Invisible Cabbage Worms

How many cabbage worms do you see in the picture below?

If you said two, then it makes me feel a little better that I wasn't the only one.  If you said three, then you saw better than I did.  These pests really blend in well.  I think I only picked two cabbage worms off of this daikon radish leaf, or what's left of this leaf.  But after I uploaded this picture, I saw that there was another one in the middle.  I'm pretty sure I didn't see it when I picked off 15 cabbage worms from this part of the garden last weekend.  Ugh, it's probably eaten another pound of greens in my garden by now.

Below are some of the highlights of the cabbage worm damage in the garden.

The damage starts out like this, with holes and chunks missing from the leaves.

But if left alone, the cabbage worms will eat the leaves down to the stems.

It's like they swallowed all the leaves whole, except for the center stems.

Icky Garden Pests: Hornworms, Cabbage worms and Aphids

I have been "lucky" enough to spot some pests in my garden during the last few weeks while I've been making my weekly rounds with my camera. 

Check out this puppy - I mean, hornworm.  I've seen many pictures of them on the internet, but that still didn't prepare me for a up close and personal encounter.  I initially thought that this was a tomato hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata) but I learned from my pest research that this was actually a closely related tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta).  Tobacco hornworms have seven diagonal white lines on each side with a slightly curved red horn on their rear ends (exactly like in my picture above!).  Tomato hornworms have eight V-shaped marks on each side with a straighter black horn.  Both tomato and tobacco hornworms feed on various Solanum species, which was good to know, since I'm definitely not growing any tobacco in my garden.
 

This must have been my lucky day, because I also saw another less fortunate tobacco hornworm infested with parasitic wasp eggs on its back.  I know this is supposedly to be natural and all, but ugh, I have to admit, I was thoroughly, completely grossed out while taking these pictures.

On to slightly less disgusting, but nonetheless evil pests in my garden.  Here we have two cabbage worms feasting on my radish leaves.  A few weeks ago, I posted some pictures of damaged seedlings in my fall garden.  Many of my regular readers suggested slug damage.  That may still be true, but I have yet to see any slugs in my garden.  What I have seen lots of are these cabbage worms.  They are everywhere, and they eat the leaves of radishes, kale, all kinds of asian greens and even chards.  I could (maybe) deal with them nibbling a bit here and there.  But left unchecked, many of my seedlings get stripped bare of their foliage and just die.

Here's a picture of another cabbage worm.  They blend in really well with the leaves, don't they?  I must have squished dozens of them in my garden just last weekend. But they keep popping up everywhere and I just can't keep up. 

Here we have an aphid infestation on the underside of a radish leaf.  The aphids are out in full force all over the same crops that the cabbage worms seem to love.  I tried to spray them with soapy water and squish what I could, but as you can see, they way outnumber me.

Cutworm Damage to Sugar Snap Pea Seedlings

As I work out of state during the week, I sometimes text Keith to get current status reports on our garden vegetables.

"Hey, how are the peas doing?"

"Um... Oh, did I tell you that we have peppers growing in the grow box now?"

"Oh No.  What's wrong with the peas?"

"We have lots of new baby peppers!  They look really good!"

"TELL ME ABOUT THE PEAS"

"They don't look so good."

I must have bad pea karma, because I just can't seem to grow them in my Indiana garden.  Due to my first-year gardening inexperience, sugar snap peas were planted too late this spring (mid-May), and what few seedlings that tried to survive either got munched on by wild rabbits or got fried crispy brown by the hot weather.  On the other hand, the same peas that I planted in my mom's garden just thrived in the cool coastal California weather this summer and gave my mom pound after pound of fresh and sweet sugar snap peas.

As we slowly transitioned from summer to fall, I was determined to try my hand at pea-growing once again.  I direct sowed them in a shadier part of the herb garden in early August.  All the peas germinated within a week.  I even called them my butt peas.  Everything seemed to be going really well.

 My precious Butt Pea seedlings towards the end of August

Then a few weeks ago, I discovered that more than half of the seedlings had fallen over, like someone had taken a pair of scissors and went snip snip around the base of the seedlings.  There were also a few seedlings that were cut off at the bottom, but looked like they were still up because their tendrils were holding hands with other seedlings. These were literally floating in mid-air, like ghost peas!

