japanese beetle – The Pottymouth Gardener

Pesticles Part 4: Caterpillars and Snails

Sonofabitch!! Why do so many of my posts start like this? Because every time I stamp out a pesticle problem in my garden, a new one crops up! (See what I did there? “Crops up” Ha ha ha)

It’s immensely frustrating spending so much of my garden time removing or killing pesticles. I want to nature bathe in the lush green leaves, plump vegetables, and colorific flowers of my garden. But noooooo, instead, I get to be the Orkin guy.

This week’s pesticle du jour are caterpillars.

I used to like caterpillars when I was a kid; cute and sometimes furry, with pretty colors and fun designs. Harmless and tickly crawling around on your hand. As an adult, I have grown an appreciation for some of the moths that they turn in to. But in the garden, these things are a menace.

This year I had my first exposure to Tomato Fucking Hornworms (finding a third one early last week). See my post Pesticles Part 3: Tomato Fucking Hornworms for great pics and creative namecalling for those shitbiscuits.

I’ve mostly posted about my veggie garden, but I love flowers, too. I’ve been growing my own petunias from seed for hanging baskets for a few years, although this year I traded those in for nasturtiums, with minimal success. Look for another future post about that.

Point is, out in front of my house I have loads of petalful beauty, and they seem to fare as well as my veggie garden. In other words: pesticles.

This year’s petunias exist in a giant barrel tub with some pansies, and they’ve been pretty spectacular:

Since I took the above pic in July, the black petunias have taken over the basket, especially after the yellow ones started dying off and I pulled them out without diagnosing or treating them, except for Neem oil.

So now at the end of summer, the beautiful black petunias are owning the barrel, all bushy and huge and beautiful. However, when I returned from an overnight trip recently, and got a good look at this front barrel when I pulled up the driveway, I discovered that all of a sudden, they look like shit!

A closer look at the blooms revealed:

What the fuck has been eating my petunias?

Obviously something is eating my black beauties. And the purple ones, too. My first thought was Japanese Fucking Beetles – because they are black holes of garden doom – so I spent some time trying to find one still munching, and confirm my hypothesis.

None. No crunching beetles. A couple of the vines near the back had some aphid and spider mite activity, but nothing a little Neem won’t clear out, and definitely nothing that can tear through three inch diameter blossoms like this.

It took me quite a while, because the shitsquirts in question are well camoflauged.

Can you see them? Well, obviously the one on the stick…

Caterpillars. At least seven of them on the day I took these pics, and then I’ve found a few more since then. They blend right in with the branches, and so have been hiding in plain sight for days or weeks. I should have noticed the caterpillar shit sooner (it’s the little black spots all over the leaves), but the seed pods also release tiny black seeds onto the leaves sometimes, and at a glance, that’s what I thought I had been seeing.

Fucking gross. Caterpillar shit all over everything, and a long scavenger hunt to find the little camoflauged fucktrumpets. I don’t know what kind they are, and I don’t care. There were multiple sizes from less than an inch to about three inches long; and multiple colors from light yellow to dark green. No fancy designs or colors, though.

I hate using nasty pesticides in the garden if I can avoid it, so I went right to the obvious and immediate fix. I grabbed a stick and pulled off every one of the assbaskets I could find. I threw them far out onto the concrete driveway so that they will never be able to make the long trek back to the flower barrel, and so that the birds, sunshine, and extreme heat get to be the executioners instead of me.

I went back out the next day and pulled a few more. I haven’t seen a nest anywhere, but read that there is probably one in the trees, and that I could puncture and then scrape out the nest, too, to prevent more. Uggg. That’s the stuff of nightmares. I admit, I’m not actively looking for the nest.

The good news is that I seem to have gotten most or all of them, because since then, I’ve only found one more tiny caterpillar, and no more decimated flowers. Woohoo!!

Snails

I live in Colorado, on the Front Range near Denver. It’s DRY here. All year long. Growing up on the east coast of the U.S., we always thought Colorado = Snow. And since snow is made of water…but no. The snow and any other moisture is in the mountains, but most of the population centers are not, and that includes the Denver metro area. Rain here is rare and fast. Humidity sits around 10% most of the time.

The reason I mention this is that the last thing I expect to see in my dry-ass count-every-drip-and-minute-of-irrigation garden is SNAILS.

