23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
I am seeing the same thing on my early potatoes. One plant a day will look poorly, and when I pull it up there is a vein of rot in the main stem in the bottom 10 inches. The potatoes are mature and good to eat, but they will get bigger with more growing time. So far, all the affected plants have been blues.
One thing to bear in mind is that both thrips and aphids are way down on the insect food chain. If you want to keep beneficials around, they have to have something to eat.In addition to ladybeetles and lacewings, there are tiny wars going on too small to see. Syrphid flies are laying eggs near the aphids so their larvae can eat them.
That said, I'd have quickly clipped off that aphid-infested leaf and dumped it in the composter and then sprayed the plants with water a few times.
Nope. It isn't a contact killer. It's a bacteria which, when the caterpillars feed on foliage, kills them. Just spray entire plant(including undersides of leaves).
If infestation is bad, spray on a weekly schedule for a couple weeks and then on a 2 week schedule after that.
Kevin
Another thought I had is to plant things that people recognise and will tend to steal anyway. Raspberries and tomatoes are always stolen when grown next to the sidewalk and that may be desirable for you since it would be a demo garden after all.
The grass edge is actually now marked out at 1 foot all the way around. I had hoped this patch would absorb runoff and filter soil from hitting the streets and sidewalk, and double as a relatively clean place for gardeners to work from.
I can not mound the soil in any way because will promote loss of soil, and all the good amendments! Edging with some sort of protection is not a bad idea, but I think I will leave a lot of the perennial development of the garden to another year. Right now I want to get the garden growing something, and for it to look good.
As for the edging, that sound pretty important. Would rock edging really do that much more than plastic garden trim/edging? Sinking rocks into the edge sounds like a ton of work, and I don't think we're ready for something so permanent.
So far I'm gathering that I don't so much need to replace all the soil, as add some good compost (the cafe just began their 3-bin compost 2 weeks ago) and maybe some coir as required.
I plant the same crops in the same places every year, because I have found the arrangement I like.
At the end of the season, I till it a bunch with my tractor powered tiller, which moves the soil a long distance. Thus, I rotate my soil instead of my crops.
I have experience that cucurbita bloom early in poor soil. That can happen in the pot when kept too long. The grow tap root and when it hits the bottom and the soil is poor and there is not enough room for roots, they figure they have reached the end of their rope and must get on with their mission, i.e. flower and produce fruits/seeds. The same can happen in poor soil in the ground too. But if they are provided good soil with adequate nutrients, they sould resume growth.
Female flowers open VERY early in the morning and close back up fairly quickly thereafter. I go out before six o'clock each morning to hand pollinate and still have to force some of them open. The male flowers appear to stay open all day long. Try checking on your plants just as the sun rises. And sometimes, no matter what you do, females are open, but males are closed, etc.
They already laid eggs on the first 2 cukes I planted in early May.
Are you 100% sure they were SVB eggs? Awfully early for them especially this year when the hatch has been delayed for a couple of weeks by the early spring weather. Where in zone 7 are you? They don't normally turn up until mid June at the earliest here.
Dave
I'm in Birmingham, AL. I transplanted May 3rd and eggs showed up May 21st. Absolutely positive they were SVB eggs. I picked hundreds of SVB eggs off squash, zucchini and cucumbers last year. I could spot those things from a mile away. Haha. I thought it much too early as well, but I guess these just wanted to ruin my summer as soon as possible.
I put in four new beds this year, so that took up a lot of my gardening budget. I'll be able to put my money for next year's garden towards row cover and maybe drip irrigation. Using soaker hoses currently - not that I've really needed them too much with all the rain we have had!
Here's an up close and personal look at the enemy.
Funny story, I'd never heard of SVB. Every year my dad's squash would get "stem rot" and die back. Frustrated him to no end. The first year I started any gardening of my own, I was growing some veggies, including some crookneck yellow squash in containers, since my dad didn't have room in the garden to give me any space.
One day I was at the local nature center and saw this "cool" red and black moth feeding on rattlesnake master. I'd seen them in my yard a few times. Took a series of macro shots (attached is one of them). Went home and googled "red and black moth IL" in image search, spotted the same moth, clicked image-- and at the top of the page in bold letters was the common name:
SQUASH VINE BORER
At that moment it occured to me my squash were looking a little sickly. It didn't take long to figure that they'd been killing my dads squash every year, which he thought was the stem rot.
And thus my (still mostly losing) battle with these things began. Wiped out my crooknecks that year. I managed to keep my squash alive last year by injecting with BT and heaping dirt on the vines to get some new roots, but ultimately production went down to nearly zero on the two survivors.
Here's a picture of the top part.
the bottom leaves from my experience always yellow and fall off its normal for my plants.