Gardening 101, Chapter 5

Leaf Footed Bug

Pest Control

Pest control falls into three broad areas: Preventing pests, repelling pests and killing pests.

Preventing pests--Prevention is the most important form of pest control in an organic garden. Insect prevention is very basic. First and foremost, a clean garden area will leave insects with fewer hiding places and winter homes. Keeping weeds and grass in the garden and around the perimeter cut down provides fewer hiding places. Cleaning up leaves and branches from garden plants is also important. Healthy plant materials can be composted, but cuttings from diseased or bug infested plants should be burned or thrown in the trash, rather than taking a risk of reintroducing blights or bug eggs to next season's garden.

The best way to prevent insects and diseases in your garden is to have healthy plants. Start off with plants that have been bred for disease resistance. Seed packets and plant markers of commercial transplants will usually say something like "wilt resistant." Such information is also listed in seed catalogs and can be found online.

Proper spacing of plants is also important. Plants that are bunched tightly together provide plenty of hiding places, restrict airflow and force plants to compete for nutrients. Pruning, when appropriate, allows good airflow and makes it harder for pests to hide from their natural predators.

Good soil is also important to preventing pests. Healthy soil means healthier plants, but it also means a good balance of beneficial microbes and other organisms that prevent the buildup of soil-borne diseases.

Repelling pests--Pests are usually looking for an easy meal. There are ways to make it a little harder for them to find their favorite foods, or unpleasant to be around them.

Animal pests can wipe out a garden in no time. Rabbits are usually the earliest problem in the garden, because they love tender young sprouts. Sprinkling a line of blood meal around the perimeter of planted areas or the entire garden will scare the rabbits away. I haven't had any problems with the furry beasts since I began using this method.

Deer are a big problem for people who live in the country because normal fences don't slow them down and they can strip an entire garden overnight. There are commercial repellents available for deer, rabbits and other warmblooded problems, but I haven't tried them. Wildlife specialists recommend an eight foot fence to deter deer. I cut trees to make extra tall posts and then used various odds and ends of fence material I had around to cover the first six feet (before I ran out). For the next two feet, I used a strand of rope around the top. I've had no problems with deer.

Raccoons are relentless. Raccoon damage is easy to recognize, because they will eat half a tomato and leave the other half on the ground, and they will eat through and snap off a corn stalk and pull it down so the ears are easy to reach.

I read that they will not climb wobbly fences or anything else that provides uncertain footing. This didn't work for me. A couple of well-placed strands of electric fence is supposed to work really well, but that's an expense I couldn't manage before. I was recently given everything I need to put in an electric fence next year, so we'll see. There are various repellent sprays you can make such as garlic, hot pepper or essential oil, but those only worked for a day or two in my garden. The most recommended old farmer's method I've heard is to place a radio in your garden, tuned to classic rock or talk radio. This fools the creatures into thinking there are humans in the garden. I've had some luck with this, but I have to take the radio in when it rains and the raccoons take full advantage. Somewhere online I read the suggestion to just plant enough for everyone. This has served me very well, although the raccoon made off with a special beefsteak tomato I had been nurturing, damn it!

Animals will eventually get used to these methods. The ultimate would be a large dog in the garden every night, but I don't have the heart to leave a dog alone outside like that. Rotating methods works best.

Most people think possums are garden pests, but they really aren't. In fact they are somewhat beneficial. Opossums eat insects, snails and slugs. As for fruits and vegetables, they only like things that have begun to rot.

Companion planting is a good way to repel insect pests. Marigolds are well known for their repellent properties in the garden, but onions, garlic and mint are also good. Borage is another plant that not only repels many pests, but attracts beneficial insects such as pollinators and parasitic wasps.

I like to leave plenty of wildflowers just beyond the garden fence to attract pollinators and other helpful insects.

Floating row covers early in the season is a widely used method for preventing insects from getting started on crops. I haven't tried this, but the fact that professional organic growers use row covers is a high recommendation for me.

Killing pests--When most of us have small plants beginning to really take off and we discover insect damage--or visible insects--our first impulse is to nuke the whole garden with a broad spectrum insecticide. This might seem to be a good solution at first, but in the long run, it will make the problem worse.

Most chemical bug sprays break down very slowly and leave chemical residues in the fruit, plants and your soil. The vegetable waste you put in your compost will have chemical contamination and you will add that finished compost back to your garden. I'm not a chemist and can't pretend to know any more than is common knowledge among amateur farmers. I do have first-hand experience with herbicide drift on my crops and that's not much fun.

The organic growing industry has its own nuclear solution, but without the residue. Pyrethrum is a natural bug spray derived from a  member of the Chrysanthemum family. It's harmless to mammals and reptiles, but it kills bugs. Many years ago I happily sprayed my plants with a Pyrethrum product and had a bug free garden for a few days. The last time I used it, I was examining my work and I found a large praying mantis. The mantis was limp and its arms trembled. I rinsed it off, but it was too late. Still, the praying mantis took hours to die. That one mantis was probably doing a huge pest control service for me.

So, bottom line, after about two weeks the bad bugs had moved back in before the good bugs could bounce back. For some reason, the pests are more prolific in a wide open garden. While I highly recommend pyrethrum in extreme cases, I find it to be less effective on some insects than others.

