Attack of the Beetles III

As with recent wars elsewhere, my struggle against the beetles is ongoing, progress has been made, it wouldn't make sense to quit now, and I might have declared victory a bit too soon (see parts I and II).

Enemy #1: Flea beetle
Status: new insurgents!
The tomatoes had outgrown the flea beetle damage and were/are taking off. Also, the upside-down tomato plants had completely avoided the first wave of flea beetles that were attacking all my in-ground plants (guess they couldn't jump that high - ha! outwitted you, didn't I, you little f*ers!) Okay, well, not so fast there, J... perhaps I outwitted them the first time, with help from some diatomaceous earth, but.... they're back! With reinforcements! They're all over my in-ground tomatoes. The beetles have also managed to make it up to my upside-down tomatoes, I assume by hopping up all the squash leaves underneath both plants. You're welcome.
Strategy: Management. Time for some more DE.

Enemy #2: Cucumber beetle
Status: buzzing around but are basically has-beens. However, I fear late-season comeback.
In my last report from the front lines, I gave up on sprays and was resorting to physical blockage involving walls of water with cheesecloth over the top, and row covers. The wall arrangement worked very well until the plants were too big to fit inside. At that point, I fearfully took off the walls/cloth and hoped for the best. The squash won: thankfully, squash is such a fast, strong grower that the beetles couldn't do measurable damage to the plants anymore.

However, the cucumber plants were under heavier attack, suffered more damage before I re-covered them, and probably continued to get eaten after I was forced to uncover them because they were getting too big, too, for the wall/cloth contraption. The covers allowed both plants to recover a bit and put on new growth, which I think was key to their survival. They are survivors! As shown in the last post, I harvested 2 lovely cucumbers from my Marketmore plant this week. Still no Armenian yard-longs, but I think I saw some babies on there a few days ago.
Lessons Learned:
1)cuc beetles can do terrible damage to really small plants. Physical covers like walls of water, cheesecloth or row cover material are the only good way to protect small plants from them. Cover your cucumber, melon or squash plant until it is flowering and/or can't fit under the cover anymore.
2)I am sure pyrethrin sprays have some efficacy but just aren't worth the cost, effort and potential to kill beneficial insects.
Strategy: feeling sense of impending doom about late-season resurgence of cuc beetle damage, not sure what to do! Come on, cucumbers! Produce! Hurry!

Spent barley mulch +wall of water = vinegary plant death

Last year, I mulched with spent barley from a local brewery. It was great. It's free, natural, easy to spread, gives good cover, stays in place relatively well, and eventually breaks down to provide nitrogen, etc back to the soil. In fact, I still recommend it. However, I wouldn't recommend doing what I did this year:

I got the barley from bins outside the brewery early one morning (gotta get there before the flies do). The barley was still wet and stinky from brewing. I went straight to my community plot, removed the black plastic mulch (weather had definitely warmed up enough) and began spreading the barley around. I put a good 2in layer on top of the soil. This was all fine. The problem came when I a) spread thick wet layers around some of my smaller plants, all tomatoes; these were my 2nd round transplants that I planted where I realized there was room after the 1st round, then b) put the walls of water back around these small tomatoes.

I go back the next day to check on things, and what do I find? Brown, shriveled tomato seedlings. Completely gone. The walls of water around the wet barley had created a hot vinegar tomato-annihilation atmosphere as hospitable to plant life as the ammonia clouds of Jupiter. The tomatoes never had a chance. This pic is the Early Girl tomato, after 1 day in my unintentional death chamber. Look closely; the leaves are reduced to papery dead shreds. This was the largest of the condemned tomatoes. The stem of this one lived (the others were smaller so got totally boiled), but since I have so many plants at home, I pulled it out and replaced it with another fully-alive plant.

Didn't see this one coming!
Lessoned learned: it always pays to have 3x the plants you really need ;)

-jardinera de muerte

Tutorial: Early season techniques

This is my experience with how to plant warm-season vegetables dangerously close to the last frost date and not kill them. This year, I've used walls of water and black plastic mulch to protect seedlings.

Prologue: My seedlings were all at least 5 in high (some larger as I was too optimistic about the last frost) when I transplanted them into the garden. I started some plants from seed indoors and bought some seedlings from a local nursery, and others online because I thought I wouldn't be able to find them locally.

Both walls and mulch help early in the season by raising the temperature around plants (walls of water) and raising soil temps (black mulch). Cold temps can stress plants, kill them (less than 40f can kill peppers, for instance), or reduce nutrient uptake resulting in slowed or stunted growth. We sure need it here at 5000ft, as it got into the 30's (F) at night well into mid-May.

