⚫️Flea Beetles jumpers
Tiny beetles, usually black. Touch the leaf and they jump like fleas. They show up on eggplant, tomatillo, radishes, mustard, and that whole family.
They do not chew big holes. They make tiny shot-holes, like a little shotgun blast across the leaf. If you get enough of them, especially on pepper and eggplant, it gets really bad fast. They also spread disease as they move plant to plant.
What he does about it
- Spray an organic control, spinosad or neem oil. You have to repeat it, and after a while it diminishes.
- Spray neem in the cool of the day. Do not spray oil in the heat of the day.
- Keep the grass around the garden short. They like tall grass. He noticed that when he let his grass get too tall in summer, all kinds of little things came fluttering up out of it. Short grass around the beds cuts them down.
How to know they moved on
Look at the newest leaves. If the fresh growth is not being eaten, the insect has moved on and the lifecycle has passed. If they start chewing the new leaves, they are still there and you need to do something.
🛡️Squash Bugs worst of the squash pests
Flat, gray-brown, shield-shaped, with a hard shell and needle-like piercing mouthparts. They do not eat holes. They stab the plant and suck the juice, and that drains the strength right out of a squash plant.
He met a guy at the city market with a really nice squash spot and asked how he controlled squash bugs. The guy said he used really toxic stuff. That was not encouraging. There is a better way, and it is several small things stacked together.
Clean up their winter shelter
Adults overwinter as adults, hiding in old squash leaves and garden debris. That debris is their shelter. Get rid of old, dying squash leaves. Do not throw them on the compost pile. Dig them in or pull them out over the winter so the adults have nowhere to wait out the cold.
Find the eggs and lift them off
Turn the leaf over. The eggs sit on the underside in neat little groups, shiny and coppery. They hatch into gray nymphs that cluster and grow bigger.
His old method was to just tear that part of the leaf out where the eggs were, sacrificing the leaf with a hole in it. The better method now: take a piece of sticky tape, sticky on both sides, press it on the eggs, and it pulls all the eggs right off. It works like the tape you use to pull pet hair off your clothes or the furniture. The eggs that come off will not hatch and will not become a problem.
Spray the young nymphs
If they do hatch, or if you missed some eggs, spray neem or spinosad while they are at the little gray nymph stage. That is the window where control works. Once they grow the hard shell, it gets much harder.
The board trap
Lay a board, a one-by-six, flat on the soil in the row at night. The adults crawl under it to hide. In the morning go out, flip the board over, and you will usually find adults underneath. Step on them right there, or drop them into soapy water. They are not fast flyers, so they are easy to catch. He has done this for years.
The trap crop
Plant something else nearby that squash bugs love even more, to pull them off your real crop. Blue Hubbard is the one. It is a big blue-gray winter squash, sometimes sold as a decorative squash. Squash bugs love it. Plant it about two weeks earlier than your main squash, and put it in another part of the yard, not right next to your garden. The bugs go there and hang out, and you leave them. At some point they may kill the trap plant, and that is fine, because they stayed off the squash you care about.
Plant late
Plant your zucchini and yellow squash later, around the middle of the month, so the young plants miss the heaviest part of the squash bug cycle.
🦟Squash Vine Borer the overnight killer
A moth that looks a little like a wasp. It lays eggs on the stem, and the egg becomes a fat caterpillar that bores into the inside of the stem. It has two generations a season, which is part of why it is so hard.
It hits zucchini, yellow squash, butternut, and pumpkins, the whole family. Once the caterpillar is inside the stem, spraying the outside does nothing. The plant cannot take up water anymore, so it wilts and goes flat overnight, or over a day or two.
People come and tell him their squash plant died, it was fine yesterday and just collapsed. That is the borer. It was eating deep inside the stem the whole time, and the plant finally could not move water.
Plant in waves
Succession-plant zucchini and yellow squash, which grow fast. June 15, then July 1, then July 15. The later plantings come up after the borer has done most of its damage and tend to miss the lifecycle.
Spray BT on the stems every week
A regular weekly BT spray on the stems has a good chance of catching most of the caterpillars right as they hatch out, before they bore in.