In moist humid parts of the country snails are pretty common. They were sliming all over the front windows of my sister’s home in Texas when I visited a few weeks ago, and all over the sidewalks of our resort in Newport Beach, CA when we visited a few years ago. But here in ~~Mordor~~ Denver, I have never seen one in the wild.

Until this week.

I’ve been trying to solve the mystery of my dying pole beans for a while, you can read more about that in my post The Potatoes are Dead, Long Live the Beans! . However, I’ve been unable to accurately diagnose and treat the problem, probably because there’s more than one problem. There’s been the Japanese Fucking Beetles, the slugs that ate the first sprouts and have been hanging around the soil under the mature beans, cucumber beetles, nutritional issues, and more recently, some small flying things that I can never actually see because they buzz off whenever I approach.

But when investigating one of the tell tale dark spots on a bean leaf I found these:

Goddamsonofafuckingbitch!!! Seriously, is there any ass-sneezing fucktarding pesticle I haven’t had this year? No wait, don’t answer that, you know it will be predictive.

I didn’t even bother to look up what to do. I’m tired and grossed out, and the season’s almost over anyway. Instead, I plucked off the leaves that had these doucheweasels, and threw it over the fence. [For the record, “over the fence” is either the green space next to a four-lane major thoroughfare in front of a pond, or the green space right next to a sidewalk adjacent to a main neighborhood street. I am NOT tossing them into someone else’s yard, in case you were wondering.] I know, I did the same with the hornworms, so am I really solving the problem? No, prolly not, but they won’t be back in MY garden this year, and I don’t want to kill them. Caterpillars are jelly-filled and gooey, I’m not going to squash or poison them and then have to scrape up their slimey remains. Barf! And you know what kind of sound a snail will make if you squash them; my tummy is turning and my face grimacing at just the thought. Plus, they’re gooey inside, too, so it’s like crunchy caterpillars. Ewwww!! At least my “over the fence” method gives them a fighting chance at survival, and I’ll be able to keep down my breakfast AND sleep tonight.

So there you have it, another problem solved! (It’s okay if you’re laughing because that was a ridiculous statement, but we tell ourselves what we need to hear to get by, and I’m laughing, too. More of a sardonic or sarcastic laugh, but still.)

But WAIT! There’s MORE!

I’ve been excitedly waiting for my autumn Deep Purple carrots to sprout, since I planted them the first week in August. They should definitely have come up by now, and have an inch or two of new growth. Noticing that the little carrot square is still nearly empty, I decided to deepen my investigation.

Upon closer inspection, I can see what is happening here, and why I do not have carrots growing. The little sprouts have no leaves. Gee, I wonder who did that? I don’t see the tell-tale slime trails of slugs, my first best guess. Is it the grasshoppers? Some other critter I don’t know about yet?

Just then, my husband came out to cut some chives and rosemary, the residents of the squares next to the carrots. I cut away a large swath of the chives, and whaddaya know, look at the douchecanoe I found hiding:

Unbelievable. This thing is gi-fucking-gantic. Seriously, it’s huge. And of course it’s huge. It’s been dining on chives and baby carrots to its’ heart’s content, hiding away in the dark spots during the day while avoiding my semi-heartless investigations.

This cockbucket is so big that there was only one person to call for help: my 8 year old resident entomologist. She was happy to step into the role of malacologist (a person who studies slugs and snails) for this emergency.

With her trusty protective gloves, my little Mighty Mouse came to save the day:

The Potatoes are Dead. Long Live the Beans!

The potatoes are dead. I’ve not been able to find the reason. They started huge and beautiful and green and flowery. And then their leaves turned yellow and died. After much research and several attempts to fix them with nutrition – as there was no insect activity – I have come to believe it was fungal, viral, or bacterial in nature. See this earlier post for details: What’s STILL wrong with the potatoes?

Some time in the next few days I intend to empty the buckets and see if any of the plants were able to produce a few tubers. I found a few delicious potato treasures earlier in the summer when investigating causes for decline, and they were yummy. But beyond that, the season is obviously over for them, and there’s nothing left to do but try and learn more over the winter.

But….

….my beans are still kicking!! They have some issues as well (’cause what in my shitwagon garden doesn’t?), but I’m still getting some pretty good harvest, and I haven’t been able to identify what is causing their distress.

