Good Bugs/ Bad Bugs

Mid-summer is the fat part of the year here on the East End – time to chill on the beach, savor tomatoes plucked from the vine, fire up the grill and enjoy long a leisurely dinner watching the fireflies light up the night. 

 But mid-summer also brings its challenges especially in the garden, where all too often we must face an infestation of bugs.  Chief among the most destructive pests are squash borers and bugs which usually start making their appearance in mid-July, not long after the first batch of zucchinis have been harvested.  If you’re not careful, these bugs and borers can take over pretty darn fast, turning a healthy plant into a dead one in just a few short days. 

So as soon as you notice yellow discoloration on the leaves or rot on the stems of your squash plants, it’s time to spring into action.  Here’s what we’ve been doing this year in the Food Pantry Garden to hold the squash borers and bugs at bay – a campaign in two parts, since there are different pests, designed to restore your squash plants to health.

 Part 1: Fight fire with fire, as Shakespeare put it, an approach we use in the garden by deploying good bugs to fight the bad ones.  When it comes to combating squash bugs there is no weapon more potent than nematodes, or roundworms, which are tiny transparent critters that love to feed on the squash bug larvae.  

 We bought our nematodes from buglogical.com but you can find lots of other sources online.  They will arrive in a neat little package with very clear instructions for application but the long and short of it is that you drop the nematodes into a full watering can and then apply to the entire squash bed.

You may want to apply the nematodes a second time depending on the severity of the infestation.

Part 2:  The other menace to your squash plants is the squash borer, which as the name implies, loves to drill little holes into squash and feast on its insides.  The key ingredient in fighting the squash borer is a soil dwelling bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (usually abbreviated as Bt) which you can buy online or at any garden center in the form of a spray.  Bt is the most common biological pesticide used worldwide.

Here are the steps we follow in applying the Bt:

 1.    Remove leaves that have any eggs & hatched nymphs on them and any adults running around in the beds and put them in a bucket of soapy water. The soap kills them. A simple method of extermination but alone is not sufficient to control most infestations. 

2.    Slice open infested stems to expose larvae and spray Bt into the cut.

3.    Apply more Bt around soil and stems.

4.    Mound up soil over and under the stems so that the plant can create new roots & stems to bypass infested areas.

Maybe it’s already too late to save your squash crop this year. If so, perhaps you should bookmark this page and be ready for next year because, sure enough, the bugs and borers will return, in which case you want to make sure you have some nematodes and Bt close at hand …. Here are some photos of the Food Pantry Garden campaign to save our squash plants over the last few weeks.

Where Tender Lettuce Goes to do Hard Time

It’s great to get an early jump on spring planting but you also need to be careful, particularly in an April like the present one, when there’s been an extended chill that has kept up for almost the entire month. You don’t want to damage your seedlings by leaving them out in a frost overnight.   

It’s easy to get annoyed hauling your trays of seedlings in and out, from the living room floor to the patio; but there actually may be some benefit in leaving the seedlings outside overnight, as long as there isn’t an actual frost.  According to Daphne S., co-manager of the ECI garden, your tender lettuce seedlings will benefit from some cold conditioning by leaving them on the patio overnight. The agricultural term for it is “hardening” them up.

Here's a picture of the fenced in yard where ECI’s juvenile lettuce leave do their “hard” time.  The area is fenced in so critters can’t get to the tender leaves, but we leave the seedlings in their trays for now, in case there’s a freezing night still to come.

Gardening Tips #1

Peas- Remember to keep up with harvesting. Picking encourages the pea plants to keep producing. And soon it will be too hot for them so they will shut down.

Successive sowing- Beans of all types( string, limas, bush, pole) should be sowed successively. Cukes and Zukes too. Also sow heat tolerant lettuce types like romaine and dark leaf varieties.

Feed - Use foliar feeds like diluted seaweed/ fish emulsion for all plants, best in afternoon. Apply to tomato plants around the drip line where the roots are (away from stems), not on leaves. Or feed with (aged) manure/compost tea around  the drip line. Don’t skip the peppers, they are heavy feeders.

Garlic -  finish harvesting scapes and don’t water or feed plants. Harvest in mid July.

Weed, weed, weed. Compost ‘em if they haven’t set seed yet(after flowering). Or feed to your .

Water in early mornings. Slow and long. Keep the soil moist enough so it can easily absorb any rainfall, which is really really needed. Summer is heating up.

And visit the ECI Seed Library if you need more seeds.

Happy gardening and munching.

Maribeth Fuchs

Daphne Shuttleworth