I know deer
eavesdrop on my conversations. I thought
I won the battle against deer, but they must have decided I was too sure of my victory against them, and
they started eating my garden as if the electric fence that surrounds my
property did not exist. Almost daily,
now, I see deer in the yard, and I see their white mop-like tails defiantly
wave at me as they clear the fence in one jump.
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| My poor apple trees! There should be leaves all the way down the branches. |
Deer aren’t the
only pests attacking my garden, and even if you don’t have deer, you probably
have six-legged critters that munch on your plants. I saw no potato bugs this year, and harvested
84 pounds of nearly perfect potatoes a couple of weeks, but they usually try to destroy
my potatoes.
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| One of my helpers. Digging potatoes is a treasure hunt! |
If you have potato bugs,
which are little orange bugs that defoliate potato plants, knocking them into
soapy water is a great way to dispose of them safely. Knocking almost any insect into soapy water
will kill it; just make sure you correctly identify it as a pest first.
 |
| My other helper. These girls know where potatoes come from! |
I giggle to
myself as I knock Japanese beetles off my blackberries, grape vines, apple
trees, and roses into a bucket of plain water to give to the chickens. I call it “chicken bobbing for apples” because
I set the bucket of water in the midst of the hens, and they gleefully consume
the Japanese beetles so they can, later, turn them into eggs. See a video of this here. It’s best to pick
Japanese beetles and other insects that fly to escape capture in the morning,
when the dew remains on the plants, because they can’t fly well when their
wings are wet.
I avoid using
chemical pesticides, and I never apply pesticides to the entire garden. Whenever I apply pesticides, chemical or
organic, I apply them to kill a specific pest that I have identified
correctly. Whatever pesticide I apply
can also kill bees and other beneficial insects, and spraying the entire garden
will kill all insects.
Most of the
time, pests I attempt to control with pesticides are eating the leaves of the plant,
not the blossoms, and bees visit the blossoms of the plant and have incidental
contact with the leaves of the plant. I
can also wait until the plant has stopped blooming, because bees will stop
visiting the plant when it has stopped blooming, and apply pesticides
then.
Japanese beetles
are devouring my grapes. The plants
aren’t blooming anymore, because the deer ate the blossoms and many
leaves. The poor plants began to grow
new leaves and now Japanese beetles are eating the new growth. The chickens have enjoyed several episodes of
“bobbing for apples” with those beetles, and I applied diatomaceous earth, a
naturally occurring pesticide made from fossilized diatoms that works by
dehydrating insects, to the leaves. If
the Japanese beetles persist in their attack on my grapes, I may apply a
chemical pesticide, because if I don’t stop the beetles the plants may
die.
I use Sluggo®
and containers of beer to drown slugs and snails, and I use Bacillus thuringiensis,
or BT, to kill caterpillars. I pick off
large tomato hornworms, the scary-looking, but harmless to people, green worms
that can defoliate tomatoes and feed them to my chickens. Correctly identify caterpillars; Monarch
butterfly caterpillars eat parsley, but I allow them to eat my parsley so that
I can enjoy butterflies later.
How is your
garden?