Tag: Sluggo

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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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Attract Bees to Your Garden

 

I love bees of all kinds and honeybees in particular.  When I was about five years old, my father left me in the house while he worked outside.  When my mother came home from an errand, she found me standing by a plate of honey I was using to feed my father’s honeybees. He kept bees and sold honey for years until the mites and diseases killed them.  I remember them crawling up my legs as I lured them with honey.  No bees stung me that day because of, I believe, my calmness around them.  I was not scared of them, and meant them no harm, and they knew it. 
Last week, I noticed that the shrubs enclosing an area of my garden were buzzing.  They were the ordinary holly, Ilex ‘Compacta,’ commonly used in landscapes. Hundreds of tiny white flowers, so small I might not have noticed them if the bees were not on them, were blooming, and the bees covered the shrubs. Dozens of bees furiously worked the blossoms to grab every bit of nectar they could find. 
If you are allergic to bee stings, you might understandably find the sight of so many bees alarming.  Many folks are scared of bees because they don’t understand their behavior and think they are aggressive.  Bees (and in this discussion I include wasps, yellow jackets, bumble bees, and any other sort of flying insect capable of stinging although it’s not technically correct) will not hurt you unless you bother them first.  Many of them are so tiny you might not notice them, but they are critical to pollinating flowers and vegetables.  I have suffered many bee stings in my life, but I always bothered the bees first, by either stepping on it or threatening its home.  They are happy to go about their bee business as long as you leave them alone.

 

Without bees in the garden, there would be no flowers, vegetables, or fruit.  Bees must move pollen from the male flower parts to the female flower parts for pollination to occur.  If you spray your garden with insecticides, you will kill the bees, which are more sensitive than other creatures, along with the harmful insects.  Sometimes a pest threatens to devour all your plants if you do not spray some sort of insecticide, and even organic ones can harm bees.  When I spray insecticides, which is very rare, I do it in the evening, when the bees have gone to bed, but I hesitate to do even this because I often find bumblebees sleeping among the bean leaves. 
I only use pesticides to target a very specific pest that I have first identified and am sure I am treating correctly.  For example, snails, slugs, Japanese beetles, caterpillars, or many other creatures may cause holes in the bean leaves.  If you just spray an all-purpose insecticide, you will kill all the creatures instead of just the one causing the problem.  Maybe some Sluggo® bait sprinkled on the ground might take care of the snail and slug problem, without harming the bees, and shaking the Japanese beetles into a bucket of soapy water might take care of them, again without harming the bees.  The plant might be able to tolerate the damage from the creature without any intervention. 
To attract bees to the garden, plant a variety of plants that flower in succession during the year. Bees usually like native, heirloom plants better than hybridized plants.  Some plants you might add to your garden to attract bees include asters, Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Penstemon, Joe-Pye weed or Eupatorium, Salvia, Zinnia, Sedum, Helianthus, Agastache, Goldenrod, Rosemary, and Basil.  Most of these plants flower in my garden during the year, and bees usually cover them.  Visit this link for additional information about attracting bees to your garden.