Pests in the Garden

Garden pests can be frustrating to say the least, often causing substantial damage to the garden and dampened enthusiasm of the gardener,  There are a good many remedies that local gardeners swear by to keep their garden produce for them selves.  Some of the worst pests include deer, aphids, Colorado Potato Beetle,  and cabbage loopers. 

                         

 We have a year around herd of a dozen or so deer here in this rural neighborhood.

Ah, the deer, I have been working diligently with the deer so that we can co-exist. When we first planted the berries and trees in the garden space, we put an electric fence around the plot. (about a half acre in size). Soon the deer were munching away on the new trees. Next we carefully caged all the trees and the electric fence went from 6' to 8' plus a more sturdy gate was added. The next thing I noticed was that the strawberries had all been mowed back to their crowns, dead leaves and all. Deer pellets were everywhere.

The next step was to raise the fence to 7'. The whole gardening season came and went with no deer damage or evidence. Victory ensued or so I thought. The unplanted areas are just sandy soil and you can pretty well find their tracks and make a rough guess about what is going on. Then fall came...........and the deer move from one seasonal range to another twice a year. Good lord, I had my own herd munching on the perennials,  berries and trying to reach the now caged 3 year old fruit trees. It seems to be this seasonal population giving me grief. The resident herd has learned about the fence and does not seem to want to risk it. Or so my belief system goes....

So off to the Ag-West store for more farm supplies. They do not have 12' high fence posts but they do carry pressure treated wooden fence rails that long. Ah, since it is only holding strands of wire that carry electricity, they do not have to be all that sturdy. So I installed the fence rails as fence posts and now have a fence line that is nearly 10' tall. Just to be sure, I stapled 4' fiber glass fence posts to the top of the fence posts so could go up to 13' if I needed to.

The new height has been installed and just to make sure the migrants can see the new height, I added white tape flags to the fence line at intervals. Feeling pretty smug about it all, I now think the problem is solved.

Yeah, right. This week as I go out to the garden area to turn the compost pile, standing there in all her glory is the largest, prettiest, most well FED doe you ever saw. Mildly watching me as she munches away, I move a little closer to see if I can show her out they way she got in. (Which of course I have no idea about since I have not yet searched for tracks). She carefully keeps a safe distance from me as we do the exit dance around the garden. Then, she decides to leave the garden area...........but jumping THROUGH THE DANG FENCE!! So I begin the tracking to see if I can figure out where she got in. The ground is wet so the tracks show up nicely. She is eating so well she has dumped multiple piles of pellets, oh and one large pile suggesting gastric upset from holiday overindulgence in our garden!!  

Eventually, I find the spot of entry at the boundary of the rear of our yard. You can see her tracks coming directly at the fence with none leaving and a new fresh set on my side of the fence, suggesting she went through the fence to get in as well. So I add more kite tails to the fence at this point. Solved, or so I think. ..............Last night the dogs were raising cain at the patio door..... our  doe has discovered the bird feeders and rose bushes in the back yard. 

 It was time to get serious……and maybe mean.  I put peanut butter on heavy duty tin foil fastened too the electric fence where the obvious entry point was.  I know, I know, but I may have solved this problem.  I found the biggest scramble of deer tracks at the point of entry you ever saw.  I think she got my message.

Around flowers such as tulips we have found laying down a strip of pure manure from the stock yard seems to keep the deer out of them.  You have to be careful to keep it directly off the sprout but it is pretty effective. 

Other pests such as cabbage loopers can be held a bay by dripping a small bit of water into a flat pan or basin.  I place it near the cabbage/cauliflower beds.  It attracts wasps.  They seem to be meat eaters, and  love cabbage loopers/worms.  Cabbage loopers come from the white butterfly you see hanging in the garden.  Until the wasps get active you can limit looper damage by putting row cover over your cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower plants. Planting them all together makes it easier to cover one bed.

       

Row cover is a spun blanket that protects plants from insects and frost down to 28 degrees or so, but it allows air to move back and forth through the surface so  you do not get overheating and plant death associated with clear plastics.   

Speaking of clear plastics, if you are growing in raised beds,  you can insert a soil thermometer in to the bed, then cover the bed with clear plastic in the early spring.  Be sure to weight it down well and tuck the edges of the plastic into the soil so the cover will stay put.  This will cause excessive heating of the soil, destroying harmful elements and causing weed seeds to sprout and die.  It will reduce the number of pests in the bed, and lessen weeding later in the season.  This technique is called solarizing, and is commonly used in Israel to reduce pest damage in their crops. 

A couple other things that have been very helpful in the garden has been the presence of frogs and lizards.  Here in Madras, I find a number of lizards in the flower and vegetable beds and almost no aphids or other insect damage.  Frogs are common in the greenhouse and the raised beds near the greenhouse and in the garden as well.  When I find a frog, I usually catch it and move it to flower beds or garden beds. 

