Grow Better Veggies

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!

Cabbage and Broccoli in January

January's frosty mornings and short day length are no match for the cold loving veggies like broccoli and cabbage.

Savoy Cabbage

Broccoli

This broccoli (below) has whiteflies. Time for some organic pest treatment, pyrethrin spray at dusk (so we don't hurt our honeybees that are out only during the day).

Adding Fertility: Sow a Winter Cover Crop

Although our winter garden is in full swing, we nevertheless do not have every single bed planted out with cool-season vegetables. That's because it's important, if you can, to put some of your garden beds into a rotational cover-cropping program. A cover crop, or green manure, is a plant sown not for eating but to enrich the soil. Instead of taking nutrients OUT of your garden, they actually add them back. They also act to improve the soil's structure and it's ability to sustain growth and hold water and nutrients.

There are many types of cover crops, from legumes which grab the nitrogen out of the air and infuse it into the soil, to buckwheat, which serves to choke out invasive weeds before they take over your garden. The choice of a proper and productive cover crop for your garden firstly depends on the time of year you are sowing it. Some green manures won't germinate if it's too cold, while others can handle frost, even snow, with no problem. Secondly, you should consider whether you've got a special agenda over and above a basic desire for adding soil fertility.

For my California garden that gets plenty of frosts, but no snow, I had a larger choice of crops that would survive the winter here. Knowing that, I then sought to figure out what other benefits besides improving my soil health I could gain out of a specific cover crop.  After a bit of research, I settled on Pacific Gold Mustard.  I've got a few dodgy pests in my soil, and this type of mustard supposedly deters both wire worms and harmful nematodes.  The fact that David Kinch can also use the delicious spicy young leaves in his signature "Into the Vegetable Garden" dish, also played into my decision.

For a 50 square foot bed, we use about half a cup of seed.  The bed is not prepared at all, just cleared of previous vegetation.  We sprinkle the seed uniformly on top of the soil, trying to achieve about two or three seeds per square inch.  We then scratch it into the top inch of soil with a hard metal rake.  It's better to use an up and down motion rather than an actual raking movement.  If you rake back and forth, you're more likely to get bare patches where you've raked the seed out of place.  We then make sure the bed is kept constantly moist until germination occurs.  This usually means we've got to water every day if it doesn't rain.  The seeds can begin to emerge 48 hours after sowing, if the weather is mild.  If not, expect to wait a week before you see any green.

Once up, back off on the water, only giving it a spritz during extremely dry conditions.  You can begin to eat the tender greens within a few weeks by either pulling up the whole plant or by snipping off individual leaves.  It's best to mow down the whole lot before it flowers and sets seed, though.   We will cut all of the mustard off at the soil level in about late February, turn it all under the soil with our spade forks, and let it naturally compost for a month or two before we plant our warm-loving veggies.

So a triple threat: soil health, pest control, and yummy eats!

Attack of the Aphids

Where did those guys come from?!

One of my tomato plants was covered with aphids the other morning and required emergency intervention. I quickly got an organic pesticide: "Monterey Take Down Garden Spray."  Pyrethrin is the main ingredient, which is derived from chrysanthemum leaves and is an OMRI-certified pesticide (organic).

I mixed up a batch of spray in my 2 gallon garden sprayer. Also into the mix went one and a half aspirin tablets to help the plant's immune system at the same time.  I worked quickly as I needed to spray ASAP before the bees came into the hoophouse for the day. The fact that it happened to be cold and overcast weather meant the bees would stay safely in their hive for a while.  Although I noticed the neighboring tomato plants had a few aphids, only the heavily infested plant was sprayed.

Later that night, after the bees went to bed, I sprayed the infested others. The emergency treatment was applied to the one plant only.  It'll need follow-up treatment, no doubt, in about a week. (I kind of like that name for a horror movie: "The Infested Others!")

 

I hate you, pretty white butterfly!

Some people think this beautiful white butterfly is a lovely addition to their garden.  When I noticed it in my very first winter vegetable garden years ago, I thought, "Oh how wonderful.  My garden is so healthy, it's attracting all these fabulous butterflies."  When I looked across my garden full of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and a bunch of other things, there seemed to be at least a hundred of them, fluttering merrily above it all.  I admired them for a few minutes, then bent over and got back to work.  It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that their beauty turned deadly.  Hundreds of little green caterpillars were everywhere eating everything down to nubbins.  Well, not everything.  But just about everything.

When I realized that the culprit was this pretty white butterfly, properly called the Cabbage Moth, it was game on.  Over the years we have dealt with them by: 1. hand-rubbing out the worms as we hunt them among the veggies, 2. catching them with a butterfly net,  3. slapping them with our bare hands (much to the horror of the occasional child in the garden),  4. covering their favorite delicacies with floating row cover,  5. spraying with organic-approved Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), swatting them with a tennis racket, or 7. ignoring them.

No matter how much I want it to, ignoring them is just not helpful.  I don't recommend ignoring them.  As Glenn Close said in Fatal Attraction, "I will NOT be ignored!"

I hate Tomato Fruitworms

Check out the chutzpa of this guy who hatched inside my kitchen last week and got some good chompin' in before I noticed him. 

These tomatoes were brought into the house to ripen up.  Since the nights were getting colder, there was no hope that the tomatoes would finish ripening on the vines.  So as we were taking them down, we stripped off most of the green fruits.  We then brought the trays inside to ripen.

The trays were just hangin' out on my kitchen counter, and I must have passed them by a hundred times a day.  I don't know why I didn't notice this guy sooner, but all of a sudden, I caught sight of him, and Gack!  Where the heck did you come from?

If this were earlier in the season, and the tomato fruitworms were starting to attack my tomatoes, I'd have to move pretty quickly to protect them.  One year, I lost about a third of my crop because I didn't do anything to stop them.  It was the first time they had ever been a problem in my garden, and so I kept thinking that they'd just go away.  Not a good idea!  Now, when I see the first signs of an infestation, I immediately go on-line and purchase eggs of the predatory insect, the Trichogramma wasp.

The Trichogramma wasp's favorite food source are caterpillars like this voracious fruitworm.  But don't freak out, the wasps are so tiny, you cannot even see them.  I prefer using predatory insects rather than spraying or dusting, because it's much safer and quicker.  I don't have to take up valuable time mixing and applying an organic pesticide.

Fortunately, I don't have to do anything right now, though.  It's the end of the tomato season, and this little guy is the last of the tomato fruitworms.  For this year, at least.