It must be summer in the garden! Pesticles pesticles everywhere!!
Powdery Mildew
I was really starting to think that I had outsmarted the powdery mildew this year. This annually recurring annoyance has plagued every garden I’ve had for the last seven years, but THIS year I tried active prevention.
In years past, the powdery mildew was sneaky and slow, right up until it wasn’t, and then it was impossible to stop. I’ve spent many a summer sunset out in the garden spraying Neem oil on all the affected plants, coming in smelling like fish oil, and needing to shower. And STILL that shit persists.
Powdery mildew is my oldest enemy in the garden. It was the first – and to this day – the most consistent pesticle to fuck up my Happy Place.
This dumb-ass fungus among us is a slow fucker upper. You see one little white fuzzy spot here and there…
…and before you know it, whole leaves are getting fuzzy white all over, and turning yellow.
This pesticle loves cucurbits, but is not terribly discriminating, and will take over peas and beans, too. I’ve lost entire crops of peas to this buttfucker because peas, like zucchini, have a silvery pattern on their leaves to begin with, and therefore it’s easy to overlook the fungus.
I really hate this pesticle because it’s hard to prevent, and you can’t actually get rid of it once it once you have it. The only strategy is mitigation.
Neem oil is the standard organic prescription for the home garden, but it doesn’t kill or remove powdery mildew, it just stops it from spreading for a few hours. Once you have an infestation, you have to treat it with the Neem oil every 7 days or it will take over. It doesn’t really hurt the fruit of the plant as long as the infestation isn’t too overwhelming. But left untreated or under-treated, the mildew will eventually stunt growth, reduce yield, and kill the plant.
This year I tried to be clever and cunning, and applied active prevention measures. For my garden that meant adjusting the drip irrigation so that the plants don’t go to sleep in a wet bed. This is the reason I have my drip system dripping at 6AM and 2PM. The 2PM water gives the soil a chance to dry a bit before the sun goes down, and therefore reduces the overnight moisture in the beds. A humid, moist, warm, and overgrown bed is a perfect incubation place for powdery mildew.
I already use vertical gardening to keep growth up off of the soil and to provide airflow, and I remove any dead or dying vegetation. These are the first best prevention methods, but they aren’t guaranteed. Powdery mildew is common, and just requires mitigation. But the hardest part about mitigation is timing.
The thing about the Neem Oil is that it does to the leaves what coconut oil does to your skin at the beach: it cooks. You can only use Neem oil when the plant will not be in the direct sun and heat, otherwise, it will cook and crisp up the very leaves you are trying to save. So evening applications as the sun sets are optimal. (I mean, I COULD get up before the sun and do it, but hahahahaha, let’s be real.)
Evening applications suck because I have young kids and evening means dinner, bath, and bedtime. By the time I can get out there for a non-burning application, it’s full dark. There’s mosquitos. And there’s the night critters. And I simply HATE wearing Neem Oil. It’s got fish oil in it, and when you spray, you have to manually squirt the top and undersides of each leaf. Even with elbow length rubber gloves, I’m gonna smell like dead fish when I come in. Yuck.
So this year I’ve been much more preventative, and although I do have some powdery fucking mildew on my zucchini and pickling cukes, my mischief is managed. For now.
Cucumber Beetles
I don’t have a lot of pictures of these guys. They’re small and quiet, and pretty unobtrusive. I’ve rarely seen them on my cucumbers or other squash, but I have found a few on my pole beans. Usually when I see them, strangely, it’s here:
I definitely have cucumber beetles, but they mostly seem to hang out on my glass windows and doors, and always on the pond side of the house. That’s not to say they don’t go in the garden. The other day I shook several of them off of my pole beans and morning glories and into the soapy water I keep around for drowning the Japanese fucking Beetles.
However, if they have done actual damage to my plants, I haven’t been able to determine exactly what.
Earwigs
Gross. I hate these twatwaffles. They aren’t exactly destructive to the plants, but they’re fugly, and roach-like, and have these nasty pincers on their asses. Ugg.
Earwigs like dead vegetation. And they like some live stuff, too. But they really like cool moist stuff the most. So they like to hide down inside my lettuce heads, and come running out when I’m placing lettuce in my basket. I find them scurrying around the bases of my pole beans, and down the insides and corners of my raised beds. I have an actual disgust look on my face right now while I’m writing this, because even thinking about these douchenozzles makes me cringe.
I guess if I have to have pesticles, these guys aren’t that bad, because they really don’t cause much damage to the actual garden. But they do creep me the fuck out. Gross.
The Pottymouth Gardener 