Good morning, very interesting
observations in the garden this year, there seems to be an increase
of beneficial insects over last year. It was real comforting to know
that there were lady bugs through out the growing season. This is a
first since the hard drought of 2011.
I was really afraid with the use of Cold pressed neem oil that beneficial insects just might be collateral damage, and become scarce in the garden. I think I may have done a total of 5 or 6 garden wide spraying s this year. There was a pretty good flush of squash bugs along with cucumber beetles, but the grasshopper hatch was a bit over the top. Most of the above mentioned sprayings were to control the hoppers. A total of 3 spraying s every seven days were used to control them. After the second spraying you could pluck most of the hoppers off the leaves easily at mid day. The third spraying cleaned them up. Very few if any got to be adults, so I am hoping the hopper egg density will be non existent for next year. The spraying of neem oil was only done of an evening when most of the beneficial insects are less active.
Very interesting thing happened one harvest day when I found a large horn worm underneath the bell peppers. Silly me, I went into auto pilot and squashed him. It was cool to see it had been totally infected with parasites. Sad that they did not get to mature. I did find 5 or 6 horn worms under the tomatillos that were like empty sacks. So maybe I did not inadvertently kill all of this valuable asset. Such was not the case with the horn worms found in the sweet potatoes. No parasites in them, maybe next year.
It was interesting to note that I encountered very few wire worms this year while harvesting the sweet potatoes. Here again I was finding a lot of grubs and feeding them to my chickens, who went yummm. Sloooowly I began to take notice of these two observations and found a connection. Ground beetles of which most of the larvae were from these beetles, eat wire worms. Needless to say I have some unhappy chickens.
This year I cannot remember there ever being so many spiders to spin webs across paths only for me to walk through them in the morning. There were ground beetles, toads, praying mantis', garter snakes and the list goes on. I hope this is a sign of a happy little ecosystem that has become my garden.
I was afraid that by using a pesticide such as neem , I would throw the whole thing out of wack. This does not seem to be the case, it could be due to my reluctance to spray and only spraying when a pest population gets out of control. It is nice to know that I am a help as opposed to a hindrance to all my garden helpers.
As for my root knot nematodes, with the use of my drip system and very fertile beds, garden production did not seem to be impacted severely. It was interesting to see in two infected sweet potato beds I harvested a total of 252 pound of sweets. Not a great harvest but a good one. Now for the last bed that does not have nematodes, I have harvested well over 120 pounds out of only half the bed. I finally finished the sweet harvest. Total poundage was 531 with 279 being out of the last bed. A real awesome harvest!!
Next year because the drip system has worked so well I intend to not plant as many duplicate beds. This will allow me to solaraize more beds and get a very good handle on my root knot nematodes.
The fall / winter veggies are looking pretty good. It looks like I have some lettuce to list this week. Within the next couple of weeks I will start the Jerusalem artichoke harvest. I am going to be interested to see how well this crop did with a drip line. I may be able to harvest spinach soon also. One of my favorite greens Hon Tsai Tai pronounced Asian green is starting to put up flower stems. The leave stems and flower stems have a nice crunch to them, the leaves have a very mild mustard taste, and the flowers add a nice little touch to any tossed salad. They can be eaten raw, steamed, sauteed, added to soups or stir fries. A wonderful versatile green.
No comments:
Post a Comment