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 2: Powdery Mildew, Cucumber Beetles, and Earwigs

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.

Powdery mildew taking hold of a zucchini.

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.

Cucumber Asshats sleeping with the fishes.

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.

Douchenozzle earwig chillin’ on a pepper leaf.

Pesticles Part 3: Tomato Fucking Hornworms

I’ve had a lot of shit in my garden over the years, but this asshole takes the cake. I’d read about them in various publications over time, but have never had any but the smallest inchworm grace my garden. You know, the super cute and tiny little green fellow that you can hardly see against the stem or leaf, and that probably starred in his own Eric Carle story. Oh, wait…

Tomato Hornworms are anathema to your tomato plant. Just one or two can decimate this winter’s spaghetti sauce if you miss its presence.

My mother is not much of a gardener, but her burgeoning skills with a gifted Bonzai tree have encouraged her, and for the past couple of years, she has also hosted a potted tomato plant in her backyard.

This summer she told me she was having the most terrible luck with her tomato plant. She recruited my brother-in-law, and investigated the trouble. Here’s what they found:

I reeled in horror at what I saw! It’s hyyuuggeee!!! Ewww! Mom hadn’t found out what it was yet and I couldn’t possibly wait for an identification, so I did what any good gardener does in a moment of horror: Google.

To be honest, I kinda figured I already knew what it was. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve never seen one or even looked up a picture, but the Tomato Hornworm’s reputation precedes it. It took me about 10 seconds to know what had eaten Mom’s plant.

Technically, this one is a Tobacco Hornworm. The Tomato version has a green horn and V-shaped stripes or something. Whatever. The point is, this thing is a killer and must be stopped!! Or at least moved to somewhere that it won’t murder tomatoes.

By the time Mom found that shithead, it was already too late. Her poor tomato plant was decimated, and although technically alive, can not possibly produce a crop before winter. What an asshole. (The hornworm, not Mom.)

Okay, so for what it’s worth, the Tomato and Tobacco Hornworms turn in to really pretty moths – the Tomato variety actually played a starring role in the classic film Silence of the Lambs. No, really. Google it if you don’t believe me.

Fortunately, I’ve never seen one of these assholes in MY garden. Whew!

After returning from a weeklong visit to Mom’s – where I first-hand witnessed the devastation to her tomato plant – I couldn’t wait to visit my Happy Place and see how the garden fared under my partner’s gardensitting hand.

He’d done a stupendous job staying on top of harvesting and collecting, and even hand-watered my faltering potatoes.

Everything was looking wonderful; predictably my hunny had done a terrific job while I was gone. After a week away, I carefully inspected everyone, looking for growth, moisture levels, health, and pesticles. While looking down to avoid an obstacle, I noticed some shit.

To the untrained eye, it probably looks like some dirt bits or something. But after you’ve seen enough pesticles, you start to recognize shit from shinola. This kind of looks like mouse scat, but it’s too square. Mouse shit is oblong. This shit is squared off. Yes, I looked that closely.

Well, the shit don’t fall far from the pesticle, so I used my physics training to look 90 degrees from the perpendicular of the droppings. Basically, I looked straight up from the shit. Oh shit.

Fucking Pesticle!!!!!!!!
(*Otherwise known as a goddam Tobacco Fucking Horn Worm*.)

Goddambloodytomatosuckingpieceofshit!! Aaaagggggg! Eeeewwwww!! It was hovering over my head while I was investigating its shit!!! Disgusting wanker!!

Well, once I made sure that every one of my neighbors knows my extensive repertoire of profanity, I did what any brave gardener does when confronted by a monster. I called out my 8-year old.

After the shock of witnessing such an enormous beast committing herbicide right in front of my eyes, me and the kid got down to a removal plan. Although my little Danger (yes, that’s really her nickname, and if you met her you’d know why) was keen to go grab it and hug it and squeeze it and love it for ever and ever, I was NOT keen for her to touch the thing, so I made her put on some rubber gloves first. She went right up to the beast and attempted to pluck it off. But NO. This little fucker was vacuum sealed on to the stem. Danger tried every way she could think of without squashing the bastard, and we finally gave up.

