Tag: pests

Spring Busyness

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Rock cress, phlox, potentilla, candy tuft, and spring tulips are brighting up the spring landscape. The leaves are coming on trees right now. The weather is finally warm and springy. The grass is vigorously growing, it’s almost too late to plant spring crops and about time to plant annual flowers and all the summer veggies.

The past week was spent beautifying the landscape. My husband was between semesters in school, which was the perfect timing to send him to work. We cleaned up the compost pile, mowed and trimmed, planted potatoes, and built a fence around the community garden. One big project that took us longer than anticipated was getting the irrigation system up and running. We had to replaced quite a few heads, and I was pretty amazed at all the shortcuts/things wrong with the system. There are spray heads and rotors on the same zone, areas devoid of head to head coverage or even without any coverage, heads spraying the hard scape, areas in need of a pressure regulator, and a lack of uniformity in the type of head. I just finished up an irrigation design class, so the mistakes in design are very blaring to me. But there is a lot worse out there as well and the system does irrigated.

I also sprayed some of the expansive grass with glyphosate. I loved doing that. Spraying is the easiest way to get rid of weeds: I’m not giving it up anytime soon regardless of any desire I have to be more green in my garden. I love the ease of glyphosate, and not a huge fan of hours of hand weeding.

I love how spring unfolds in the garden: it really is the best time of year.

Eating Cucurbit Leaves

My parents vegetable garden did not look so hot this year. Cucumber beetles and squash bugs ate the cucurbit crops. A recurring pest of pocket gophers decided to eat the tomatoes close to the ground. The squash was attacked by powdery mildew. One zucchini and tomato ended up dying before the season was over. There were wilt diseases present.

I gave my parents some recommendations on how to overcome the pests. But nothing was sprayed or done to control the pests even at its worst. And you know what? The garden came through. There was still good harvests, including the largest cantaloupe I’ve ever seen. Maybe the harvest wasn’t as plentiful as it could of been. But it was good enough. Plants and nature can often take care of themselves, even against seemingly impossible enemies. I don’t think we need to worry about pests as much as we do.

The garden has been in the same small plot for 16 years. It is moving next year. That should help the vegetables continue to have good harvests.

Quackgrass

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I hope you never come across this plant. I’ve been helping my grandma out with her garden. In her berry patch was lots of grass. Grass that you couldn’t pull up and it chocked out all the berries. At first I thought it was the lawn grass spreading over its bounds. That would have been a lot nicer. Instead it was a mean stand of quackgrass.

Quackgrass grows in irrigated soil. It has tons and tons of undergroudn rhizomes. If you come across this grass, the worst control measure is to till. Tilling cuts up all the rhizomes into smaller pieces and does a wonderful job of propagating the plant. That’s opposite of killing the plant.

So after I figured out it was quackgrass, I started to think of control measures. Here is what I ended up doing:

I fertilized the plant and made it really happy. Sounds strange. The philosophy behind that is that quackgrass’s rhizomes have a lot of dormant buds. They will just come back even if you spray or pull it up. By making it happy, I hopefully made those dormant buds send up shoots. I waited about a month, then I sprayed it with glyphosate. I did it again in two weeks. That actually did a fairly good job of killing off the plant, but I really don’t want it to make a comeback.

The next step was hand-digging out all the rhizomes. This took a long time. I’m not done with the large patch I’m working on yet. But…to see soil that you could work with and rake through after I was done was worth it.  We could plant in it now…but I think we will wait. The next few months I will be watching the bed, looking for quackgrass to make a comeback. And I plan to nip out all the attempts.

This is the soil full of rhizomes. The grass isn't deserving enough of a picture.

We dug out two huge garbage bags full of rhizomes for a 8'x15' area. Wow.

The moral of this story is–learn to recognize your weeds. This weed wouldn’t have been such a problem if it was controlled when it started to invade, not years after. Also, by knowing what it was, I was able to choose good control measures and avoid ones (like tilling) that are ineffective. If you live in the west, Weeds of the West is an invaluable book. It has the id info for nearly all the weeds you come across.

Chemicals

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I was over at Ink and Penstemon, and in a post it was mentioned that she was wary of round-up. I commented, ” I can’t imagine being scared of herbicides. To me, I would rather use a herbicide than to spend hours weeding. And I guess resistance is an issue, but maybe rotating chemicals? At least that’s insect IPM. There is more then round-up…” That kind-of makes me sound like a spray-happy farmer with no regard to the environment.  Alas, one of my faults, especially on comment forums, is being a little too blunt and lacking tact. So I come across not as I want to. For the record–I haven’t used any type of pesticides in over a year. I got pregnant, and then had a kid crawling around and it made me think a little more about using chemicals.

And now I come to my dilemma right now in my horticultural and regular mind. Are chemicals (specifically pesticides) good or bad? There seems to be two sides, and I’m a fence sitter. On one side is wary of pesticides and avoiding them at almost all costs, instead focusing on organic gardening. (Which to me is a way to garden, not necessarily just avoiding pesticides. Now I’m sidetracked–another day maybe.) The other side sees pesticides as a means to get rid of all pests, with no worries about ill effects.

I firmly believe pesticides, if used according to label directions, will generally not cause ill effects. I’ve learned a little about what goes into the testing, and the toxicity level of pesticides, and they don’t scare me that much. Homeowner chemicals are usually quite safe. And pesticides are many time more effective than any other option. In school, I knew many (some of whom came from farms) who where a little flabbergasted at the movement to reduce pesticides. Pesticides do their job economically and effectively and without any direct risk.   So on one hand, they seem to be a useful means to an end.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any risks. Now with a kid, I feel a little more aware of them. Certainly exposure to high levels and amounts of artificial chemicals will result in ill effects. Chemicals are everywhere, and it isn’t a big deal to get them out of our gardens, where we grow food to consume and roll around in the grass. I also cringe sometimes thinking about the amount of agricultural pesticides used to get rid of blemishes on crops. The spray happy era of DDT is certainly not something desirable.