Inject BT into the stem
This sounds crazy, and he has done it, and it has worked well. Mix up the liquid BT. Use a syringe, the kind you can get from a vet, a fairly large one. You do not even need a needle. Poke a small hole in the stem with a nail near the base, then push the concentrated BT in there before the damage starts. The BT moves through the stem. When the caterpillars start feeding inside, it shuts them down and paralyzes them. Do it a couple of times.
If you lose the leaves, hand-pollinate
If a plant gets stripped or covered, you may need to pollinate by hand to still get fruit. Take a little paintbrush, find the male flower, pick up the yellow pollen on the end, then find the female flower, the one with the tiny fruit behind it, and dab the pollen on. The afternoon works for this.
🐛Tomato Hornworm big, but rare
A large green caterpillar with a horn on its tail. There are two close cousins, the tomato hornworm and the tobacco hornworm, and they both look about the same and both go after tomatoes.
He hardly ever sees one, maybe once every several years. A gardener will bring one in and ask what stripped their plant. They eat whole branches and have a big appetite, but there are usually not many of them, so you can just pick them off by hand. For a heavy infestation you could use BT.
The helper to watch for
There is a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs on the hornworm. If you see a caterpillar covered in little white things, those are the wasp cocoons. Leave that caterpillar alone. The young wasps hatch out and eat the caterpillar from the inside, then fly off to find other caterpillars. That is nature staying in balance, and it is a big reason you do not see hornworms very often.
🧅Onion Thrips the leaf rasper
Tiny, hard to see, with rasping mouthparts that work like a file scraping a plate. They leave silvery streaks on onion leaves.
They love hot, dry weather. Most of the time they are not a big problem, and the onions still come along fine. If you get a heavy crowd, they can weaken the bulb, and with onions you want a big strong plant to get a big bulb. Control with neem oil or spinosad if it gets to that point.
🥒Cucumber Beetles striped chewers
Small striped or spotted beetles that eat holes in the leaves. The larvae feed on the roots, and the adults feed on leaves and fruit.
You can dodge a lot of the damage by delaying your planting instead of planting at the very beginning of the season, so the young plants are not out there when the beetles are worst. An organic spray will help control the adults.
🪲Japanese Beetles & June Bugs tell them apart
June bugs
The June bug is also called the May beetle or June beetle. They are big and mostly just annoying, the ones that bonk into the porch light. They eat a little, mostly on trees and shrubs, and they do not do much. He does not worry about June bugs at all. Their grubs live in the soil.
Japanese beetles
Shiny iridescent green, very metallic looking. Once you see one it is unmistakable. They skeletonize leaves and chew good-sized holes. The grubs live in the grass roots in the soil, and the grubs do not look like June bug grubs.
They did not used to be a problem here. They came from the East Coast and keep spreading. Some years they favor particular plants. For certain they go after cherry trees, roses, and other leaves, and the canna lilies in the children's garden get hit a lot, so they pick them off and dispose of them.
The trap argument
There is a big debate online, traps are bad versus traps are good. Traps can be bad because the pheromone lure has a scent that draws beetles toward your yard. His approach is to use a 55-gallon drum trap with the lure and place it well away from the garden, out by the workshop and the horses. In a bad year that drum fills up, a third full of beetles, which is just crazy. Placed far from the garden, he thinks the trap is a good way to go.
🕷️Spider Mites not an insect
Spider mites are related to spiders, not insects. They are very, very tiny and hard to see. There is a two-spotted spider mite and a red spider mite.
They are a big one for houseplants, the kind you find around the plants inside your house. They multiply fast in hot, dry weather. Last year, with temperatures in the 90s and not much rain, he saw a lot of them, especially on tomato plants. That is bad, because they suck the juice and the tomatoes do not size up.
How to spot and stop them
- Look underneath the leaves, really close. You can see tiny critters moving, and you will see fine webbing and pale speckling where they have been feeding.
- Wash them off with water, though it is hard to get them all.
- Spray neem oil or an insecticidal soap like Safer.
🐌Slugs night and moisture
Slugs are not insects either. They are more related to clams. The damage usually happens at night. They like cool, moist weather and they like moisture in general.