I thought I was going to have to break out some nasty chemicals and melt away the little fuckwad into slime like a slug in salt. But no, there had to be a better way. The little green hobgoblin was attached to one of the topmost branches of the my SuperSweet 100s, an indeterminate tomato variety notorious for taking over any tomato patch with its rapid growth and long-ass branches. This plant would never miss that little tip of branch, especially since the hornworm had eaten all of the foliage and half of the fruit from it already.

So Danger and I cut the branch off the plant. And we tossed the branch over the fence of my yard. We are very brave.

I know, and I’m not proud of it. I know I could have disposed of it some other way, but I don’t want to kill it! It’s huge, and would make a huge mess and nightmare-inducing sound if we squashed it. But that caterpillar is never going to be able to find this plant again from outside the yard, AND, it might become a delightful meal for one of the families of birds nearby. Or it can just fucking find somewhere else to live and something else to eat; I gave it a chance. But it will GET. OFF. OF. MY. LAWN. (or garden, in this case)

Whew! Well, that’s that.

So today I was out harvesting my plentiful tomatoes (They’re doing great now after some treatment; see What’s Wrong With the Tomatoes?). I haven’t been in the garden in two days, and at this time of year (August is harvest time! Every day!) that could be critical. The powdery mildew could get out of control in just two days, the Japanese beetles could finish off a whole blackberry cane or several pole bean plants, or a delightful infestation of YouNameIt pesticle could move in and take over. The point is, I was spending some time harvesting and observing.

Honestly, although there’s some issues in my Happy Place, overall, today it was looking alright and there’s no new Japanese beetles to drown, so I’m feeling good. It sucks to be a murderer every time I go in the garden, so a day without Japanese fucking Beetles is a good day.

I was filling my harvest basket with beautiful green beans, a couple of pickling cucumbers, the first ripe Thai chili of the season, a zucchini, two Anaheim peppers, a few strawberries, and several jalapenos until the basket was full up! After emptying the basket of the first load, I came back out ready to fill it with tomato love.

My fertilizer treatments of calcium and phosphorus made all the difference, and the ‘maters have been coming fast and tasty!

I made my way down the line from the Romas to the San Marzanos to the SuperSweet 100s. And there I noticed something odd:

SOMEBODY has been eating my tomatoes. Without asking my permission, and without even taking them off the vine! My children might be feral, but even THEY have the courtesy to remove them from the plant before noshing. Dufuq?

Oh no. I recognize this. I’ve only ever had one pesticle that actually ATE my tomatoes. Fucking asshat.

Sigh. Another one. I know you might be wondering, is that the one you threw over the fence, Pottymouth? No. No, I don’t believe it is. There’s pretty much no way it could find its way back. I don’t think. Plus, although still uncomfortably large, this one is a smidge smaller than the last. And its stripes are not as pronounced. Ugg, whatever! Fortunately, like the last one, it clearly hasn’t been there long because there were only a few leaves and those two half tomatoes missing. Like before, I lopped off the branch and hurled it over the fence.

We have some lovely birds of prey nearby; there’s even an American Bald Eagle preserve just a few miles away. Last year we had a family of Cooper Hawks nest in the tree just over the fence where I threw my not-friend. Plus, we have all the usual suburban birds, and a healthy population of traveling birds like ducks and geese from the pond across the street. Point is, there’s a whole ecosystem of modern-day T-Rexes looking for grubs just over that fence. Soup’s on fellas!!!

What’s wrong with the tomatoes?

Sonofamotherfuckingbitch!!! There’s something wrong with my damn tomatoes!! Specifically the San Marzanos. Grrr.

Tomatoes have always done really well in my garden. One time I had some blossom-end rot, but that’s an easy fix. And last year I had an abso-fucking-lutely disgusting and massive infestation of whiteflies. Fucking pesticles!! That was horrendously heinous, but I still had a terrific harvest.

This year I rotated the toms to another part of the garden for soil health and also to try a different configuration of plants so that I can reach and see all parts of the plants. Last year’s whiteflies got a hold in an area that I couldn’t see or reach; that’s how they evaded treatment until they had fully infested, and then I couldn’t get rid of them. Gross!