Even though I haven't personally seen any cutworms yet, I knew from my pest research that they were the culprit here.  Those darn cutworms!  I tried to find them by digging around the fallen seedlings, but I couldn't find any.  I protected the remaining seedlings by pulling cardboard cylinders - empty paper towel rolls and toilet paper rolls cut about 2-3 inches tall - over them.  I have no pictures from this day, because I was too mad to play photographer.

I really hoped that the remaining pea seedlings would survive, but a few more of them just dried up brown from the bottom without any apparent physical damage to the stems. Not sure what caused that.

 Some remaining pea seedlings died this slow browning death

We still have a few pea seedlings that survived this ordeal and are trying to set flowers, but the pea patch is much more sparse than I had planned and I just don't have a lot of hope left for the remaining few pea vines.  The level-headed side of me thinks, oh well, I'll just have to try again next year.

But what I really want to say is: WAHHHH, I WANT MY PEAS THIS YEAR!

Fall Garden Woes

Someone has been eating my fall garden crops, and it's not me!

Daikon Radish Seedling

Pak Choi  or Tatsoi seeding

Pak Choi or Tatsoi Seedling

The frustrating thing is, I haven't seen any bugs around these seedlings, so I don't even know what's doing the damage.  With the cucumber beetles this summer, at least I could see them all the time on my plants so I could kill or curse them (often both at the same time).  But these fall seedlings are getting eaten up by some mystery pest and I don't know what to do, or whom to curse and blame (not productive for the garden, I know, but it can be therapeutic for myself)

Is there anyone else battling mystery seedling damage in their fall garden? 

Cucumber Beetle on My Beans?

I didn't know what this little yellow insect was when I made Keith hold still so I could snap a picture, but thanks to Google image search, I have now identified it as a cucumber beetle.  A spotted cucumber beetle, to be exact. 

According to the experts, cucumber beetles got their name from their tendency to be found on cucurbit leaves and flowers.  The last time I checked, green beans were not part of the cucurbit family.  So what was this bug doing on my bean flower?  I suppose it's possible that it was just enjoying a rest stop en route to cucurbitsville - I do have cucumbers and squash in my garden - but it was crawling around the bean flowers for a while and it didn't look like it had any plans to leave the bean area anytime soon. 

Could cucumber beetles have done this to my bean plants, or is this masterpiece a courtesy of some other unsavory garden pest?  Do any of you readers know if cucumber beetles are exclusive to cucurbits, or if they sometimes venture out to other plants like beans?

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I made sure to get rid of this particular cucumber beetle by relocating it to the concrete patio and stepping on it mercilessly.  I know you can get the job done easier by simply dropping the bug in soapy water, but it was more satisfying this way.  Much more.

7/12/10 Harvest Monday

Welcome to another episode of  Daphne's Harvest Monday!

I finally have over ONE pound of harvest in a week.  And I will freely admit that the squash blossoms pushed me over that 1 lb mark.

Zucchini:
It's my first home-grown zucchini!  I know most people have "problems" with their zucchini plants being too prolific, but I was excited to get my first full-sized zucchini this week.  I actually hand-pollinated this one with a small brush last weekend, because I wanted to make extra certain that this female flower got pollinated, after seeing another female flower, along with its embryo zucchini, just wither away and die two weekends ago.  I'm guessing that's what happens to female squash flowers that don't get pollinated.

Squash Blossoms:
I've been reading about fried squash blossoms.  Edible, cookable flowers?  Heck yeah, I had to test this out for myself.  Unfortunately, I only saw two blossoms that seemed fit for harvesting on Sunday, so I ended up with just two.  I prepared a beer batter according to one of the recipes I found online, and fried up the two blossoms.  The verdict? Well, let's just say that there's room for improvement.  There was nothing really wrong with them, but I just wasn't overly impressed as I had hoped.  Maybe my expectations were too high.  Or maybe my frying technique needs more practice, as I hardly ever fry anything. I will try this again before I give up completely.  Does anyone here have a good recipe for squash blossoms that they would recommend?  I also sliced up my one zucchini into coins and sticks and fried them up using the same beer batter.  But I discovered that the batter was just too thick/heavy for the zucchini.  I really need to work on my frying skills and recipes.

Green Beans: 
There was another handful of green beans this week. We are loving growing (and eating) our own green beans.  We made a note to plant many more beans next year.  We may even try multiple varieties.  The one we planted this year is Burpee's Blue Lake 274.  Do you have any favorites that you would suggest we try next year?  These beans got sauteed in a little bit of olive oil with some garlic for Sunday dinner.

