Circle M Farm

July is the time of year when gardening becomes more work than play. The crops are all in, except those planted in succession the entire season, and now the challenge is keeping them safe from strangling weeds, marauding bugs and ill-timed dry spells.

Irrigation is just a fact of life if you plan to grow a wide variety of vegetables, because some, like melons and tomatoes, aren’t from this climate and simply do require more than our weather will provide. And weeding, well, you’ve just got to accept a certain amount of hoeing as a sort of meditation exercise for the inner life of a gardener. But with pests, some crops do just fine without your help, and some do fine most years but require a rescue operation in others.

This year, we’ve had the worst bug pressure I’ve ever seen in this area – both at my farm and at those of neighbors. First, cabbage worms did a job on our cabbages and brussels sprouts. As the weather warmed up, flea beetles swarmed over our spinach, turnips, eggplants and arugula. And then, just as the eggplants were making a comeback, the most dreaded pest of all showed up on their war-torn foliage – the Colorado potato beetle. In spite of the fact that I’ve been squishing non-stop for several weeks, they’ve overrun the potatoes now, too. I’m done with squishing, though. I just take off whole leaves and burn them. I can’t bear to touch any more of those things…

Such a pretty butterfly, this cabbage moth. Yet it’s presence in droves fluttering over your cabbage crops is quite terrifying, since it means thousands of eggs have been laid on your leaves.

Those pretty little moths lay eggs that turn into these ravenous caterpillars, known as cabbage worms. Boy, can they eat.

Kinda’ cute, these soft little critters, the first time you see them. But now that I’ve spent weeks squashing them between my fingers, the sight of these potato beetle larva actually inspires a gag reflex!

There are a fair number of things you can do to work against pest problems: rotate your crops from one area to another so over-wintered bugs can’t just jump out of the ground and start eating, mix species of crops in beneficial combinations that repel certain pests and have a lot of diversity in general to confuse the bugs. Other strategies aid specific crops: potato beetles don’t like mulched eggplants, flea beetles tend to leave early plantings of spinach alone, slugs don’t care much for lettuce that’s surrounded by scratchy material like sand. Many crops can be protected with floating fabric row covers laid over the plants until they are big enough to either fight the bugs or be harvested. We use those and other strategies here, but they haven’t seemed to do the trick this year. I suppose things could have been worse – we haven’t actually lost any plants, they’ve just been stunted or less attractive.

Conventional agriculture deals with pests by applying a wide range of poisons to the ground ahead of planting, to the plants during the growing season, and to the fruits even after harvest. In organic agriculture, we employ a lot of managment methods, like those described above, and mechanical methods, like hand-picking and squishing. But there are some helpful, though expensive, sprays and powders that are approved for use in organic practice. We’ve seen good results on cabbages we sprayed with “Safer Soap” a oil and soap liquid that also contains pyrethrin, a chrysanthemum extract that kills bugs. In our shed, we’ve got DiPel waiting to put on the potatoes and eggplants, if my pluck and burn method doesn’t suppress the beetles. It’s approved for organic use, but the active ingredient is a bacteria (derived from the roots of a South American plant) and I hesitate to introduce a living organism like that into my soil, since it will kill good bugs along with the bad.

And so, as usual, every day is an adventure here at Circle M, as we never know what bugs we will find munching on the plants in the morning. Of course, this morning we also found our first zucchini hiding under the vine leaves. Some adventures are more fun than others!