For pretty much every year I can think of that I’ve grown beans, this seems to happen by about late July or August:

The leaves start getting crispy and red looking. Then they start dying. This year I started paying much closer attention to them, as I now have a Japanese Beetle problem in my garden, and they LOVE LOVE LOVE the bean leaves. Last year was the first year I ever saw a Japanese Beetle, but now they seem to be permanent summer residents. Fucking douchekabobs. See my previous posts Fucking Japanese Beetles and Pesticles Part 1: Japanese Beetles, Flea Beetles, and Grasshoppers for more about those shit sneezes.

Since the invasion of the Fucking Japanese Beetles (FJBs), I have to keep real close tabs on the beans because the FJBs will skeletonize the plant in just a few days if left to their evil plans. The harsh pesticides that will keep them off for a few days does wash off with rain, and cannot be used at will – it has specifically prescribed maximum applications, and is, of course, poisonous to all kinds of things (including humans!) if used improperly.

Therefore, I have to use organic methods as well: I pluck or shake the assbaskets off of the leaves and into a soapy water solution, where they promptly drown.

Anyway, the FJBs have kept me sharp about the beans, and, along with my other nutritional failures around the garden, I’ve been focusing on why the leaves that haven’t been bothered by the FJBs are dying.

Unfortunately, I have no answers. Like the potatoes, the closest fit I can find in my research seems to be viral. When I try to find images of bean leaf issues, the closest match to how my leaves look is in articles about viruses or fungi, but my leaves don’t really fit the description or the look of the images of leaves that have those problems. And, if it’s a virus or something, why am I still getting such a delicious and harvest? Admittedly, it’s not as abundant as it seems like it should be, but many of the purple bean plants have died completely.

I have made it a point to fertilize using a general veggie fertilizer as well as a supplement or two that I’ve applied to everyone in the garden. A bit of magnesium and calcium as a preventative, since several other plants in the garden have needed those.

I noticed that the beans themselves started looking longer and more plump after starting a fertilizer routine, but there’s been no change to the part where leaves are crisping up and falling off.

So…feeling like I had to do something, I chose to get rid of all the shitty leaves, and reduce the amount of water they get from the drip irrigation, hoping that maybe they’re overwatered. The bean leaves are very good at providing their stems and soil with so much shade that the soil often stays pretty moist.

Unfortunately, the purple bean leaves seem to be hit the worst, and after removing the dead and dying leaves, there doesn’t seem to be much left of the purple crop. But the green ones are still growing well. They are still losing leaves, but seem to be looking healthier, and still producing abundantly!

I don’t have any real answers, and I continue to research, but I think the bulk of any new approach will have to happen next spring at planting. I think it’s time to ditch the giant felt grow bag that has been the home for these guys for a few seasons, with squash inhabiting the space before them. I think that in case it’s fungal or viral, I might have to dispose of the soil, or find a way to leave it fallow for a few seasons. Grrr.

PESTICLES PART 1: Japanese Beetles, Flea Beetles, and Grasshoppers

Sometimes I get to feeling down about my garden, like last summer during the Apocalypse when I was known to come in from tending the ash-covered garden cussin’ the whole thing, “Fuck that stupid garden!”

To be clear though, it’s never really the garden that bums me out, because green growing things are joy. It’s the goddam pests. Fucking pesticles. Yeah, I said pesticles. It’s a winner, go ahead, try it out! It’s as much fun to say as it is to hear! Pesticles is my new addition to the gardening glossary. I wish I could claim credit, but it was my partner’s crafty (dirty?) mind that gave me that verbal gold nugget.

The urban dictionary has some choice definitions involving sweaty man-parts, but I’m hijacking it for legitimate gardening purposes: a disparaging expletive in the sexually explicit tradition of “fuckers” and “assholes”, that refers specifically to garden pests: any of the animal, bacterial, viral, or fungal wankers that are fucking up my happy place.

Over the years, I’ve had a several different kinds of pesticles wreaking havoc, but last summer was the perfect storm of shitbags. I had Japanese Beetles, grasshoppers, cucumber beetles, earwigs, caterpillars, squirrels, aphids, slugs, whiteflies, spider mites, and powdery fucking mildew. I probably missed some – oh yeah, like the moth invasion! It was the stuff of nightmares.

This summer, I’m adding to the pesticle list with flea beetles and downy mildew.

