Gardening Information
I got my seeds, now what?
1) Go to World Food Garden to find the exact planting times for your zipcode. Planting at the right time for your area is essential for gardening success. While you are at World Food Garden, you will see they also have gardening tutorials, gardening mentors, and seed swaps all for FREE!
2) Container Gardening? Check out Urban Organic Gardener and Life on the Balcony. These websites offer support, advice and inspiration for people who garden in containers.
3) Left over produce from your harvest? Hop on over to Ampleharvest.org. On their website, enter yourzipcode and they will tell you the closest food pantry accepting donations. You will be able to share fresh fruit and veggies with people right in your own neighborhood!
4) Want to save seeds from your veggies to plant next year or to donate back to The Dinner Garden? Check out this detailed guide to How to Save Seeds from our friends at Home Grown Edible Landscapes.
5) Let us know how your garden turned out! We love to hear your gardening stories and see your garden pics! The more info you send us, the more we can share with our donors and help more people get growing! You can contact us at info@dinnergarden.org
Read about your summer produce here. You can find information on your fall produce here. We are in the process of adding this new information to the website, so we have plenty more to come!
Extension Offices
State extension offices are fantastic resources for what vegetables grow in a particular state, what diseases or pests have been seen in that state, and how to deal with gardening issues.
Battles with Pests
We at the Dinner Garden are live and let live kind of people. An occasional squirrel or possum chewing on our strawberries or tomatoes doesn't bother us.
We're happy to share. A few bugs nibbling on our leaves are perfectly welcome to hang around. Lately, however, we have been confronted by two pests that
aren't interested in sharing. They take out the entire plant, before the plant has a chance to produce anything. These pests are the dreaded spider mite,
enemy of our tomatoes and eggplant, and squash vine borers, destroyer of our squash and watermelon.
Spider Mites
Spider mites, Tetranynchus urticae Koch, are very tiny (think eye of a needle) and have eight legs. They live on the underside of leaves. Check out http://insects.tamu.edu/fieldguide/cimg371.html for a good photograph of them and some detailed information on them. Spider mites pierce plant cells and suck out the contents. As you can imagine, large amounts of them will drain a leaf. Lightly infested leaves have green veins and yellow surfaces. Heavily infested leaves look white, like a vampire got to them. When they have infested a plant, they can kill it by draining all the leaves. The poor plant just shrivels up. The spider mites then use their silk to make little wind nets to drift to another plant. You can see the progression in these photos from an early case to severe. The leaves begin turning yellow on the surface, followed by a further draining of color, and ending with a white, shriveled tomato leaf. Sad isn't it?
Treatment of spider mites is tough for several reasons. They are tiny. They are numerous. Their little silky webs protect them. Hanging out under the leaf
keeps them clear of the hose, which could spray them off the leaf. They reproduce wildly; growth from egg to reproducing adult takes five to twenty days.
http://insects.tamu.edu/extension/bulletins/uc/uc-030.html has some
information on controlling spider mites. We have been using Neem Oil with some success.
Neems isn't a chemical pesticide and is pretty cheap. We mix it with water and spray it on the underside of the leaves. On heavily infested plants, it
either didn't work on the plant was too far gone. On lightly infested plants, it is keeping the spider mites in check. Spraying it on plants with no
infestation has kept them clear of the spider mites.
We have had great success treating for spider mites, other mites, and aphids with insecticidal soap. It washes them right off the leaf. It isn't a poison, so it isn't harmful to humans, pets, and other insects. Of course, if you buy some, read the label to make sure whatever you have isn't mixed with a pesticide. Insecticidal soap works by dissolving the waxy shell of insects like mites and aphids and their eggs. That means you can spray it on your vegetables and your plants up until the day your harvest them. Just rinse the residue off your vegetables before you eat them, since it doesn't taste good.
We tried two different methods of treatment with insecticidal soap. First, we made a homemade batch with 1 tablespoon of Dawn mixed with 1 gallon of water. We sprayed it on the leaves in the evening, and all the mites just washed off. Great, eh? Well, here's the downside. Plant leaves also have a waxy coating to help them retain moisture and to protect the plants from the sun. The homemade insecticidal soap removed that waxy coating along with the mites. All insecticidal soap has this risk, but the homemade stuff was a little too aggressive.
We also purchased some insecticidal soap. It worked very well on removing the spider mites, but not quite as well as the homemade soap. On the other hand, the leaves kept their waxy coating, so we got rid of the mites, and the leaves weren't damaged, so score one point for the home gardener. Incidentally, insecticidal soap from the store is engineered for this purpose. The soap in the home recipe is meant to clean dishes, so it dissolves everything.
