Yard smart

About 50 people spent an hour touring the Phactors' gardens this morning.  They were coming to see how are gardens looked when sustainable gardening practices are used, a program called Yard Smart. This cute little sign is in our front garden. Our lawns are diverse, which means weeds, although sometime some areas get spot treated to give some grass a fighting chance. The use of pesticides is very minimal.  Right now Japanese beetles are eating the crap out of big landscape purple cannas, so all is good, the cannas will outgrow the herbivory and the beetles would be eating other plants if not these. If the apple trees start getting chomped then the trees will get covered with insect netting (sometimes used as bridal veil). Ecological practices make the yard wildlife friendly, but safe for people too.  Fencing keeps bunnies from being too bad. One large hosta bed has been mulched with leaves gathered last fall.  Wood mulch helps preserve water and protect soil especially around shrubs. The kitchen garden is mulched with straw covering 2 layers of newspaper; zucchini and other squash really like this. A floating row cover keeps cucumber beetles (and bacterial wilt) away from cucumbers; if the beetles weren't disease vectors, there would be no problem.  TPP even goes so far as to hand pollinate the female flowers (netting keeps away pollinators too). It's not too onerous; how many cucumbers can two people eat? The neighbors have potatoes growing and the flea beetles like the potato vines more than egg plant, which they like more than tomatoes and peppers (see the taxonomic theme?), so no insecticides are needed unless the beetles get way more common.  Note: plant one potato as the sacrifice to the flea beetles, and you other nightshades get a pass. A bigger problem are squash/pumpkin vine borers; larvae of day flying moths that eat your squash vines from the inside.  However you only have to spray Seven on nothing but the stems for 2-3 weeks in July mostly, so pollinators are quite safe to visit the unsprayed flowers. Little things like these add up and cumulatively make your garden a lot more ecological, greener so to speak.  Now if only each of those visitors had pulled a hand full of weeds as the price of admission, what happy campers we all would be. Consider starting such a program where you live.

Japanese beetle invastion - 2009

Japanese beetles have extended their range into my local portion of Lincolnland in just the past 3 or so years much to the dismay of gardeners. And the Phactor is not immune; his gardens are being consumed as much as everyone else's. So what can you do?

Japanese beetle traps are not the answer. Studies have shown that such traps can attract way more beetles than they kill, so while you may feel good about all the beetle bodies piling up, the local population may be higher than it would be without the trap.

Spraying plants with insecticide is not really the answer either both because no one likes spreading such nasty stuff around, especially on plants that you are planning to consume, but in small gardens, the beetles still cause intolerable damage. Last year they denuded two young apple trees while I was away for a long weekend. If the trees were sprayed, the beetles would eat until the toxin kills them and then they would be replaced by more beetles who eat until the toxin kills them, and so on until my trees are again denuded. Since the object is to prevent the trees from being eaten, not to kill beetles, this year the Phactor took another approach. Evaluation is continuing.

Light weight netting can be purchased at many fine fabric stores; the ladies are usually quite helpful. So far the netting tents over the young apple trees, held in place by extremely high tech clothes pins, seem to be doing an excellent job of thwarting the voracious beetles. Finer wedding veil voile could also be used to protect green beans or cucumbers from the small beetles that they attract. In the case of the cucumbers it isn't that the beetles eat so much but they transfer a wilt causing bacterium that invariably kills the cucumber plants (and their close relatives, cantelope).

Such netting is quite cheap, a nice alternative to more expensive row coverings.

Do the readers of the Phytophactor have other anti-Japanese beetle methods they would like to share?