Tag: BT

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Deer… I do not love you!

I know deer
eavesdrop on my conversations.  I thought
I won the battle against deer, but they must have decided  I was too sure of my victory against them, and
they started eating my garden as if the electric fence that surrounds my
property did not exist.  Almost daily,
now, I see deer in the yard, and I see their white mop-like tails defiantly
wave at me as they clear the fence in one jump. 

My poor apple trees!  There should be leaves all the way down the  branches.



Deer aren’t the
only pests attacking my garden, and even if you don’t have deer, you probably
have six-legged critters that munch on your plants.  I saw no potato bugs this year, and harvested
84 pounds of nearly perfect potatoes a couple of weeks, but they usually try to destroy
my potatoes. 

One of my helpers.  Digging potatoes is a treasure hunt!
If you have potato bugs,
which are little orange bugs that defoliate potato plants, knocking them into
soapy water is a great way to dispose of them safely.  Knocking almost any insect into soapy water
will kill it; just make sure you correctly identify it as a pest first. 
My other helper.  These girls know where potatoes come from!


I giggle to
myself as I knock Japanese beetles off my blackberries, grape vines, apple
trees, and roses into a bucket of plain water to give to the chickens.  I call it “chicken bobbing for apples” because
I set the bucket of water in the midst of the hens, and they gleefully consume
the Japanese beetles so they can, later, turn them into eggs.  See a video of this here. It’s best to pick
Japanese beetles and other insects that fly to escape capture in the morning,
when the dew remains on the plants, because they can’t fly well when their
wings are wet.
 
I avoid using
chemical pesticides, and I never apply pesticides to the entire garden.  Whenever I apply pesticides, chemical or
organic, I apply them to kill a specific pest that I have identified
correctly.  Whatever pesticide I apply
can also kill bees and other beneficial insects, and spraying the entire garden
will kill all insects. 

Most of the
time, pests I attempt to control with pesticides are eating the leaves of the plant,
not the blossoms, and bees visit the blossoms of the plant and have incidental
contact with the leaves of the plant.  I
can also wait until the plant has stopped blooming, because bees will stop
visiting the plant when it has stopped blooming, and apply pesticides
then. 

Japanese beetles
are devouring my grapes.  The plants
aren’t blooming anymore, because the deer ate the blossoms and many
leaves.  The poor plants began to grow
new leaves and now Japanese beetles are eating the new growth.  The chickens have enjoyed several episodes of
“bobbing for apples” with those beetles, and I applied diatomaceous earth, a
naturally occurring pesticide made from fossilized diatoms that works by
dehydrating insects, to the leaves.  If
the Japanese beetles persist in their attack on my grapes, I may apply a
chemical pesticide, because if I don’t stop the beetles the plants may
die.
 
I use Sluggo®
and containers of beer to drown slugs and snails, and I use Bacillus thuringiensis,
or BT, to kill caterpillars.  I pick off
large tomato hornworms, the scary-looking, but harmless to people, green worms
that can defoliate tomatoes and feed them to my chickens.  Correctly identify caterpillars; Monarch
butterfly caterpillars eat parsley, but I allow them to eat my parsley so that
I can enjoy butterflies later. 

How is your
garden?  

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Are You Confused about the Different Types of Seeds?

For the novice gardener searching for seeds in a catalog, the array of terms like hybrid, non-GMO, open-pollinated, and heirloom might make the task of deciding among all the tempting descriptions of plants more difficult. Depending on which catalog you read, some types of seeds are almost vilified, while others are ignored.

 

Almost all seeds on the market for gardeners are either hybrid or open-pollinated.  Scientists genetically engineer GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds by inserting genes from plants, bacteria, or other living species into a plant’s DNA in ways that cannot happen in nature.   For example, Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT, is a bacteria organic gardeners apply to plants to kill caterpillars.  Scientists figured out how to insert the BT gene into corn genes, and the resulting seed kills the corn earworms when they begin feeding on the ear of corn.  The corn you eat has the BT gene inside it. 

 

Proponents say this reduces the amount of pesticides introduced into the environment, while skeptics don’t like messing around too much with the natural order of things.  You will know it if you buy GMO seed: you will probably have to sign some document saying you won’t sell or even save the seed, and you may have to put up a sign near the field identifying the crop.  There is no danger of the home-gardener accidentally buying some GMO seed at the local store and planting it; it’s usually reserved for farmers.

Open-pollinated seeds form when the pollen of one plant is transferred to another plant, usually with the help of wind or insect pollinators.  The resulting offspring are similar to the parent plants because plants that are similar genetically cross with each other.  Gardeners save seed from open-pollinated plants and expect to get a similar plant from the seed next year.  All seeds were originally open-pollinated, and farmers and gardeners were able to save seed from plants that did well in their gardens for free.  Once a crop sets seed, they could grow gardens indefinitely, as long as they saved seed from the crop each year, without ever buying any more seed. 

Heirloom seeds are usually open-pollinated, and they have some historic or cultural value.  They are seeds your great-grandparents might have grown.  The definition of heirloom seed varies from catalog to catalog, but some examples are Brandywine tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder beans, and Red Russian kale. 

Hybrids pollinate either by wind or with the help of a plant breeder, but the seed grower makes sure pollination occurs in controlled circumstances among varieties of plants that are distantly related.  The seed, the offspring of two specific parents, is usually the first generation of the breeding between the two plants that possess desired characteristics.  For example, a breeder may cross a tomato resistant to tobacco mosaic virus with a tomato resistant to cracking to get a tomato resistant to both cracking and tobacco mosaic virus.  The seed of a hybrid tomato, however, contains the genetic traits combined in an uncontrolled manner and the traits of the offspring are unpredictable.  Hybrids often do not even produce seed, or they may produce sterile seed that will not germinate.  If you plant hybrid crops, you will have to buy new seed every year.  Breeders label seed “F1” hybrid, which denotes the seed as the first offspring of the parent plants.

Each of the types of seed has its own advantages.  Hybrids often offer better disease-resistance than open-pollinated varieties, but open-pollinated varieties often taste better and, if you save the seed, you don’t have to buy the seed again. 

Harvesting a tomato crop at all has been an ongoing challenge for me because the disease has been killing my plants.  Last year, I planted many different types of seeds and the hybrid tomatoes resisted disease the best.  A few of the open-pollinated seeds did fairly well too, and I’ll grow them again along with some new types.  Last year I actually had a tomato harvest, and, although purists would eschew any seeds not open-pollinated, I am practical: it’s better to grow something in my own garden instead of buying it elsewhere, even if it’s from hybrid seed.  Planting many different types of seed is the best way to ensure a harvest: if one variety dies, something else may survive.