Love Apple Farms

A Pest to Watch Out for This Spring: Leaf Miner

The damage done to this young chard is made by what can be quite a pernicious pest in the spring: Leaf Miner. There are many types of beetles and flies that have offspring which burrow inside leaves.  They make trails or tunnels that can meander around inside the leaf, looking like it has been "mined."  Another gross thing is that when you hold the leaf up to the light, you can sometimes see the maggot inside its tunnel.  Definitely NOT yummy.

The leaf miner in my garden loves the beets and chard the best.  No wonder, they are sister plants.  Leaf miners also bother (to a smaller extent) my spinach and lettuces, but boy, if there's a beet patch around for them to play in, that's where they're going.

I don't exactly know which species of critter I've got here at Love Apple Farm which is the exact "leaf miner," but I do know how to get a handle on them.

Our first line of defense is to trap them with a blue sticky trap, as you see in the pic below.  Position it at plant level in the garden, and your offending leaf miner is attracted to the trap instead of the plant, gets stuck on it, and that's the end of it.
We also can hand pick each leaf off that has the miner inside.  Be careful what you do with these  Don't simply throw them away, the maggots will hatch in the trash (or compost pile) and continue their life cycle.  Either put them in a sealed plastic bag or squish each one, killing the maggot.  Better yet, give them to your chickens.  They'll love eating the leaves AND the maggots.  The ultimate lean protein and leafy green diet.

Don't have chickens and wish you did?  Consider taking my class in April on Keeping Backyard Chickens.  In the meantime, watch out for those leaf miners, they can do some serious damage!

Low Germination - What to do?

This is a bed of newly sprouting beets.  Beets need to be sown directly in garden beds.  The term "direct sown" means that rather than starting seeds in flats in the greenhouse, we sprinkle the seeds right on top of the soil, covering them lightly with more soil.  We then keep the bed moist until full germination happens.  Sometimes, that germination isn't 100% or even close to that. There are numerous reasons all of your sown seeds don't germinate.  It could be the time of the year (too cold or too hot).  It could be you've sown the seeds too shallowly (not enough soil on top of them) or too deeply (as often happens with carrots).  Perhaps you have accidentally allowed the soil to dry out between waterings, which often kills the sprouting seeds.  Whatever the reason, you can usually fix it.

A few weeks after sowing seeds, if they haven't sprung up in the numbers you expect, then you should probably assume you have reached the maximum germination you could hope for.  We sowed these beet seeds on January 3; we've done our best to keep them well hydrated.  As a veteran gardener, I am pretty sure that five weeks later, the reason we have a 60 or 70 percent germination rate is that it's darned cold here in the coastal mountains of California this time of year.  Temperatures overnight often dip into the twenties and low thirties (Fahrenheit), thwarting germination of even cool-weather crops like beets.  Not to worry, we can add more seeds to the bare patches.

Just sprinkle more seeds right on top of the soil in the bare spots.  Our aim is to get about one seed per square inch.  We don't go overboard creating grids and expending too much time on this.  We've got work to do!

Once you've added more seeds to the bare patches, go ahead and add more soil.  Don't have any more soil?  Take it from a too-full bed, or use potting soil to lightly cover the seed.  You're adding about a quarter of an inch on top of the seed.  In this photo, you can see the darker, new soil, in the lower half of the shot.  Don't worry at all if you get soil on top of your tiny sprouted plants.  Once you water, the soil will settle around them.

You will then need to water the whole bed in a bit, as the photo below shows.  Don't over-do it, as you only need to moisten the top half inch of soil if your seeds are only lightly covered, right?  It's not like you're watering a big tomato plant.  Every day thereafter, check the moisture.  Water if the top of the soil starts to show minor signs of drying out.  If you keep your re-sown seeds constantly moistened, you should see some good seed sprouting within a couple of weeks.  That way, you get full bed coverage.  No wasted space!