Oh, I also harvested another female flower/baby zucchini after watching it closely for a few days and not seeing it grow any bigger compared to my hand-pollinated zucchini (above) that grew about 1-2 inches every day.  There wasn't much to eat on this baby zucchini (it was about a finger length), but I suspected that it didn't get pollinated, so if I had left it on the plant, it would have just met the same shriveling death as its sister did two weeks ago. I just sliced it and ate it raw in two bites, while Keith watched and wrinkled his nose in anti-zucchini disgust.  It tasted just like a regular zucchini.

In other garden news, I'm slowly getting over my squeamishness over all things buggy, and have been bravely picking off any creepy crawlies of pest persuasion from my vegetable plants.  Just this weekend alone, I removed a yellowstriped armyworm and an unidentified bright green caterpillar from my bean plants, and four Japanese beetles from my basil.  All of them were quickly smooshed dead by the bottom of my unforgiving shoes. 

Yellowstriped Armyworm eating its last meal

Is This Powdery Mildew?

As the growing season progresses, I'm starting to discover more pests and plant diseases that I've only been reading about until now.  Can someone tell me if this is powdery mildew on my squash leaves, or something else? There are numerous white spots spread all over the leaves.  Also, the whole plant has been getting more yellow-green the last week or two.

(click on all pictures to enlarge and see the spots better)

And what about these white spots on my cucumber leaves?  They look very different from the white spots on the squash leaves. Does anyone know what this is?

And lastly, there are holes on my bean leaves.  I thought the culprit was japanese beetles, but I found a different pest today.  Yellow striped armyworm, I think?

Dealing With Bunnies

I used to think that bunnies were cute. What normal person doesn't? They are small, furry, cuddly (looking), and they hop. Cute, right? Well... I started growing vegetables, and I changed my mind about the whole cute business.

We have a six foot tall board-on-board fence all around the backyard for our two dogs, so I didn't think we had to worry about any wild animals trespassing on our yard (did I mention that I'm a city girl, generally unfamiliar with the digging abilities of small animals?). We also put up a plastic fence around the garden area to keep the dogs out, so I thought the garden crops were fairly well protected. But it wasn't long before the damages started. First the lettuce and spinach got chewed up. Then the pea seedlings disappeared overnight. The bean seedlings also suffered. It was driving me crazy!

Then Keith emailed me this picture one day:


It (and all its family/friends) chewed through the plastic fence, after wiggling its way under the outside fence! Having no sympathy for the bunny (as cute as it was) that had been chewing on my babies (vegetables), I was happy (more like overjoyed) when Keith told me that Sienna went after the bunny. Look what Sienna did for us:


Let's just say, that was not a good day for this bunny.

Unfortunately, this bunny must have come from a big family, because the damages to the crops didn't stop. They just kept getting worse. Over the course of about a month, Sienna caught four bunnies, but she wasn't a 24/7 bunny hunter, and the bunnies just kept coming back. I wanted to put up a stronger chicken-wire type of fence, but Keith had other ideas, and I ended up with this:


The right-most box suffered some damage when the box accidentally got dropped while being moved. I'm told that the boxes were verrrrrrry heavy (one of the few benefits of being a long-distance gardener is that I'm not always around to partake in the heavy lifting - literally this time - when something needs to be done). We'll have to repair it at the end of this season.

So far, the remaining crops that survived the initial bunny attacks are doing okay in the elevated boxes. I just don't have as many plants left as I would like, but hopefully I can plant more fall crops.

Have you had any problems with bunnies, and how did you deal with them?

Is my basil turning into swiss cheese?

Last year, my potted basil died a long slow death due to "mystery fly things." Since then, I learned that those flies were most likely fungus gnats. I tried all kinds of organic repellents like cayenne and soapy water, but these flies seemed impervious to everything and kept coming back. I finally gave up on the sickly basil.

This year, my basil has been doing much better with healthy, bushy leaves.

Last week, I harvested about 4 oz of basil and made tasty pesto that promptly got turned into neat little frozen cubes for future consumption.

I thought everything was going really well, and looked forward to the basil plants growing back bushier. But today, I discovered some leaves that were turning "holey" like swiss cheese. I didn't see any bugs around my basil plants, so I'm at a loss as to what is doing this to my basil. Is it some kind of bugs? Or could birds be doing this damage?