23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Just in case your open to organic suggestions I attract birds and hummingbirds to my garden. If a caterpillar eats so much that its walking on bare ground, it ain't got long.
That's not caterpillar damage I have cabbage worms and we both eat just fine.
This is cabbage worms 
I know I like white butterflies so I plant ten for every one I expect to eat. Mature caterpillar will much on the peas.
so here is my suggestion
1. broadcast the seed so you have enough food for wildlife.
2. Grow some sunflower, sweet corn or sorghum.
3. Trellis some runner beans for the hummingbirds
3b. Grow a huge winter squash to shade the cabbage, later open one up and leave the seed for the swallows. Best mosquitoes eliminater ever
4. Put a little composting stuff near your vegetables to attract tiny flies that pregnant hummingbirds eat
5. Put a shallow puddle of water out
6. Plant some dill and other host herbs, let them flower.
7. Use compost tea to fight disease mine is made with tansy, soapy water for aphids until the hummingbirds clean them out , and yogurt paint for mildew.
8. Late at night arm yourself with a garden flash light and some bug squashing boots, then go get EM Slugs fyi kids love this.
lastly keep planting more tightly we never know how many hungry mouths are in the garden.
SJane's - I looked at your photo of the damage to your plants and I was thinking it also could be ear wigs. I've had damage, that I couldn't find a culprit for and decided to go out with a flashlight at night, and that's what it ended up being, ear wigs. Which I knocked into a cup of soapy water for a few nights until I felt they were under control.
At any rate, I never use a pesticide and I find that my garden has found it's own equilibrium, which just tickles me. Aphids show up and within a week, when I leave them alone, the Ladybugs show up and no more aphids. I actually end up trying to attract aphids to feed the ladybugs. lol
Last year, I had a lot of Brassica crops and I hadn't grown them in awhile, so I was concerned I was going to get cabbage worms, and I did, but no sooner did the cabbage worms show up, then I suddenly started seeing wasps patrolling my vegetable beds and I stopped seeing cabbage worm damage.
WHMaven - Thanks for your list - it's a good one. I'm growing sunflowers this year and I'm adding Scarlet Runner Bean for hummers. I never get hummers for some reason, but I keep adding plants to try to attract them. Last year, I noticed, a small little hummer buzzing around my pole string beans, which was a surprise to me. So, I asked about it here and found out they like Scarlet Runner Beans. I'm going to try to put out a feeder for them again. I've given up in the past. And I have honeysuckle early in the season and now I will have the SRBeans and a great place to grow a lot of them too.
We don't get swallows where I am in suburban/urban area with small 1/4 acre lots, and when I opened a pumpkin for the yard last year, all I got was squirrels. [g] They certainly enjoyed that for about a week. They would crawl inside the pumpkin and poke their head out. It was entertaining.
I'm also going to put a shallow saucer of water, but also a saucer of mud.
Had a lot of dill and other herbs last year and will again this year. I love to let Parsley winter over and flower for beneficials and reseed the next year.
Including a link to the video you are talking about in your post would be nice. Easy to do and it would save us having to dig through YouTube - much less have to watch them all - to try to find out what you are asking about.
The only garden girl videos I can find with any white row covers in it is the one using plastic to make low tunnels and old skylights to make domes over the beds. Then there is the one using white tissue paper to make seed tapes.
Assuming you aren't talking about either of those then Mike and zeedman provided the best guesses.
Dave
died I found it finally remember she was using a pH tester...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHRPU5Ghr_Y
Yeah, I tried finding tha video for several hours.. no luck... Exasperating thought I had bookmarked it.... so who has the best price for it? thanks yall
Dang, I even passed up some platic skylights at the Habitat restore plsce couple months ago... Dang I knew when I touched them they were good for something.. Yeah, I did the tulle thing. een sent twice for the 90 inch wide roll..... It doent last long...I even made gathered up "pillowcases for my blueberries one year. That was a mistake cause I had to carefully remove them tediously and they were easy to knock off unripened berries.. So now I just drape my tulle(Oh, old sheers(curtains) works even nicer.) over the hardware "cages" with clothespins.....down to the ground... I keep the hdwe cloth "circles on all the time. so I dont have to store them...keep them (cages")in place with a ground rod or tobacco sticks
Charlie, it's only been a few winters that I've had the room to try with the chokes, and none of them have been "normal". But yes, they seem to be fine with the normal course of things and revive after long hard freezes just fine. But we've had 80ð days in February and 26ð nights in late April, and it seems like they only have enough oopmf to get through one or two freeze-thaws like that. They will start growing again in March, then freeze out in a sudden late freeze in April. I've had them unprotected and lightly protected. I didn't want to encourage my voles with a heavy mulch. Maybe it makes sense they don't have too much in reserve, they are only yearling perrenials at their first winter.
If mine make it through to the spring, I will try harder to protect them from late freezes. And maybe I'll go out now and dig one of the small ones to try in a pot over winter.
I have a real challenge in growing artichokes being in Zone 5a. Have had seed sprouting success but thats about it. I wonder if you could do the following:
put some ground cloth over the plant before bedding it down for the winter then bury it with 12" or so of dirt
Then in the spring uncover them after the night temps are above 45 degrees or so then make a mini-greenhouse that you put over the plant, along with a bowl of water inside, until the day temps are in the mid-70s. I am doing this for tomatoes; in SE Wisconsin we have cool springs here with possible snow up to 1st week of May some years. I will be doing this this year for my peppers and tomatoes.