Mulch timing matters
Straw is good mulch, but in the early spring when it is cool and moist, do not put the straw out right away, because it gives slugs the cover and damp they want. Wait until later when it warms up.
Baits
- Beer traps work and are organic, but they are not very practical and do not always work.
- The organic bait he trusts is iron phosphate, sold as Sluggo. Iron phosphate kills slugs and will not kill pets. Iron is a material that is already in the soil, so it just decomposes. Once it is spread, you have not poisoned your garden.
🧴The Organic Sprays
The main ones he reaches for are neem, pyrethrin, BT, and spinosad.
Neem oil
It comes from the nut of the neem tree, which grows in India. It is both an insecticide and a fungicide, so it does double duty. It has a smell to it. Spray it, and you can wash it off the produce later. Keep it out of the heat of the day, because it is an oil.
Pyrethrin
It is made from a flower, a daisy-type flower, the painted daisy. Growing the flower does no good on its own. They take a powder of the flower and turn it into the insecticide. It is great because it is short-term. Sunlight breaks it down, and in about 24 hours it is gone. It does not persist in the environment. Compare that to chemical pesticides that stick around two or three weeks, which is why conventional farmers like them, since they do not have to spray as often. With pyrethrin you spray when you actually see the damage.
BT and spinosad
These are natural bacterial products. BT is for caterpillars, and it is also the dust you put on cabbage and broccoli. Spinosad comes from a soil organism and is good on flea beetles, thrips, and caterpillars.
Hot pepper and others
There are essential-oil type products too, and sprays made from hot peppers. Be careful with hot pepper, keep it away from your lips and eyes. It is good for some things, including keeping squirrels off, and it is worth trying.
🦟Mosquitoes
There are many kinds, and they are most active in the evening when you are out on the patio. They lay in standing water and they spread dangerous diseases. Whole towns have fogged the outdoors with chemicals to fight them.
BTI, the mosquito version of BT
There is an organic answer. It is a BT specifically for mosquitoes, called BTI. It targets the mosquito larvae. It was found in the soil in Israel, a particular variation of the soil bacteria that hits mosquito and blackfly larvae very hard and leaves almost everything else alone.
You can get it as little donut-shaped dunks that last about two months, or as granules you sprinkle on the water. It works on the larvae fast. It does not harm fish, pets, people, or plants.
When his daughter was getting married in the backyard, everyone was worried about the mosquitoes. So he deliberately put out standing water and treated it with this, the idea being that the water draws the mosquitoes in and the treatment crashes them. It worked, the population dropped, and it was amazing. He does the same thing a couple of weeks before their big fundraising event.
Rain barrels are safe
At a rain-barrel class they were told to drop mosquito dunks in the barrel. Is the water then safe to put on the garden? Absolutely safe. It only affects the mosquito larvae. These organisms are out in nature already, just not at enough density to control mosquitoes on their own.
For your skin
Instead of DEET, which is harsh enough that people say not to put it on kids since their skin is more sensitive, he uses oil of lemon eucalyptus. It is an essential oil from a particular eucalyptus species, it has been tested by universities, and it smells like eucalyptus. He keeps several bottles and puts it on every time he goes out to mow. It lasts a good while, it is a little greasy, and you shower it off at the end of the day.
💧Mixing and Timing
- Chlorine kills BT. When you mix BT, the chlorine in fresh tap water can affect the bacteria. Let the tap water sit out for a day so the chlorine off-gasses, or use distilled water. It is the same idea as letting water sit before you put fish in it. He uses distilled water for BT so the chlorine does not weaken the material.
- Waiting time before eating. Labels on conventional insecticides may say wait a week. For these organic ones it is effectively about 24 hours. Do not eat right after spraying, give it a day, and rinse the produce.
- Compost in the water. Some people add a little compost to their water. It brings in other beneficial organisms and helps the whole ecosystem, the way nature would.
Where to Buy
- Gardens Alive. Organic sprays plus a catalog that reads almost like a little book on how to control different pests.
- Arbico Organics. More scientific and professional, aimed at growers and greenhouse growers. A great catalog, and where they order a lot of their supplies.
- Your local co-op or supply house. Many also carry the organic baits and sprays above.