23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
IME damage such as in your picture is more likely to be squash bugs rather than SVB. SVB damage kills the vine itself. Squash bug damage is more leaf oriented than vine oriented.
But it is easy enough to determine with close examination.
Dave
Honestly, seysonn, zone has little to do with it.
This is the first year I have begun to understand the potential of okra, which is nice because another couple of dudd years on it would have put it on my why bother list. Very few of my purple tomatillos are actually purple but they are growing well so it is nice to have a few successes. My season though has mainly been hot and dry, are temperatures have been exceeding the normal average and while our drought has improved a teensy bit, it is still ongoing.
I don't see it much different than spraying rose pride on my mildew prone roses before they get powdery mildew. It's a lot easier to prevent it than to cure it.
It pays to first understand how something actually works.
It is a big difference is between treating or preventing an airborne fungus disease vs. killing a live pest.
Bt only works after it is eaten. It isn't a repellent, it isn't a contact pesticide. It has to be ingested, chewed up, swallowed. Plus once diluted it is only effective for a short period and in liquid form (to inject it) it will all just drain down to the base of the plant anyway.
So you'd be wasting most if not all of it on the off chance that some borer might just happen to enter the stem where the Bt was injected and just might come in contact with some it still active and just might happen to eat some of it.
Dave
I still see no difference. I'm spraying the roses on the chance that mildew spores will land on it and infect the plant. The spray has a longer effective time than BT, obviously, but it's limited too, that's why I have to spray every 1-2 weeks (and failing to, I get mildew infestation like I did last year and beginning of this year when I got negligent about it).
Since at this point I'm positive my plants WILL get SVB. No matter how hard I search for eggs, I'm going to wind up with them. It's not a matter of if, but when, then at some point my weekly injection will overlap a point of time when they're too small for me to see obvious signs of them, but already inside eating, and kill them before they do too much harm.
I got to them with injections this year before they did enough damage to kill the plants, but they still did enough damage to hurt production and weaken the plants. Taking a preventative approach, I may be able to kill them before my plants are weakened. You do a series of injections up the entire vine, and the amount you inject is actually pretty low to fill the cavity in the vine. I only mix a cup full and after injecting six plants, I still have some left over that I usually spray onto my broccoli.
This post was edited by CaraRose on Fri, Sep 6, 13 at 12:18
Stop. Put the spray away. Go to Google and look up ladybug larvae. They're very distinctive and one of the most useful insects for gardeners. In fact, there is a shortage of them lately. Don't spray them.
Bean beetles attack the plants as adults, not larvae. Look them up, too. There are a couple of varieties.
See those little black specks on your corn tassles? They're aphids. They probably aren't doing a lot of harm, but the ladybugs are eating them.
Farming is an input in/profit out business more than how much the crop is expected to be worth on the open market for the most part.
On no-irrigation land, if corn isn't demanding a high enough price a lot of farmers will grow drought tolerant wheat (or another area specific crop) because the risk and cost of additional inputs for water/nutrients/weed control/etc aren't worth it...that hasn't been a huge issue lately with high corn prices (which are expected to decline slightly this year, btw). This is just a single example.
All
Tks for taking the time and posting your tags
Hidesert, great link, just what I needed
yukkuri, never thought about growing Favas, going to go give it a try, after I locate some seeds.
McKenzie. This is my second year planting garlic in Early Sept, had a huge harvest this year. First attempt at Bush Beans, must say they are growing at lighting speed, have not had any temps over 100 for several weeks now. looks like we will most diffently have a fall crop of bush beans.
This was my first experience and posting for this site, what a wealth of knowledge and information, glad I found it.
Cheers
Donald
I'm guessing the favas can be planted late fall in zone 8, and grow slowly through through the winter for an early spring crop.
John Jeavons & the biointensive folks are big on fava - reason being they are great compost crops. You get nitrogen fixation, and they also create a fair amount of root & stalk that adds biomass to your soil.
generally speaking, sweet potatoes like water. Slips will thrive for a long time in a gallon jug of water as long as they have warmth and sunlight.
They will like a thorough soaking every once in a while. But waterlogged soils, not good. Drip irrigation is good.
SP vines are quick to wilt, but quick to recover.
Sprouts are far more productive indoors. After much selection, I grow sunflower shoots in compost trays in a sunny window sill, and broccoli and fenugreek in jars (no medium). Shoots take two weeks, sprouts one week. My biggest problem is keeping the bag of compost in the garage unfrozen, since I use fresh compost for every new batch of shoots.
I doubt that root crops can be grown successfully indoors. You need more than one foot of soil. Root crops can be eaten through the winter, but they need to be in the root cellar, which in my case is totes full of moist sand in the garage. Carrots and parsnips dug up during a thaw are the best tasting root crops, better than anything you can grow indoors.
I tried posting on the growing under lights forum, but it's been kind of dead over there.
Well I didn't necessarily mean posting, just reading all the huge amount of info that is already there about gardening under lights.
But yes it is slow right now on that forum as it is out of season. It will pick up there after outdoor harvest time in mid to late October.
Dave
I have a community garden where I grow my potatoes and leaving them in the ground is not an option. I dug mine a couple of weeks ago and they were in milk crates until I could get them stored correctly. I thought the milk crate allowed for good air circulation. I was going to try the newspaper layering technique but before I could get that done, about 10 potatoes rotted out of about 100 lbs. Right now, I washed most of the potatoes and have them drying on a screen on saw horses in my garage. I am going to let them dry well for a couple of days and then go through them again to check for any with signs of rot. We will see how this works.
So what do you do with the potatoes that have been next to the rotten potatoes and have that nasty rotten potato liquid on them?
In the southern zones , You have to plant them real early. Like in GA, I use to plant them 4 to 6 weeks before last frost and would dig them sometimes in july. That would like 110 days or so. Then you can also do a fall planting, Like late July.
Climate is a limitation, fersure. But then, it presents a challenge!