Garden Watch: Caterpillars On The Loose

The broccoli is growing crowns, the kale is leafing up fantastically, the chard is out of this world: but what's this? Little holes in those big, beautiful leaves?

One little caterpillar can do a whole lot of damage

Caterpillar Attack!
It is important to spend some time in your garden to observe the health of your plants and check for potential marauders. My garden is most often plagued with snails: they can at times be seen in vast herds on the walls of houses in my neighborhood and take advantage of rains to sneak attack the veggies trying to enjoy the drink as well. Nasty snails.  Along with snails are their covert friends: caterpillars. Small, green and camouflaged; large, fuzzy and obvious: all caterpillars want is to defoliate your lovely veggies and herbs as quickly as they can digest. Granted, some will turn to beautiful butterflies and should be left alone or even provided with specific habitat (ie dill plants for the swallowtail butterflies). This time of year though, most of the caterpillars in the garden should be hunted and squished - or fed to the chickens.
What to look out for:

• Holes in leaves - may be small and round or jagged and 'chewed' looking
• Broken stems or leaf stalks
• Holes in tomatoes and other fruits
• Strange grenade looking dung

Leaf damage like this can be caused by snails and caterpillars

The hornworms of Summer

If you see any of these signs, go in for a closer look: turn over the leaves of your plants and you may find an unwelcome visitor. Caterpillars will most often hide on the underside of the leaves and down in the center of a plant or flower. Tomato hornworms are remarkably well camouflaged and can sometimes only be spotted by the tell tale signs of leafless stalks amongst an otherwise healthy tomato plant, and the conspicuous grenade shaped dung they leave behind.
What to do with the critters once you've caught them? I generally squish the smaller, green caterpillars  or cutworms found on my brassicas and in the soil. The larger worms get tossed to the chickens to their delight - or thrown into the street for the mockingbirds to dispatch. It's not the most gentile job in the garden, but your plants will thank you for being their hero. They can't run away from threatening critters, and they'd much rather have your hands on them than nasty chemicals. However, If you have a bad infestation of caterpillars or a very large garden area you can supplement handpicking with BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) a natural soil bacteria that can fight off hoards of nasty caterpillars too vast to be handpicked. The great thing about BT is that it only targets the caterpillars and spares the beneficial insects.

Fuzzy caterpillar found chewing on some beet greens

Flipping broccoli leaves over can unveil some unwanted tag alongs

Take some time to look over your plants today, it might just save their life - or at least maximize the bounty for you instead of for creepy crawlies. Also, please mind the lower temperatures during this lovely season. Temps below 40 may be too chilly for certain plants, especially tropicals and citrus. When our first freeze does show up in the forecast - pick what tomatoes and peppers are still on the vine and wrap any other sensitive plants with freeze cloth or old sheets.

This post and others I've written can be seen at Yard Farm Austin.

What I'm Planting/ Pulling

Some photos from around the gardens and an update on what's going in, on and out.
My backyard has previously been home to a raucous husky and thus no gardens. My husband had a gourd arbor back there, fenced from the chickens and doggie. The doggie has sense past, the chickens still try and get in, and there's really not a whole heck of a lot of sun back there for veggies that can't climb up 9 feet. But i'm reclaiming it for my own and hope to grow at least some spindly food plants.

Beet seedling - victim of cutworm or snail.

6 pack of Green Comet Broccolis surrounded by a row of Early Wonder Beets and side dressed with compost

In the front yard i've pulled out a ton of lemon basil spreading its seed all over the place and just generally tidied things up a bit. Some cucumbers i planted mid season are producing now and lots of volunteer seedlings are springing up. I've started putting in seeds and transplants of the veggies i want to grow for winter adn will continue to pull as things die and plant new winter veggies as the season progresses. I will do my best to stuff as much plant matter into this little space as i can - if the snails leave it alone.

I may just get kale to grow from seed this year! Spring's attempt was thwarted repeatedly by snails.

I tried cabbage last year with the same end. I eat a LOT of cabbage and was really hoping to grow some of my own. The snails have other plans.

The curse of the cayenne has been lifted!

Volunteer leafy lettuce and dill baby

Tuscan kale from a seed i saved

Baby calendulas - destined for craft and soap making

The Dallas Red Lantana is just so pretty. I plan on propagating cuttings soon in tandem with pruning time

So that's what's going on over here. My to do list includes more soil amending, weed pulling and spot watering along with harvesting what comes along and successively planting as many seeds and transplants as i can stuff into this little space. On the docket:

• Beets - Early Wonder and a baggie of mixed varieties
• Carrots - i chose little round ones this season
• Cauliflower and Broccoli via transplants - hoping to find Packman and Gypsy varieties
• Kale from seed and later from transplants if i can find them/ if my seeds fail again
• Lettuce and spinach - volunteer and planted all throughout the winter
• Garlic from saved bulbs in the next few weeks
• Separating and replanting multiplying onions to new bed in back that does not seem very happy at all
• Thinning cilantro and dill seedlings as they inevitably present themselves
• Prune shrubby perennials and start some cuttings
• Wildflower seeds now - Thanksgiving

I may also pot up some of my pepper plants to get them through the winter. I tried covering last year and just made a mess of things. This year frost victims will simply make way for new seasonal crops.

What's in your garden tote this season?

This post found at Simple Lives Thursdays.

First Tomatoes Are IN

I'm calling it: SPRING.
The red buds are budding, the daffies are up, the grass requires mowing weekly, and the forecast (for now) looks to be staying above 40 degrees.