Apocalypse 2020: My collective summer 2020 garden experience. During the height of the COVID pandemic my garden should have been my refuge. But the symptoms of climate change manifested significantly in my happy place, and, combined with close proximity to a pond/nature area, and some plain old bad luck, I was not feeling very fucking happy about my happy place.

The wildfires that ravaged the West in 2020 left Front Range skies looking like Mordor for much of the summer. We even had ash snow down on us several times, and for days on end. The pic to right shows the small pond behind my house cooking under ominous skies. Temps were higher for longer than ever before, and it was so very dry. The summer heat and dry problems only compounded the late start to the planting season. We had late freezes in 2020 that broke my new hydrangeas, and stunted the growth of everything that dared to live through it. But none of that even includes the pesticles.

The smoke-filled skies of Mordor blocking out the mountain view west of the pond behind our house, Summer 2020.

Local Fox 31 News image showing record-breaking heat. Click for article.

Japanese Beetles

Last year was the first time I encountered Japanese Beetles in my garden, and they’ve returned this year. Please see my earlier post Fucking Japanese Beetles, to see how that has gone. Since my beetle obliteration treatment, I’ve only found one more this summer, and I used the gentle organic method of removal.

Japanese beetle humanely shaken off of my beans into a container with soapy water. Where it inevitably fucking DIED.

These pretty beetles are harmless to you but will decimate your garden. And your neighbor’s garden. And every other garden they can get to. They will congregate on sunny leaves and eat them skeletal in minutes. They don’t really mess with your actual fruit, but they’ll kill your plant by eating up its leaves.

Flea Beetles

I hadn’t started photographing my garden yet when I ran into these wankers early this spring, so I’ll use my words and borrow photos. Flea beetles are hard to see because they’re so very tiny. It will look like your plant has finely ground pepper shaken on them, pepper that takes to the air as soon as your hand approaches. They jump, so as soon as you get close to the plant that has them, they just jump away, it’s enough to make you question what you’re seeing. Fucking gaslighters. _{(Image at left from https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/insects/flea-beetles-5-592/)}

Basically, it looks like your fresh new sprouts and transplants have become target practice for a legion of ant-size sharpshooters. Tender new leaves will be shot full of tiny holes, giving them a lace-like appearance. But they’re tough to address because they’re hard to see and they just jump away from your pesticide.

From my research, the best hope is that your fresh new baby garden plants are healthy and strong enough to deal with the holes for a few weeks until their leaves are big and tough enough that the beetles move on. This is how I got through my infestation. [Admittedly, it took me so long to finally research what was going on, that “waiting it out” was only like two weeks of waffling about pesticide.] The sprouts and transplants were too young for me to feel comfortable using pesticides, especially with our late freezes that put the whole garden behind schedule. I didn’t want to fry my little seedlings and have to start all over again at the beginning of June. However, if I get them again, it’s good to know that there are plenty of the usual pesticides that will mitigate. See this link to Colorado State University’s extension page on flea beetles for more information.

Sure enough, although the flea beetles took bites of almost everything, none of my babies appeared harmed by the little holes, and the beetles moved on after a couple of weeks. I didn’t try any pesticides, and the lace-patterned leaves quickly disappeared under the mountains of new growth to maturity. Whew, feeling like I got lucky!

Grasshoppers

So these assholes are just eating machines. I’m convinced that they were at least half the reason I had no potato crop during the Apocalypse last summer. Mine were hyyuuuge and brought friends. They’re tough because they can just jump away from you and your spray. And then come back to munch after you have left and your spray has dried or washed off.

This year there must have been a nest or something nearby because at the beginning of June I had a zillion little baby grasshoppers all over the garden! If they weren’t so destructive, they’d be super-duper adorable! My youngest daughter is a budding entomologist and just fell in love with the tiny twats. But fortunately for all involved, these veggie-mowing baby bastards seem to have cleared out, and the pics above are about all I’ve seen of them lately.

Last summer, I had grasshoppers everywhere in the garden, but I had so many other issues there that I never did any research how to get rid of them. This year’s early summer grasshopper nursery seems to have graduated on to greener pastures, because now I’m only seeing one or two of them around the plants, and am not seeing much, if any, actual grasshopper damage anywhere in the garden.