For some insects, aphids for one, simply knocking them off with a stiff spray of water will blast them off of the plant and they won't able to make their way back.

Blister beetle.

Marigolds are attractive repellents, you might say.

Mature squash bug above, juveniles below.

Squash bugs are best dealt with before they become an infestation. If you place flat boards on the ground beneath squash and cucumber plants, the bugs will hide there overnight, so you can go out in the morning, turn the boards over and crush the pests. Check the undersides of leaves, especially close to the ground, for clusters of eggs and more bugs.

Neem oil is a very popular solution for many insect pests and is both organic and biodegradable. I have never used Neem oil, but next year I plan to make widespread use. The list of uses for Neem oil is too long to recount here, plus, I would simply be quoting someone else, but it treats everything from flee beetles, to fungus, to mold, to wilt and I've heard that it is good for the plants.

In my garden, I dust with diatomatious earth to control flea beetles. Potato and tomatillo plants seem to attract flea beetles early in the growing season, so it's a good idea to deal with them as soon as you see damage. These tiny bugs leave small patterns of holes in the plant leaves that look like a shotgun blast.

Stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are very destructive and attack tomatoes, peppers, okra and whatever else is handy. If I get started early enough, I can catch and crush enough of the beasts to minimize damage, but once they get out of hand it's hard to kill enough of them to save my crops. That's when I put a couple of tablespoons of Dawn dish washing liquid in a gallon of water in my pump sprayer. There are other things that can be added such as garlic or hot pepper that will repel other pests. The thing is, because the stinkbug's shells are so hard at this stage, you have to actually drench them in order to kill them. Still, it's satisfying to see them fall from the plant and die.

For our purposes here, we'll assume that anything worm-like that has fur is a caterpillar and anything worm-like that is smooth is a worm. Not to be confused with earthworms, which are very desirable in the garden. The main worm I have trouble with in my garden is the tomato horn worm. They are very large, green, have diagonal white stripes on their sides and have a hornlike tail. They can strip half the leaves from a mature tomato plant overnight and they are hard to see, since they are the exact same color as the plant stems. Every time I find one, I throw it as far from my tomatoes as I can and I haven't had one return, yet. Other worms that affect garden crops are smaller and even harder to find.

To treat or prevent worm problems, I use Bt, Bacillus Thuringiensis, in a spray, often when I'm foliar feeding my plants. Thuricide is the brand I had available. Bt is a soil bacterium that occurs naturally. Basically, it locks up the pests digestive system, causing them to starve to death, but they have to eat it. Several applications over the season have always worked for me.

By the way, if you find a tomato horn worm with little white, elongated eggs on its back, leave it alone or move it to a sacrificial tomato plant. Those eggs belong to parasitic wasps that provide the best possible natural control for horn worms.

Ladybugs, praying mantis and many other predatory insects do a good job of controlling bad bugs in the garden and can be purchased from suppliers locally or online in early spring if you need to add them to your native supply. In my garden, I have lizards and toads as animal controls for insects. Once in awhile, I find a small garter snake. Natural controls are best as a balanced natural system.

The snake above is a rat snake. They eat small rodents and leaf bugs, both threats to the garden. I rarely see one, but they are keepers. Relocate them to another area if they make you uncomfortable. They will bite if forced to and it will be very unpleasant, but they are not venomous.

These two pictures are of a copperhead who took up residence on our front steps. He also eats small rodents and leaf bugs, but he bit Kathy on the foot and then had the nerve to keep coming back nightly at nine o'clock. Mothballs seem to have driven him away, and Kathy is almost fully recovered. Copperheads are difficult to relocate, since they travel fast and know the way home, but I feel that killing any snake should be a last resort. Copperheads or pygmy rattlesnakes close to the house, or around children or pets, may have to be killed for safety, but please be sure what you are killing. Harmless snakes are just that, and beneficial as well.

This is a garter snake, completely harmless to you, but very useful in and around the garden. Do not kill it. Garter snakes eat rodents and slugs, among other things and they provide food for a number of birds of prey.

Conclusion--For me, cost has been a major factor in deciding what pest control methods to use, but for a small garden, Neem oil, Bt and other natural products are really not that expensive. If you know what pests you have a problem with, researching and developing a strategy will make good use of an idle winter evening or two. If you are breaking fresh ground or building a raised bed in a previously unused area, generic plan would be best. For the first year of a new raised bed, there will be little problem with insects that overwinter in the soil. Replacing the upper layer of soil every year will lessen the problem even more. Row covers, row covers, row covers.

Important note--Before you spray or use anything that kills a wide range of insects, please check what impact it will have on bees and other pollinators. After two years in my current garden plot, and not using sprays, I still didn't have sufficient pollination. My health this summer prevented me from hand-pollinating my cucumbers and peppers, so I've had no edible cucumbers and very few peppers. This is becoming a worldwide crisis and we're not just talking about honey bees. There are many tiny insects, solitary bees (they live alone), wasps, hive bees and bumblebees that are essential to productive crops. Too many sprays simply wipe out everything, so be careful out there.

Stephen