This year’s crop has been looking spectacular and bug-free all season, but now there’s a potential nutrient problem that’s making the San Marzanos look like shit. Time to find out what’s wrong with them.

The San Marzano plant has been losing leaves at the very bottom; they’ve been turning yellow and falling off. There’s a gazillion tomatoes on the huge tall plant – and the others – but they’re not turning red. Some of the tomatoes have been full grown for weeks, but just not turning red. I did some research and learned that they might not be turning because it’s too hot! Well shit. There’s nothing I can do about that. Believe me, I’ve tried for my whole adult life, but enough folks have ignored the data and believed climate change is a hoax or some other nonsense for so long, that even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, we’d still see temperatures and sea levels and extreme weather events rise for another decade or two before stabilizing. But I digress.

So maybe it’s too hot for the maters to ripen, but I can’t do anything about that. Also, there’s no insect activity in any of the tomato plants, so I’m ruling out pesticles.

The three Romas next to the San Marzanos are looking kinda shitty, too. Their oldest leaves are curling with purple veins. I’ve read that the purpling is related to a phosphorus deficiency.

San Marzanos looking shitty at the bottom.

While doing this careful inspection of the tomatoes for symptoms of problems, I found a sure-fire indication of nutritional deficiency: Blossom End Rot.

Blossom-end rot in the San Marzanos (left) and Romas (right). The tiny brown patches on the Romas are bruising due to a dumb-ass hailstorm a few days before.

Blossom-end rot (BER) is due to calcium deficiency in the tissues of the tomato. It’s most often seen in the first tomatoes of the season, and can be caused from overwatering, soil deficiency, or very rapid growth and inconsistent moisture. I’ve seen this in my garden before (I was horrified and disgusted!!), so I recognized this as a non-terminal issue, and one with an easy fix. I’ve read that you can still eat the BER tomatoes, but eww, I’m not willing to try.

So…having found a phosphorus deficiency and a calcium deficiency across my tomatoes, it’s clear they need some nutritional love. I had used my general Miracle-Gro tomato and veggie fertilizer at least once, but now will institute a weekly treatment to make sure. This should cover the phosphorus problem, as that is one of main ingredients at 18-18-21.

However, blossom-end rot is a calcium problem, and not addressed through my general veg fertilizer. Therefore, I will use a solution I picked up the first time I had the end rot problem:

I’m going out of town for a week, so I’m going to use these two treatments on the tomatoes, and see the results when I return! Here goes!

Hey Good Lookin’, Watcha got Cookin’?

In July, the rewards for our patience, love, and care are becoming visible! It’s devilishly hot out, but in the shady calm under the chlorophyll canopy, treasure is growing.

My family LOVES peppers. This year I’m growing bell peppers, mini bell peppers, Anaheim peppers, Thai chiles, ancho poblano peppers, and jalapenos.

The best part of summer in the garden is the bounty! I love watching everything get bigger and more ripe until harvest. This summer seems to be cruising by, because so many of my peppers are at or near maturity! Here’s some eye candy:

I also grow peas, and this year I tried out a new trellis that I really like. I ran this expandable trellis down one of my pepper boxes, knowing that the peas would be done and coming out of the ground by the time the peppers need the space.

I’m not a huge fan of peas, myself, but my children will eat them like candy. They’re a fun-to-eat side with dinner or an easy afternoon snack. My kids just get a big ole pile of pods, and enjoy popping the shells and picking out the treasure. No cooking required! Nom Nom.

My whole family enjoys green beans, especially fresh from the garden. For several years I’ve built a tipi frame out of six foot bamboo stakes, and grown the beans up as a cylindrical pyramid. But this year I tried a new set-up using two A-frame trellises and bamboo stakes.

I will probably have to go back to the tipi next year, because the beans are simply too tall to work on my new structure. They have grown all the way up the trellis and over the top, and how have branches hanging back down from the top.

Because we like beans so much, I have fun growing different varieties. This year and last, I’ve grown purple pole beans as well as green pole and bush beans. I like the bush beans because they grow faster and fit nicely in any raised bed with no trellis, but the pole beans are really a beautiful addition, and they are so, so, so, very prolific!