Last year i was a bit hard core. I planted 6 varieties of tomatoes, 8 peppers, and 3 eggplants (you'd realize how insane this is if you'd seen the smallness of my garden space). I worked at The Natural Gardener last spring and was the "Authority" on vegetable gardening - answering onslaughts of questions and learning tips from the good ole' gard'ners daily. I put in my first tomatoes at the beginning of March, a good two weeks before 'last average frost' and battled with several freezes with pots and freeze cloth and crossed fingers.

I also had problems with blossom end rot, some kind of wilt, purple leaf tomato disease, all kinds of wierdness - not to mention leaving for 3 weeks in June to get married only to return to a dead dead dead garden. (my neighbor tried, bless her heart, but those diseases were too much for any woman). Apparently last year was hard for most of Austin's gardeners: drought, heat waves, and lack of Winter to squelch the bugs all added up to one nasty season.

This year, i'm banking on two things: Ambivalence, Weather. I waited to plant my tomatoes. I won't plant peppers until i'm sure it's warmed up. I'm using a lot of pots (which was too hard last year due to no rain) to avoid successive planting the same family in the same soil again this year. And i'm just not caring as much in hopes my plants will vie for my attention and grow leaps and bounds all by themselves. I will still treat them with kid gloves, compost, fertilizer, and kind words - but i'm taking my time and being more relaxed. Gardening is supposed to be fun, anyway - right??  Plus it's been raining. We're almost out of the drought. The snails are a b*tch, but Sluggo does the trick, mostly. I can cross my fingers that temps will be less extreme this Summer, and at the very least my rain barrel might stay full, and my new watering can will serve my plants well.

March 8th:

• Mustard plants germinating well and growing nicely
• First batch of onion sets growing nicely, second in and trying their best
• Multiplying onions growing upper bulbs, harvesting occasionally = tasty
• Main garden clearing out as i go: corn planted, salad being eaten, one tomato in and staked (Japanese Black Trifele)
• Second tomato planted in pot with soil and homemade compost (Rutgers)
• Seeds scattered in back yard to grow poultry forage plants
• Pruned perennials putting on shoots, even a flower!
• Wildflowers filling in: toadflax blooming like crazy

One last discovery: upon reading through my Foxfire 2 book, i figured out what those two weeds in my front lawn are: and they're edible!  Shepard's purse (darn it, i've composted so many, could have been eating it) and Chickweed (well that makes sense, the chickens LOVE this stuff, also edible by me). Just goes to show - double check what those weeds you're composting are, they just might be a delicious treat. Think i'll add some of this to my salad tonight (i love not using any nasty chemicals so i too can eat from my own lawn.)

It was a lovely weekend in the garden. It's raining lightly now and the grass is all shiny with droplets. Chooks are in for the day, but had a big weekend out. Unfortunate discovery on that front: Belina seems to be bloated (or overweight?) Might be a problem. More on that in my next post.

Do you have any favorite "weeds" that find their way onto your dinner plate?

Rain. Rain. Rain.

Not the best time for rain, in my opinion. Should be great for the bluebonnets, but not so great for those of us trying to prepare our soil for planting season. It's not ideal to work the soil when it is wet as it damages the consistency (can we say mud clods?).

The rain is also bringing a fleet of snails to my gardens. I broke down and bout $30 worth of Sluggo yesterday, which apparently i could have gotten for about 10$ cheaper here. Sluggo is about the only pest product i use in my garden, and it's organic and doesn't damage the native wildlife or good bugs. Just evil snails! Apparently it ruins their appetite and then kills them. Death to snails!
My cauliflower is just putting on a head that is peeking out - and of course it is covered with the snails and their poo, and now sluggo. Hopefully i can convince the snails to leave it alone.

The rain brings some happy things as well: growing lawn, germinating back yard (which has been quite forlorn and chicken scratched for a while now), and germinating baby mustards and kales. I hope they do well this season - the kale is a last ditch effort to succeed at all with my favorite veg (it doesn't love summer, but it might do SOMEthing) and the mustard is destined for sautees, pickles, and eventually to seed to make mustard. I'd really like to be making all of my own condiments by the end of the summer, even if i have to barter for some tomatoes if i skip planting those summer beauties this year.

The lemon tree is happy to be outside and getting rain water, heavily laden with half a dozen or so lemons i should harvest soon. Last year i harvested all in one batch and juiced them, storing the juice in the freezer. This year i've been taking them more one at a time, using the juice fresh in things like mayo and cheese. It's about time to harvest them all, though as they seem to be ripe and it's time to set new flowers.

 

 Inside the house i'm frustratingly waiting for my cream cheese to turn into cheese and whey - the milk refuses to coagulate, though the cream at the top smells and tastes kind of like a really stinky blue cheese - not my favorite thing. Will keep waiting though and hope that it does its thing in time to make bagels with the lox that i made.

Speaking of the lox: it's a bit hard to tell when raw salmon has been sufficiently marinated to be no longer 'raw' but edible. It looks mostly the same. The directions called for marinating for 2-6 days or so. Last night it had been in the fridge under its weight for about 4 days. Unfortunately, some of the liquid (whey, juices, and salt/sugar mixture) had escaped from the layers of saran wrap, foil, and baggy. I'm not sure if this adversely affected the results and would have preferred to know that the salmon was fully encased in what it was supposed to be marinating in. So i sprinkled a bit more whey and salt/sugar and recovered. I'll try it again tonight and hope that it was not a poor decision to introduce new whey. Cross fingers.

Ah, and now the sun is coming out, a friend is coming by to make crackers with me, and the dog is ready for a walk a little later. Must take advantage of these rainless hours!