Walls of water: They are the turquoise teepees in the pic, available at your garden store $7 per 3 walls. Ouch! But worth it if you insist on trying to improve upon nature as I do. One 'wall' is a plastic cylinder of connected cells that you fill with water. The water absorbs the sun's heat all day, and radiates it back to the plant at night. The package says you can transplant plants up to 6-8 weeks earlier using walls, but I'm a bit skeptical of that, especially when 6-8 weeks earlier means frost/snow and many vegetables can't handle temps below 40 or 45F (that's a claim of ~10F temp increase). However, I think you can get closer to these figures by completely encasing the plant: if you only fill the cells 2/3-3/4 full of water, the cylinder will lean in on itself to form the teepee shape you can see in the pic. When closed off like that, it forms a mini-greenhouse around the plant. I'm using the teepees with black mulch, and when I open the top and stick my hand in, it's a regular sauna in there. Steamy and hot. The steamy part is becoming a problem for my squash as it's providing a quite hospitable environment for powdery mildew, but that's another post.

Now that it's mid-June - warmer, and some of the squash plants are getting bigger - I want to open the teepees and reposition them so they are cylinders, open on the top for more air-flow and space within. However, I found that the teepees protected many plants from early flea and cucumber beetle infestations - which are not over - so I'm torn as to exactly how to proceed...

Black Plastic Mulch: Basically, an impermeable soil covering that absorbs the sun's heat (because its' black) and transfers the heat to the soil, raising soil temps to help warm-season vegetables get a head start. Also helps with moisture retention and weed control, as do all mulches :) (Other mulches, like straw, are better later in the season, once the weather has warmed up, since they help keep soil temps more stable i.e. cooler)

Trash bags, the poor man's mulch! Actually, I first bought some black plastic from the local hardware store. All they had was 4mil and it was quite thick. I read several places that the mulch needs to have good contact with the soil in order to transfer heat it's absorbing from the sun, and 4mil was too thick to wrap around all the bumps in the soil. Then I realized black trash bags were the perfect 1-2mil thickness I had been looking for. So, I now have 2 beds covered in 4mil and the rest in 1mil (total: $7, not bad!) We'll see if it makes a difference, but I doubt it: all the mulch has lost contact with the soil since so many weeds are growing under it and pushing up on it(sickly, white weeds that will never see sun, heehhee). I'm finding that it's still quite the sauna under the mulch anyway.

When you are laying down the mulch, you'll need to cut holes for plants. I had already planted a few seedlings, so this involved some estimation of exactly where the hole needed to be to accurately accommodate the stem. Thankfully trash bags tear easily, although strangely, in only one direction... Secure the plastic to the edges of the bed with garden stakes so it lays flat and tight over the bed.

I put the walls of water up May 18 I think, when I first planted a few plants (tomatoes and a couple of peppers). I put the rest up May 25 when I planted squash and eggplant, and the tomatoes lost their walls then b/c I didn't have enough. I put the mulch down, in parts, the last couple of weeks of May.

Not sure how long I'll leave all this stuff on, but hopefully it's helping. I have a 'control' eggplant at my house (no need to get into the messy variables of house vs. garden, container vs. ground, okay?) that has neither mulch nor walls, and several 'control' tomatoes at my house that did not have black mulch like the garden ones do. The control tomatoes also didn't have a flea beetle infestation, but hey, that's why experimental writeups have a discussion section, for all the disclaimers and possible explanations for your unexplainable results ;)

Attack of the Beetles!!!!

I went out of town for 6 days. 6 days! Everything was fine when I left... I covered most plants with walls of water and the raised beds with black plastic mulch (known in lay terms as cut up trash bags :).

I came back from out of town to flea beetles and cucumber beetles attacking the plants that weren't protected by walls of water. They must have hatched/matured in the 6 days I was gone! There were 2 tomatoes (my Moonglow heirloom, no!!!), a tomatillo, and a few peppers uncovered. The tomatoes and tomatillo were getting devoured!

Flea beetles are very little black bugs that leave tiny buckshot holes in leaves. They also jump like fleas. You can see a couple on the rightmost leaf in the pic.

(Striped) cucumber beetles are a bit bigger, yellow with distinct black stripes (The stock pic shows both spotted and striped). They eat big holes through leaves, mate all over my tomatillo, and leave clumps of orange eggs on the undersides of leaves. The worst part is that they spread bacterial wilt, which can kill the whole cucumber or squash plant. I've only noticed them on the tomatillo so far (since all my squash are in a walls of water teepees) but this could be a bad situation since 1/3 to 1/2 of my garden is curcurbits of various kinds.

The community gardens are all organic, so no killing them with technology (can I blind them with science?) .... but there's several organic options available. I'll post soon what works for me.