In my mind, I’m torn between knowing that pesticides probably won’t hurt me but aware they aren’t the most friendly answer. So in practice, I use them as a last result. I am not a couple I knew who put sevin on all their vegetables to prevent bugs of unknown type and origin. But I will use a bottle of round-up to tackle the acre of bindweed (And I have faced an acre of bindweed. We did till, but that really does squat against bindweed. Actually, round-up was only half effective too.) Sometimes, I admit, I look to pesticides too early. Oh well. I’ll figure it out one day.

I believe chemicals are not huge ugly demons. Just annoying cousins. I don’t want them around if I can prevent it, but if there’s not other option, I’ll deal with it.

What’s wrong with this tree?

I was walking through the neighborhood, and passed by some pretty horrid looking sycamore trees. They looked very dead. I had also seen a similar looking tree by my grandmas. After working for the Extension service for many years, I had to find out what was causing it. I got on my computer, and in about 2 minutes (Working for the Extension service made me fast. I don’t know everything, but I’m fast at finding answers.) I found the problem. Anthracnose.

I thought the trees were dead but I have some great news: they aren’t. (Although it looks pretty severe and it can eventually result in death. Just not usually.)   So, little background. Anthracnose is a fungal disease that attacks a variety of shade trees. The one I saw was sycamore anthracnose. The reason it is so dramatic is the very cold wet weather we have been having lately.

For control: keep trees healthy. Use sanitation by destroying fallen leaves/other debris to prevent overwintering. Prune out dead branches. You can use fungicides to prevent it if you know it’s going to be a cold wet spring. (But try spraying a 30+ foot tree. It probably won’t do that much anyway, and it’s hard to predict cold wet springs). It’s a plant disease, usually non fatal. One thing about plant diseases is there is simply no miracle way to control them.

Check out this link for more info: Anthracnose

Invasive Species

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A post at garden rant got me thinking today. And then I went and read another article that they pointed me to. The whole subject is weeds again. Those horrid things that we would all like to get rid of…or do we?

In my weeds class, we spent an entire lecture going over the definition of a weed. There is no easy answer. My favorite is a plant in an unwanted place. It’s one you want to get rid of. But do we really want to get rid of all our weeds? The post pointed out that many weeds provide the benefits of plants in places that would otherwise be bare–like a dandelion in a sidewalk crack. That is a good thing, really. And I’ve always been a fan of things like clover in lawn. It fixates nitrogen, and can reduce the need for the tremendous amount of fertilizer we like to put on our lawns. It forms a nice, symbiotic relationship with the grass.

But I thought they were drawing the line a little too far going on to say that tamarisk is a good plant. It’s drying up our stream beds, and replacing other, better species. I know there is an endangered bird nesting in them. But there were nesting trees before tamarisk–ones that didn’t dry up the stream beds, and create a monoculture of a single plant.

Where do I draw my line? If a plant helps biodiversity, it’s good. So a dandelion in a sidewalk crack–good. The hordes of maples planted as street trees–not so good. Invasive, like purple loosestrife that take over acres of previously biodiverse wetland–horrible. We need as many plants as we can get, but they should help encourage a nice, biodiverse ecosystem. Biodiversity means everything works better, it survives better, and it looks better.

We need diverse plantings in our yards if we keep replacing wildland with them too. So try not to fill up your yard just with Kentucky bluegrass.

Weeding

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I think weeding is one of  the most hated garden tasks, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. One of my professors taught me to love weed science. (And yes there is a science behind. You can get doctorates studying weeds. So don’t feel dumb if you have a bad weed problem.) Give me a field full of weeds and I will conqueror. Or at least fight pretty hard.

So, your weeds have gotten away from you, where do you start? For starters, I usually consider starting over. A good weedwhacker can make the first dent, then come back with a tiller or herbicide. Spray it all down, till it under and do something else. If what I had before was weedy, it can easily become weedy again. If I did want to keep some plants the weeds are chocking,  just get rid of what you can see. Don’t worry about roots. If I started to worry about roots I might never get past the first couple of weeds. When the weeds start to come back, they are usually more manageable.

Here are also some good questions to ask:

  • Why is the weed there?
  • What conditions encourage growth of the weed?
  • What will be there if we kill the weed?

I think you can choke out the weeds  or let the weeds choke out your plants. Here are some tips to make weeding a little easier:

  • Weed early and hard.
  • Use mulch. Any type of mulch helps. (Except low quality weed fabric. Hate that stuff.)
  • Herbicides are useful. I’m all for using less chemicals, but herbicides can save hours in a week and they’re not as toxic as other pesticides.
  • Use good tools.
  • Plant something to take the place of the weed.

And if the battle seems lost, there’s usually two option. One,  accept the weeds. Bindweed will hardly every be eradicated. (50 yr seed life, and 10 feet deep roots, it’s not going anywhere). Tall fescue in kentucky bluegrass really doesn’t look that bad, provided your not a golf course superintendent. I wouldn’t leave five foot tall prickly lettuce, but weeds are always going to be there.

The second option: spray everything with glyphosate (round-up), and hope your weeds aren’t resistant. If they are, spray something else. Sure, it really isn’t the eco-friendly way to go. But I don’t think a large infestation of noxious weeds is either.