If you go with the home version because hey, it's cheap and who doesn't like cheap, try it with less soap first, then work your way up to what works on your particular problem. For either method, follow these tips.
- Only spray it on the parts of your plant with the problem. It doesn't prevent mites so no point in spraying it everywhere.
- Try to avoid the tops of the leaves if you can. The top of the leaf has the waxy coating.
- Spray the plants in the evening. Sunlight will make the soapy leaves sizzle.
- Ten minutes after your spray the plants, rinse them with fresh water. This gives the soap enough time to take care of the mites and lessens the impact on the leaves.
You can also use the insecticidal soap to remove squash borer eggs and mites that go after other plants like your melons. It also works on white flies that attack cucumbers and squash!
Squash Borers
The squash vine borer, Melittia calabaza, looks kind of like a wasp with metallic olive-brown forewings, clear hind wings with a brown edge, and a bright red abdomen with black bands. We haven't seen them flying around. However, we have seen their larvae up close and personal. They have segmented white bodies and tiny, dark brown heads. We saw some that were half an inch long and one big one that was over an inch long and a quarter inch wide. Gross.
The adult female squash borer lays her eggs on the leaves and stems of a squash plant. The larvae then hatch and bore into the stem of the plant where they eat and grow to full size. They then leave the plant, burrow a few inches into the soil, and pupate, which is when the larvae transform into the adult squash borer.
That whole process would be just fine with us except for the fact that the larvae eat the stems of the squash plant so thoroughly that the stem dies. They seem to really enjoy being at the base of the squash plant, so when they eat through the stem base, the entire plant dies. Essentially, they hollow out the stem base from the inside, girdling the plant, which means all the plant cells that transport water and nutrients from the roots to the stems and leaves are destroyed.
So how do you fight squash borers? By the time the plant wilts, you're too late. If you miss the adults flying around, you won't be aware that they have laid eggs on your plants. The good and bad news is that the larvae leave behind trails of excrement, called frass, on the squash vines. It looks like sawdust. Check around the base of the plant and on the large stems for the frass. It is hard to miss.
After the larvae have invaded your plant, you don't have too many options. Spray insecticides don't work because the larvae are inside the plant. One solution is to slice open the stem at the point you see the frass, find the larva, and remove it. Be sure to dispose of the larva. If you are careful, you can cut out all the larvae from the plant without damaging the vines too much. The pictures in this section show a zucchini plant after we removed larvae from the stems. You can see in the first picture how most of the plant wilted after surgery. The close up shows the plant stem base where we slit it to remove the larvae. When doing this on your squash plants, after you have removed the larvae, bury the cut vines in the dirt. The nodes on the squash vines will form roots to support the plant.
For less invasive options, certain nemotodes are also supposed to be effective against the larvae. You inject the nemotodes into the vine at set intervals. The nemotodes then kill the larvae. We may try this option in the future.
We are working out some solutions to prevent the problem and will let you know how successful we are. Most of the stuff we've read says chemical insecticide works with limited success. We prefer not to use chemical insecticide anyway. According to some literature, insecticidal soap may work when sprayed on the leaves and the vines. It smothers the eggs before the larvae can hatch and do their damage. One article we read said we should place aluminum foil under the stems. The adults only lay eggs during the day, so the sunlight bouncing off the foil distracts them and keeps them from laying eggs. We also read that vines should be allowed to run along the ground and be covered with dirt on some of the nodes to encourage the growth of multiple points of roots to support the plant. Then, if you have to cut a vine to remove a larva, the plant has a better chance to recover.
Squash Borer Update!
We grew several varieties of winter squash this summer. The squash borers were vicious, but we were partially successful. Here were our steps.
- We monitored our plants and removed eggs by hand. Insecticidal soap was great for this because it dissolved the sticky stuff that attached the eggs to the vines.
- When we missed eggs, and we missed a lot, we saw the frass on the vines that indicated squash borer larvae had invaded the vines. So, we had to cut the vines to remove the squash borer larvae. We used a sharp knife and only cut as much as we needed to get them out. All the plants managed this surgery fine.
- Finally, as the squash plants grew, we buried vines in the dirt to encourage them to root at each node. We would always check them for eggs and frass before we buried them.