From July through September, we have to harvest pretty much every other day. Beans get tough and dry when they are too big, and they only take a few days to go from tiny to ready. We’ve had to find additional ways to prepare beans, because we end up eating loads and loads in the summer. I’ve read that you can freeze garden beans pretty easily, but I haven’t tried it yet. Jarring is definitely a well-known option, too, if you end up with too many to eat.

So far, my family has managed to eat them all! We like to sauté them up with bacon and onions, InstantPot or pressure cook with bacon or ham, or Florentine style with almonds, or batter dipped and baked into “fried green beans”, parmesan crusted…

Hello There! Fuzzy and Big Chungus

As we gardeners know, good veg brings wildlife. I’m often surprised at how much wildlife we see – and share space with – this close to the city. We’ve had several fun fellows visit, and who doesn’t love critter pics. Enjoy!

Fuzzy

This little darling was a surprise on our way to work one morning a few years ago in May. We’d had a duck nest with a full clutch of eggs nestled underneath some shrubbery next to our front porch. My partner accidently uncovered it while clearing leaves to get ready for Spring. Mama duck came screaming out from under the bush and Papa met her in the driveway, where they proceeded to chew us out until well after the leaf blower was stowed.

As pissed as they were, Mama returned to the nest, and, feeling very poorly about scaring the shit out of this family of ducks with our leaf blower, my family watched silently every day from a nearby window, being careful to avoid the area, and giving them as much privacy and protection as we could.

One happy May morning, my family bounded out of the house on our way to work and school, and found a trail of egg shells out from the bushes. Peering excitedly under the shrubs, we could clearly see that the ducklings had hatched! The pond is just behind our house (after crossing a four lane road), so we were confident that the Duck family had already gone over for a swim and a snack.

And then all of a sudden there was movement! Running right by my foot! And then my kids were screeching! And then cooing. And then crouching down and calling to the tiny duckling running around our feet and the front walkway.

We stopped to investigate, and just like in the childrens’ book, this little love nugget ran up to me and tried to crawl up my leg, almost like he was asking, “Are you my mother?”. I had to stop myself as I reached down to pick him up. Every admonishment I’d ever heard about tiny wild animals included “don’t touch the baby or the mama won’t come back”.

Hrrmmpphh. That makes no sense. But it’s what I’d always been told, and besides, we were on our way to work and school. What was I supposed to do? Reach down and pick up that sweet little fuzzy love nugget? Put it in a little box, or maybe my purse, and bring it to work with me? Feed it all day on my desk and then drive it home with me during rush hour? And then let it rest in the bathtub while I build it a fabulous little hutch in the back yard, and love it and squeeze it and….

So anyway, we told the kids that Fuzzy’s mom was gonna be right back for him, and we needed to get out of the way so she could land. And we left Fuzzy in the driveway.

Don’t ask.

No, really. Don’t.

Fine. You were warned.

Later that summer, almost Fall I believe, we had a tree planting party in the back yard. To act as a sound barrier and shade provider, I bought 8 Giant Thuja trees to plant along the back fence. When clearing out the area for planting, we found a sad surprise. A tiny baby duck skeleton, poking through the back vertical wood slat fence. It had found a knot hole or crack or some other kind of space, and managed to get its head through. On the other side of the fence is a large four lane road and then….the pond. Where Fuzzy’s family was surely noshing and playing when he worked his head through. They were likely even communicating. Poor Fuzzy had become stuck in the fence, and ….well, you know. If I had had any idea the outcome would be so bad, I’d have gladly taken Fuzzy to work with me. I never imagined! I’ll never forgive myself for leaving Fuzzy. Bwwaaaaaaaa!!!!!

Big Chungus

Ugg, that sucked. Here’s something more fun. During my time teaching middle schoolers, there was a thing about “Big Chungus”. I was sure the kids were just having one over on me, but later learned (for realz) that “Big Chungus” is the name for the giant Bugs Bunny that happens in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. I’m serious, just Google it. Outside my trailer classroom there was plenty of wildlife, including bunnies. So we had no shortage of fodder for the “Big Chungus” jokes and comments. All. Goddam. Year.