Other helpful critters include lady bugs, praying mantis and lace wings which can be purchased from on line catalog stores, and some garden centers.  With lady bugs, I usually keep them in the refrigerator (tightly enclosed mesh bag) and release a few each night after watering.  I have had the occasional escape in the refrigerator in the garage so be sure your mesh bag is tightly sealed.  They seem to arrive thirsty so when I release them at night or early morning after watering they seem to stay in the area they are released.  I will also release them where I find aphids because that is their primary food source.  I release some into the greenhouse as well where they control both aphids and white fly.  I have not had much experience with lace wings but find pray mantis occur naturally in the Madras area so I generally do not purchase them.  Also aphids are farmed by ants so they deliver them to new growth, which is why washing them off is not very effective long term.

One of the most persistent pests is the Colorado Potato Beetle.  They show up on your potatoes before they blossom.  You will find yellow eggs on the under side of the leaves.  I smash them where I find them; once the pink larvae arrive then I capture them in a old milk bottle filled with water and let them drown. I do the same with the adult bugs. 

Other bugs such as Mexican beetles or Japanese beetles can be picked off by hand and drowned in a jug of water just as with the potato beetles.  I keep a lid on the jugs to prevent escapes. 

Between the beds in the garden I usually plant grass or clover and that seems to keep the rabbits out of the vegetables.  Some one told me bunnies can’t climb so I figured, “Raised beds, no sweat”, right?  Well that was quickly dispelled while deep watering the carrots, when multiple saturated critters came crying out of the bed. After toweling them dry it was apparent they were baby bunnies who’s eyes had not yet opened.  Even with the nest of newborn bunnies, once their eyes were opened and they left the nest, I didn’t  find much damage or loss. 

When you are building your raised beds, you can put a layer of hardware cloth in the bottom of the bed before adding the soil to keep burrowing animals such as moles or voles out if they are a problem.  I forgot to do this when I moved to a new place about 3 years ago, but have not had any invasion of voles, moles or other burrowing animals. 

 There are a variety of dusts you can use in vegetable gardens.  Most any garden center can advise you on the safety and rate of application.  I tend not to use them as the wasps, frogs, ladybugs  and lizards have done a super job at keeping produce clean and pest free.  One problem I do have, is too many earwigs particularly in the strawberry beds.  I attribute this to lasagna gardening where the bed was layered with straw, manure, newspaper and then planting soil.  I suspect the technique became a breeding ground for earwigs so that type of soil building has been eliminated.

A couple books you might find helpful:  The Truth About Garden Remedies by Jeff Gillman and The Truth About Organic Gardening also by Jeff Gillman.  Liz Douville a gardening contributor from the Bend Bulletin noted in a recent article this authors down to earth science approach to these techniques. 

Other Resources:  Organic Gardening Magazine, www.organicgardending,com

Mother Earth News magazine, www.motherearthnews.com 

The Self Sufficient Gardener by John Seymour Doubleday/Dolphin publishers.  This book might be out of print but there is a revised version available through local bookstores who will order it for you, or on line through www.amazon.com 

Bare Limbs

I take the dogs to the garden pretty much every day.  There are several ares with grass that they love to run around on , as well as the aisles along the fence line where they can see the neighbors goats.  Good thing we have 6' critter fence as the dogs are waaaay too interested in the goats.

They chase each other, and their own tails and generally work themselves into near collapse.  This is the signal then that they can go back to the house and we will have a nice evening with the dogs asleep at our feet while we read or watch TV.

When they do not get enough exercise, waaaay too many toys get "kilt"!!

While they are burning off extra energy, there is time to look over the fruit tree sans leaves.  Now it is easy to see where pruning should be done to open up the tree thru the middle and to see the fruit spurs for next year.  You can also get a sense of the general health of the tree by looking at the bark, dead wood, and insect damage.

This time of year, I also like to figure out what kind of training the tree is going to need.   I make braces to force large limbs away from each other.  Fairly easy to do.  I use old scrap 2' x 4'  pieces,  measuring the approximate spread I need which determines the length of the brace.  Then  notch each end of the brace, and smooth it out with a wood rasp and file so the bark is not damaged when the wind blows rocking the limbs back and forth across the brace.  Bracing helps the tree develop form and shape, and by training and pruning your tree will be stronger over all.

Inspecting each tree gives a work plan for the dormant period.  Dormant spraying will start in January and insect control devices will be places as soon as it warms up.  Using pesticides goes against our philosophy so we try to use things compatible with organic gardening.  The dormant sprays we use are acceptable as is the copper spray we use later in the year.  Recently, a farmers magazine listed an old time insect trapping system used to control insect including coddling moth.  So that will be part of our plan for this year.  The recipe is 2 cups of cider vinegar plus 2 cups of sugar plus two cups of water in a gallon jug placed under the tree.  I plan two traps per tree so have been buying sugar on sale all fall.