After all that work, we still lost several plants! The plants that didn't make it were the varieties that didn't aggressively shoot out vines and the varieties that didn't toughen their stems at the base. The cucurbita maxima types, like Atlantic Giant Pumpkin, couldn't tough it out. Cucurbita pepo, like New England Sugar Pie Pumpkin, faired better. We still have many plants growing, so we'll give you a final update later in the year!
We are now thinking that row covers will be the way to go to prevent the investations. Pollinators don't need to get to the plants until the flowers emerge, so the plants don't need to be exposed until then. That would give us plenty of time to bury vines and get them established before a squash borer could even breath on the plants. Then, with surgery to remove invaders and with continued burying of the vines to support the plants, we could probably be 95% successful with our crop!
Treating for Snails and Slugs
As we've said before, we're happy to share our gardens with insects and other critters who want to snack on our plants. However, when they become pests by destroying our plants, it becomes time to lower the population and restore harmony to our gardens.
Case and point, the snails and slugs have been devouring everything in our gardens. You will recognize the problem in your garden by the big chunks taken out of the leaves of your plants. Snails and slugs eat the whole leaf, so you're not looking for brown leaves, speckled leaves, or skeletonized leaves. If you look on your soil in the more shaded areas, you'll find the snails and slugs hiding out during the daytime hours.
Fortunately, taking care of them is easy and cheap. Just mix 1 cup of flour, 3/4 water, and a couple pinches of yeast in a small bowl to make a thick batter. Put that bowl in your garden by the plants with the snail and slug infestation in the evening. It's kind of gross, but the next morning, you'll find a lot of dead snails and slugs in your batter.
The next evening, make sure the batter hasn't dried out, give it a stir, and add more water if needed. You'll have more snails and slugs trapped the next morning. Do this a couple more days, then dump the whole mess in your compost bin.
This treatment will lower the population significantly for several weeks. The next time you see a big increase in snail and slug damage, just put out another batter trap for a couple days. This is a simple, cheap, and safe way to deal with the problem and keep your plants growing!
Tomato Diseases
We are growing a few heirloom tomatoes here, and, unfortunately, our Tigerelle variety has been plagued with some kind of disease. We used the Tomato Problem Solver from Texas A&M to determine our plants have either Bacterial Canker or Verticillium Wilt. Both don't appear to be treatable. Bummer.
Check out the guide if you are having your own tomato problems! It covers diseases, viruses, physiological disorders, and insects.
Corn Pests
The University of Missouri published this fantastic guide on Corn Insect Pests. It contains everything you could possibly want to know about the bugs that may try to eat your corn. It has a lot of pictures, so you can determine what insect is eating your corn.
Some of our corn is being attacked by the Stalk Borer. We are trying treatment with insecticidal soup and Neem oil by pouring the mixture down the center of the stalk.
Cheap Greenhouse!
We've had some requests for how to build a cheap greenhouse. With a greenhouse, you can extend your growing seasons a couple months. We found one that can be built for under $25. It uses PVC pipe, which you can get at any hardware store for very little cost. You also need the primer, glue, and zipper ties for putting it together. Finally, you need plastic sheeting for the cover. The plastic sheeting is actually the most expensive part. Unfortunately, we don't have cheap alternatives to the plastic. The plastic is the cheap alternative to plexiglass. We would use black plastic on the north wall of the greenhouse. You'll retain more heat that way. You'll also save on cost because you can use black garbage bags for that wall.
You could use milk jugs and soda bottles for the walls, but you would need to save a lot of them! Just glue them together with the opening facing inside. If you keep the cap on the jug, you'll have better insulation. This site has an example of this type of greenhouse, but we envision using PVC, since that would be cheaper than the wood frame. The video below will show you how to build the PVC and plastic sheet greenhouse!
World Food Garden promotes personal gardens, so people can truly eat locally grown
produce. Most produce travels hundreds or even thousands of miles, so it isn't as fresh as it could be picked straight from the garden.
The World Food Garden website has a map of small
food gardens on which food gardeners from around the world profile their gardens. Gardeners can also trade seeds, knowledge, and general
inspiration. They offer information on what grows in your area, when to plant it, and how to take care of it.
Disclaimer
The Dinner Garden has reviewed the information on these websites and believes they contain valid and useful information. However, as these websites are run by third parties outside the control of The Dinner Garden, we do not guarantee any products or services offered by these companies. The links to the information contained on these websites are provided as a public service with the understanding that The Dinner Garden makes no warranties, either expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, reliability, or suitability of the information. Nor does The Dinner Garden warrant that the use of this information is free of any claims of copyright infringement. The Dinner Garden does not endorse any commercial providers or their products.