My own biological children loved coming to school with me for “Bring Your Child to Work Day”, and my students seemed to enjoy hanging out with my MiniMe’s on those days, as well. Anyway, my own children remember visiting my classroom in great detail, and the Big Chungus phenomenon stuck on them hard after a visit. So naturally, when we had a new bunny show up in the back yard to munch our grass, the kids named him Snowball.

Ha! No, they called him Big Chungus, of course. Fast forward and there’s been a Chungus of variable size living in our back yard every year since. This year I’d like to introduce Midi-Chungus. Not Big. Not Little. Midi.

Midi-Chungus. That’s what I’m calling him/her. Not little, not big, but midi.

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!]

Vertical Square Foot Gardening

Suburbia-land is a wonderful place for a plethora of reasons, but gardening is not one of them. Our backyard – like every other I know – does not have the space for a traditional in-ground row garden.

Additionally, here in the Denver metro area, we are in a semi-arid climate on the edge of both the plains and the mountains: the air and weather are super dry and our soil is either clay or sand. The weather doesn’t provide enough moisture: during the summer, we simply must water every day or the garden will be dried up dead in about 48 hours. Missing even one day of watering in July or August can fry a veggie plant so bad it won’t recover.

The way I make gardening happen here is through vertical Square Foot Gardening using raised beds and drip irrigation. My sweet hubs set me up with a drip irrigation system, but you don’t need a plumbing-inclined partner to do it. The local big box home improvement store has super easy drip systems for very affordable prices and easy-to-understand instructions.

The raised beds require a little more heavy lifting, but you can find affordable and super easy-to-build setups all over the place these days. Or you can use an old tire, or an old wheel barrow, or even grow your garden right in the bag of garden soil. Just lay the bag flat, cut out the top of the bag leaving the sides in tact, and plant your sprouts! Boom! Instant raised bed!

Drip irrigation hub servicing the tomatoes.

What is vertical gardening, you ask? It’s growing UP. Traditional gardens are rows of plants growing directly out of the ground, like a farm. The rows on the ground take up a lot of space, and so do a great many of the plants. But in vertical gardening you preserve ground space, and train the plants to grow and spread up – vertically – instead of horizontally.

It’s a perfect compliment to the other urban low-impact gardening technique I use: Square Foot gardening (SFG). The SFG method teaches you to make use of every inch of space around and under your plant. It turns out that most annual veggies have root systems considerably smaller than the part above ground, and SFG helps you maximize and optimize the use of every square inch of the soil under the plant, by breaking your garden into square feet, and then planting each square foot full, using knowledge about how much space a plant actually needs.

For instance, in one square foot, you can successfully grow one whole tomato or zucchini plant. In that same space you could instead grow 16 carrots, nine spinach, or four leaf lettuce plants.

^{(Image from https://squarefootgardening.org/2019/06/succession-planting-in-the-square-foot-garden/)}

The above image is from the Square Foot Gardening website, and shows the classic recommended 4 x 4 foot raised bed with a square foot grid. My garden (below) only has one 4 x 4 square, the rest are 2 x 4, allowing for walkways and maintenance throughout and from both sides. In addition, over the years I stopped using the physical grids. I still draw or mark the spaces during planting and sowing, but I’m pretty comfortable with how much space everybody needs, even without markers.

Top to bottom: bush beans, lettuce, rosemary, chives

Square Foot Gardening also depends on having the right soil blend to fill in a raised bed. In this way your garden soil is set up for success right from the start, even if you are brand new to gardening or live in partial desert like me. In addition, it’s a terrific way to start small and grow as you gain experience. It’s easy to add another raised bed. But I’ll leave it to Mel and company over at Square Foot Gardening to explain all that.

Sidebar (but in the middle): When I first got into gardening in any meaningful way it was because of Mel Bartholomew’s early book about Square Foot Gardening that was displayed next to the seed rack in my local Home Depot. I was investigating some flower seeds to try and sow in the postage stamp that we called a “courtyard” in the back space between my townhouse and garage, and I’d always wanted to try gardening in more than a random pot or an upside down green hanging basket that I saw on late night infomercials. Mel’s book was only a few dollars, and a cute pocket-size as well, so it was easy to throw it in the basket with the gladiolus bulbs. Reading it changed everything I ever thought I knew about gardening (which, for the record, wasn’t much at the time). Fast forward a decade or more, and I’ve adapted those techniques to work with vertical gardening in my extensive raised beds.

