it sounds like scurf or scab, which is fine, just peel them.
Keep the pH of the soil low, around 5.0 - 5.2, and don't use a lot of OM. Rotation helps, so does watering but mostly what you can do to control scab is to plant resistant varieties.
http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Potato_Scab.htm
Scurf is a little harder to deal with, I see store-bought potatoes with scurf all the time. Crop rotation helps, as does early harvesting (which you're already doing), but the best thing is to try to get certified disease-free seed potatoes, don't use store-bought potatoes or ones you save from this year. Fungicides don't seem to work.
http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Potato_SilverScurf.htm
I don't really get the square foot garden mixture. I don't think peat moss and vermiculite offer much in the way of nutrients, and in high concentrations are going to dry out fast. I've been filling my beds with what a local quarry calls "veggie mix", which I think is a mix of top soil and compost and maybe something else. But a reputable quarry in your area is going to provide the best soil mixture for growing, IMO. I top my beds off with it every couple years. Alternate years, I throw in composted steer manure, and I continually turn it into the clay soil underneath to get the mixture deeper and deeper every year. Rarely do I fertilize during the growing season, I only water every few days, even when temps get up in the 90's, and I get good results.
When it comes time to top off your beds with new soil, I would really consider trying something different. You might find you don't have to water so much and will get better results.
I would suggest, plant a few more seeds out there.
I had worse problem this year. The cucs did not grow at all despite good temps. I planted some more seeds later. Those are now several feet while the original seedlings are still sitting at few inches. Same soil, same food, same water, same seed.
I saw more Little Leaf coming up today - about the size of seysonn's.
I'd say if yours are growing now they'll really take off once the weather warms up. You could start more seed in case of cucumber beetles, powdery mildew, etc. though.
I think I'm going to throw more cantaloupe seed out this weekend since I only had 1 pop up.
As mentioned by forgotten, the potatoes will regrow, which means that they will produce again. You can harvest the new crop in a couple months -- so you'll be eating new potatoes, not the old ones that overwintered.
The onions will go to seed, and the old bulb will rot. Are they usable now? Then I'd say eat them. Leave a few in to let them go to seed and self seed, and you'll get lots of volunteers.
Sorry, I should have explained better.
These are plants that overwintered this past year--I didn't know they'd be there but they are up and growing well. Glad to hear I can just harvest the potatoes like usual. The onions I don't think have much of a bulb so I will just let them re-seed.
Thank you!!!
Hey, Slimy! Yes, the sunflowers float on top of the water for a long time unless they are disturbed by a squirrel falling in. Even then, enough still float that I've gotten a second one before I take the first one out.
I've been able to use them for up to a couple days, if I remove the bodies, but if you catch some, the water gets very stinky from them releasing their bowels and so on, and I have to dump it.
I bury them in a garden area that's open, and dump the sunflowers and water in my compost. Sometimes, though, the seeds can be hosed off and put back into a clean bucket of water and they still float. You'll have to experiment to see how it goes for you.
This post was edited by dowbright on Thu, Jun 12, 14 at 17:29
We Use it on squash for SVB protection, in Earth Boxes as fertilizer bags and will try this year on parthenocarpic cucumbers against cucumber beetles.
The only complain - aphids. They have no natural predators under tulle and multiply freely. Experiments trapping lady bugs were unsuccessful, they spent all their time and energy trying to get out and didnt care about aphids.
I will be using tulle this year to cover some of my isolation cages for seed saving. Tulle has better air flow, so it can be used over vegetables which are sensitive to damp, stale air (such as beans & tomatoes). Agribon - even the lightest grade - traps too much humidity for those vegetables, they tend to get foliar diseases (been there, done that).
As already mentioned, tulle is not UV stable, so it degrades quickly in sunlight. Mosquito netting has similar qualities & weaves, and there are UV-resistant versions available... but it is pricier than tulle, and a little harder to find.
We have had a serious case of asparagus beetles this spring, as have the local organic growers. At first there were too many to squish, so I cut off the infested fronds and composted them. Then I let the chickens in the patch twice, and I think they did a good cleanup job. I've started to let some fronds grow again, and I'm not seeing asparagus beetle larvae.
I think spinosad would work better than neem. It's what I was going to use if the chickens didn't set things right.
Hand picking and bucket of soapy water but no, do not cuts the ferns down now as the crowns need that energy to survive.
If you simply cannot bring yourself to touch them then a sharp pair of scissors snips them in half with little damage to the ferns.
But neem has little to no effect on them.
Dave.
Well, formally, mine were sugar snap, and not snow peas. I often consider them equivalent, but they really aren't. Sugar snaps are sweeter. Mine were Super Sugar Snap this year. Last year they were regular Sugar Snap. Both grew to 6-foot height, just like the seed catalogs said they would. But yes, it looks like real Snow Peas aren't supposed to get that tall.
I'm not sure what they were. I sometimes use left-over ones from the year before. I think I should have supported them once they reached 4'. The ones that got bent over aren't doing so well. Every year ican be so different for all the veggies!