Another idea, which I have not tried personally, would be to bury some fresh cow dung near the plants which will provide extra heat and create a mini-climate near the plants all winter long (you'd have to remove it plus some surrounding dirt in early spring and throw it in your mulch pile though or I would think you might burn out your plants)
The mini greenhouse is just a square frame of 2x4s with holes drilled vertically and 2 loops of wire at right angles to each other; then clear plastic stapled on the bottom where the frame touches the ground.
Since most of your original compost has since decomposed and the nutrients have been used up the standard recommended supplement for most all gardens is more compost.
All compost continues to breakdown over time so many find twice (or more) times a year replacement with approx. 3" of quality compost to be ideal. If you don't or can't compost on your own then I'd suggest find a good local source of quality compost.
Dave
We have an organic source of compost from our local dump. I usually get a truckload about every other year and use as much of my own compost as I can. I have started letting one bed go unplanted each year and composting straight on the bed in a bin. There's still room to plant something small like basil while the box sits there in the middle.
About every 3rd year, I buy a load of "garden mix" from the organic dump place and top it off. I have a very small tiller that I mix it all in with (only about 10 lbs)
Truckloads are really the way to go. With 20 forever beds, you can always find a place for the soil/compost! Nancy
Generic rectangular plastic tubs, about a foot and a half long and a foot wide, with sides a few inches high, are called "tote trays" or "stacking containers". I find those work very well, and are durable, long lasting, and fairly inexpensive. Some have ribs on the base, which keep seedling tubs out of standing water. You can get those at Target or Walmart, I think.
If it's for your own use, you could either try freecycle.com or craigslist. But you could also recycle by using TP rolls with paper bottoms, or egg cartons (cardboard type). I also see tons in thrift stores/recycle places at the dump.
appears to be russet mite damage.
see this http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews/2011/9-14/cyclamenmite.html
I read about folks who use Dipel religiously in seed trays to kill the gnat larvae. Might not kill the gnats themselves, but does a job on the larvae (and therefore, eventually gets rid of the gnats). The larvae, I understand are the real threat to seedlings. Not the gnats.
The idea of the treatment is to preserve the wood. If the wood is still pretty well preserved, I think you have to assume that the treatment chemicals are still in it. I assume you're talking about pressure-treated lumber? If the wood is a few decades old, it might have been CCA treated, and that stuff was pretty nasty. If the only treatment was ten year old stain, it's probably OK to use now for gardening.
Advice is to plant peas as soon as soil can be worked. Still frozen doesn't quite qualify I don't think. ;-) I only grow edible podded peas which are a bit more prone to rotting in cool soil, so I always presprout mine. I soak for several hours until they swell and then place in lightly damp paper towels until I just see roots starting. Then I plant out and get good growth - it seems to take care of the rotting issue. A good resource is Johnny's Select Seeds - for every vegetable they give an optimal germination temperature chart (scroll down to the top of the "growing information" section.)
Animals are less likely to chew their way into an enclosure, since it will offer few escape routes. A fence, with open sky above it, is another matter. This year, though, I had a deer jump my 6-foot garden fence for the first time. It landed, saw that it was fenced in, and beat itself against the fence trying to get back out. After 4 tries, it escaped... without eating a thing.
If plastic hardware cloth is strongly discouraged for protecting birds in aviaries from carnivores (by folks who are expert at that stuff), seems to me the same has to apply to protecting vegetables. Animals will chew their way into an enclosure if there is good stuff to eat there. Frankly, I suspect rodents are pretty clueless in thinking about how enclosed they will be. I'm here, the food I want is there. Chewable plastic in between. That's the equation they're solving. I've put chicken wire fencing around veggies, and squirrels burrow under it to get in to get those veggies. They get in and gorge. Yes, they're sorta enclosed, but there was a way in, and that's the way out.
Studies have shown that relocation of rodents to random sites more than half the time results in their death. At least partly because they are very territorial, and partly because of restricted food supply. What I do, however, is relocate in the spring, when edibles reemerge, and well before they start putting away food for the winter. I also relocate in very similar (for me, riparian) habitat. FWIW, squirrels are reared (and kicked out of the nest) in early spring, which is often why recolonization happens around then.
With a garden of that size, an electric fence sounds like the most cost-effective option. In my rural garden, I use a hybrid fence of electric fencing high, and chicken wire low. The wire not only keeps out the deer, it keeps the racoons out of my corn. To make an entryway, I just tie pieces of twine between two poles with quick-release knots... the deer could come through there, but once bitten by the fence, they don't seem to know the difference between wire & string.
But like almost any other method of animal deterrent, an electric fence is most effective when used proactively, to keep them out before they learn what's on the other side. If the animals know that something they like is inside, they will find a way through... so putting up a fence after damage has begun is less likely to discourage them.
I just bought myself a rechargeable Worxx Jaw Saw to keep the woody stuff beyond the garden under control and it is awesome. First chain saw I ever used that I can control with confidence.
Advice to others: don't try to use an auger with a rechargeable drill or you will kill the drill like I did.
The tractor is great for moving manure, mulch, etc. I otherwise mostly use hand tools in the veggie garden.