I’ve been lucky this year with the grasshoppers, but if you’re interested – and for my own future reference – I’ve read that grasshoppers are averse to garlic and spicy peppers. A quick Google search shows a gazillion recommendations for DIY sprays to deter the bouncing bastards. It also seems reasonable that there are chemical solutions to this problem, but I haven’t looked into that so far. [<—–Omigosh, somebody please LOL at my pun there. Or is that a double entendre? Whatever, do you get it? Chemical solutions? Homogenous mixture of a solute and solvent? But solutions are also how you solve a problem, see? Ha! I kill me!]

Fucking Japanese Beetles!!

I knew it! I knew they’d be back! Little fuckers!! Sonofabitch! Fucking Japanese Beetles. Grrr.

These little assholes are beautiful. I mean, really. Look at it. So shimmery and glittery, and fuzzy with stripes! If it wasn’t such a beastly torment to my (and everyone else’s) garden, I might could find it beautiful without being disgusted, like I do for the 350,000 other beautiful and fascinating beetle species.

**Fucking Japanese Beetles**
by Leslie Saunders on Unsplash
^{(No really. They’re fucking. Which I only noticed when I was checking attribution for this photo that I’d already captioned. I’m still laughing.)}

But these little shitters rain destruction on your garden, and for me, that’s crossing the LINE. I don’t mind sharing a bit with wildlife, but these guys aren’t interested in sharing. They want to OWN my green beans.

I had my first round of these bloody wankers last summer, when after only a few days, the top crown of leaves on my pole bean teepee was laced through (like that far right pic above) and dying. When I started looking carefully at the leaves, I screamed like the geeky guy in a horror flick.

Cuz eeeewwwwwww. They bunch all up. So you flip over a leaf and KABLAM! A whole facefull of beetles! And as if that’s not bad enough, the little pigfuckers fly, too!! So I’m not even exaggerating!

**“My name is the Pottymouth Gardener. You killed my beans. Prepare to die.”**

Ugg.

So I did what I do (research) and discovered that Japanese Beetles are lovely little invaders from another country. Bet you’ll never guess where. In their defense, it is probably not their fault they ended up here (in the U.S.); our two countries have been trading for ages, and these guys could easily have hitchhiked on all kinds of traveling vegetation.

They are an invasive species in Colorado, and they don’t have much predation in my suburban garden. In addition, they don’t respond to most insect repellants, deterrents, or insecticidal soap. As in, your weekly Neem oil ain’t gonna cut it. Plus, they can fly. So they can get away from you when you’re trying to pick them off and drop them into soapy water – which is the organic way to remove the little shits. And they’re big; at least as far as most garden pests go. They are easily half an inch long, which, combined with chowing together in a herd, makes them truly dangerous to the health of your plant. But at least they’re harmless to humans. Assuming you can ever sleep again after seeing your bean leaves covered in them.

They WILL, however, eat your veggies to death. Munching through leaves faster than you can pick them off. They don’t hurt the fruit, but without leaves, plants die.

AND. They overwinter right in your soil, so if you had a few this year, you’ll have even more next year!! Hooray!

The sucky part is that if you use a trap for them, you can actually make the problem worse because the traps attract the beetles from all around, potentially bringing your neighbor’s infestation into your garden, too. But, no pressure, if you have them and don’t get rid of them, they will keep spreading, right over into your neighbors’ gardens. Sigh.

Last summer, as I learned all about them, I chose to drown my Japanese Beetles in soapy water. I went out with my dead sexy purple rubber gloves and a big bowl of sudsy Dawn and warm water. Then I held the bowl under the leaf, and knocked those motherfuckers right in. And once they’re in the soapy water, they can’t fly out. Bummer. But sometimes they would fly away when I shook the leaf, so it was sometimes more effective to pick them off and commit insecticide manually. Barf.

But. Every time I picked them off into the soapy water, I’d find another one or two the next day.

And I’m really tired of fighting the pest fest. I’ve had an undue burden of pests in the last three years, and it’s affecting my garden joy. So this year, fuck the soapy water. I’m nuking the little bastards.

Say hello to my little friend:

Oh Yeah!! I did it. I sprayed those little shits. And I felt kinda bad about it. I felt worse knowing that I need to wait three days to harvest any of the beans because Sevin is the real deal. No snowflake-crunchy-granola-OMRI-certified-suggestion of an alternative living arrangement. Nope. This is garden napalm. Those buggers fell right off. And I’m leaving the carcasses wherever they land in the bean box, as a warning to others.

Muhuhahahaha!!!