At the end of the season, bugs vinegar and all will be added to the compost pile, jugs rinsed and stored for the next year, assuming they worked out well.

Once the severe freezing of the high desert  winters of Central Oregon warm toward spring, it is time to prune before budding out starts.  Many people prune in the fall after dormency occurs.  Here we can have a cold fall, that warms and then drops again. So pruning is left until we are sure things are truly dormant.  Some say you can prune apple anytime.  Generally the state extension services have guidelines for pruning methods and time frames.

Our trees are four years old and this year we had apples for fresh use, storage and applesauce.  A few pears for fresh eating cropped up as well. 

We decided to add asian pear this last summer.  We had ordered two which arrived late April.  They were planted as directed and by June first had not leafed out.  Since we use Miller Nurseries out of New York, they guarantee their trees.  So I notified them and shortly two more arrived and were planted in another site.  About two weeks later another Asian pear arrived, this one with 3 varieties on it.  And the two that failed to leaf out, leafed out.  So now we have 5 Asian pears totalling 6 varieties.  If they all survive and fruit, I guess we will be making booze!!

The winds here in the winter can be variable.  Winds have exceeded 85 mph and took off our roof a  couple years ago.  So trees have to  be well staked to keep from being blown over.  The root systems are fairly shallow as they do not work into the hard pan.  However we do plant our trees in heavily mulched berms so the roots can spread out, gaining as good a foot hold as possible.  We mulch them heavily in order to protect the roots from severe freezes which can reach twenty below, and to retain moisture throughout the hot summers.

After perusing all 9 trees, it is time to bring the dogs back to the house for the evening.  They are pooped out and I have a to do list laid out for myself.

Winterizing the Trees

Here on the Eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, although we are zone 5, I have seen trees approved for zone 5 struggling to survive.  We are a mountainous zone 5, which means some years trees and plants for this zone will do well, and other years will be challenged.  Part of the reason may be the wide variations of temperature through out the fall, winter and spring.  As fall arrives, it is easy to be 75 degrees daytime, but have the nights drop to 25. 

In the winter it is common now, to have day time temperatures near 45-50 and night time dropping to single digits.  Spring too, is problematic in that around budding time, temperatures can vary from 45-60 with night time drops to near 20.

All of this freezing and thawing seems to have damaged the young trees, best evidenced by cracks and splits of the bark,  lack of vigor during the growing seaons and slow death of the tree.  
This year, as we came into fall, I wrapped all the trees with trunk wrap followed by trunk protectors that I found on http://www.amazon.com/ and http://www.treepro.com/  .   Some of the new trees are too small for the protectors, so for them,  I used tree wrap as well as wrapping the trees in burlap to slow wind damage both of which I found through http://www.gardeners.com/ .  You may have  luck locating them through local garden supply stores, also.

 I have yet to see if we will have better survival and more vigor.  Early summer will tell.  Some of the apple trees seem to fare better than the cherry and plums. 

Next, I added about 8 inches of mulch to each tree ring, taking care to avoid the mulch stacking against the trunk of the tree itself.  I use a mixture of wheat straw, grass clippings and sawdust.  Keeping it away from the trunk, lessens the area for harboring mice or other rodents.  The heavy collars on the trees right down to the soil help protect from rodent damage as well.

Mice can winter over in mulch often doing great damage to the tree by griddling the trunk with their teeth.  This ring of destroyed bark will kill the tree.  This is true anywhere.  My brother who lives in a more temperate climate grows bamboo, which he mulched heavily to help retain moisture in the soil.  Mice loved the hay seeds in his mulch and eventually began chewing bark.  He did suffer some losses. 

Once the trees have lost their leaves, I add a mixture of well composted manures, green sand, and calcium sulfate and iron.  With our annual rain fall, in the shadow of Mt Jefferson, we get about 9 inches of rain a year, including snow fall.  So the fertilizers do not reach the root system until irrigation starts in the spring.  In areas where rain is common, it would not be wise to do this before spring when growth starts as the tree comes out of the dormant period of winter.  It would not be wise to cause a growth spurt as you move into fall and freezing weather.  Over the next growing season, the mulch from the previous winter breaks down and adds to the fertility of the soil.  The mulch is bermed up so a ring is formed around the tree which holds the water from winter rain/snow and then irrigation through out the growing season is held in the root zone of the tree as well.  Best of all, the mulch prevents weeds.  The berm needs to be kept off the trunk of the tree.

Despite damage last winter, we had plenty  of apples from two trees and some pears.  The two cherry trees were damaged beyond salvage and one new cherry did not leaf out this spring after planting,  Perhaps because of the zone 5 schizophrenic weather.  The nursery I purchased it from, http://www.millernurseries.com/  has a guarantee and will replace new trees free.  The older cherry trees had not been protected.  So the replacements will be put into winter protection for next year after replacements arrive in the spring.