So back to vertical gardening. I am a researcher by nature and profession, so before I put any time into anything, I do a fuck-tonne of research to make sure I’m set up for success. And when I was ready to grow more than tomatoes in my raised beds, I had to figure out how to make room.

Cages

A ton of Googling got me lots of Pinterest pics, but mostly I had to figure it out for myself. So I started with traditional tomato cages, since I already had some. And that was a great place to start. Turns out, with a tomato cage and some soft Velcro garden tape, you can train up just about anything. To this day, I use tomato cages for all my tomatoes (duh) and most of my zucchini and summer squash. But last year I used one for blackberries and one for Morning Glories, and I’ve also used them for cucumbers. Oh yeah, and I sometimes use them for strawberries.

The Velcro garden tape makes it easy and gentle on the plants to tape them up a cage or trellis. And even better for the greenies out there, this stuff is reusable year after year. I collect it all into a roll when I break down the garden in the fall, and use it again in the spring/summer.

Tomato cages training up zucchini, yellow squash, and another zuke. On the far right you can see the Velcro tape holding the leaf stalks to the cage.

The above pics show two of my zucchini and one of my yellow squash plants trained up tomato cages. In the far right photo you can see the Velcro tape that I used to hold the leaf stalks to the cage. The zuke in that cage totally grew out of control while I wasn’t watching, and several of the leaves were too huge to get inside the cage by the time I noticed. But they’ll shade out and crowd out everything else nearby if I don’t force them up. So some of those leaves are trained up the outside of the cage. Yay Velcro!

Obviously, the better way to train them up the tomato cage is to monitor them daily, and as soon as the leaves are tall enough, simply tuck them under the cage rings. The hollow stalks of zuke and squash leaves break pretty easily, so getting them in and up when they’re young and skinny is the ticket. (I swear there’s something pervy about that last sentence, but I can’t quite put my finger on it). And the Velcro tape is your friend. You can cut it to any length, and, as long as it’s loose enough to allow for the stalk, vine, or leaf to grow in diameter a bit, you can attach them to anything. You can also remove and reattach as necessary.

Trellises

Another structure that’s great for vertical gardening is a trellis. There’s a lot of different kinds out there, and it’s taken me a while to find some I really like. I’m also always on a budget, so I like affordable garden accessories, and you can find some pretty affordable trellises with a little digging.

Combine your trellis with Velcro garden tape, and there’s nothing you can’t train up.

Winter squashes, melons, and cucumbers pretty much have to have a trellis to climb if you are growing them in a raised bed. Melons and squashes can have massive vines that are several feet long. That could take up an entire raised bed, even if the root system is only in the square foot or two where the stalk goes into the ground. Therefore, maximize your space. Grow up! Also, look for dwarf and bush-style varieties of your favorite vining veggie, they’re selectively bred to be smaller plants.

When I first started vertical gardening, I was really paranoid that I was going to do it wrong. I searched endlessly online trying to find some instructions for how to do it and what to use. Eventually, after getting tired of looking at cute Pinterest pics of fairy gardens and wedding arbors, I decided to just try stuff. Turns out, if you’re gentle with them and make sure they get nutrition and love, your veggies can be pretty tolerant of even some rough handling. And if you get your vertical wrong, the worst that can happen is that your plant may die. But guess what? They will die in a few months anyway because winter is coming. So just try stuff, don’t be afraid!

Like this silly bastard:

Three blackberry canes climbing up an unfolded square tomato cage that is held upright in the box by a big ole wooden stake.

I’ve never grown blackberries before, but I had a cane I picked up at the end of last summer that somehow made it through the winter, so I picked up two more canes early this season and plopped them into a box. I have no idea if this will work. I don’t know how many square feet a blackberry cane needs, but they’re growing like pole beans, so they must like it so far. It’s fun to experiment.

I’ll close this post with some nice pics of my bastardized vertical raised bed square foot garden: