Gardening Gags, Tips, & Hacks

Discussion in 'The Green Patch' started by UncleMorgan, Jun 29, 2021.


  1. UncleMorgan

    UncleMorgan I like peeling bananas and (occasionally) people.

    Every gardener picks up little tricks to make the job easier, and the harvest better. It's nice to share them. This could be an interesting (& useful) thread...

    Here's my first contribution:

    Death Tape

    Nowadays most of the bugs are faster than I am, and have better eyes to boot. Since I refuse to use any form of chemical insecticide, I usually wind up having to chase the malicious critters down, wrestle them to the ground and beat their buggy little brains out with a stout cudgel.

    There is an easier way to get rid of anything from cutworms to assassin bugs.

    Tape: Any kind from transparent office tape to duct tape, as long as it's sticky.

    Just rip off a few inches, and touch the sticky side against the pest in question.

    Pull the critter off the plant, then fold over the tape to trap it securely.

    Then move on to the next bug. When the tape is full, dispose of it and start off again with another piece of tape.

    This works especially well with grasshoppers of any size.

    If you need some extra reach, you can make a tape stick to grab the little beasties, and then slap a small piece of tape over them before they can pull loose.

    Think "flypaper on a pencil."

    Tomato hornworms, if they manage to hide out long enough to get really large, will hang onto a plant so tenaciously that the stem will break before they pull loose. So the tape trick doesn't work well with them.

    But a nice pair of needle-nose pliers works just fine. Just grab & pinch. They'll come right off.

    Watch out for all the gooey slimy gooshey worm guts, though!

    Sometimes they squirt.

    Ewwwwwwww!
     
  2. kckndrgn

    kckndrgn Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I've used the tape method to some success. Works well with squash bug eggs to pull them off the leaf as well.

    My biggest problem in my garden has been squash bugs, so bad that even though I did no squash or cucumbers last year, I still had a problem this year. My solution which has met with some success this year, daily checks (sometimes 2x a day, morning & night).
    1) remove the eggs when found. A couple of ways this can be done: tape (as mentioned in the OP), Soapy water in a spray bottle (this loosens the eggs from the leaf and allows them to fall to the ground where beetles will eat them), remove the leaf from the plant entirely.
    2) kill any adults found, this is almost more time consuming than finding where they have laid their eggs. I move the plants around as much as I can to jostle them out, in addition spraying water at the base of the plant will cause them to come out so they can dry out. Killing can be done in a couple of ways, squishing them, cutting them with a knife or my favorite spaying with the soapy water. Soapy water takes longer to kill them but they are still dead.

    I have been cutting the leaves off of my zucchini and squash plants as long at the plant is healthy and I don't cut too many off. this has a benefit of opening up the plant and allowing more pollinators to the flowers. I then put the cut off leaves in a bucket and burn them once a week.

    Over the past couple of days the number of adults and egg clutches has been reduced. I may not get all the squash bugs, but killing as many as I have I'm hoping to have really made a dent in the number that show up next year. Couldn't believe how well the soapy water works!
     
  3. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    Found that carrying a spray bottle with some ice and water in it makes tomato horn worms stand their front half up when misted with it and loosens their grip considerably. Also if you having trouble finding one that mist making them stand up reveals their location :)

    I used fly strips stretched between a couple pieces of wood spikes just above ground level under the yellow squash, zucchini and cucumbers and catch the hell out of the nasty grey squash beetles, also sprinkle a generous amount of DE at the base of each plant. Damn things like to come up and feed and lay their eggs on the leafs but go back down and hide in the base. Also use bait plants for them, above all else they seem to love blue hubbard squash so I plant a few of those with intent of nuking them with sevin on the hubbards on a regular basis.

    DO the same bait plants for the Japanese Beetles, they go for the giant pussy willows before anything else and just swarm them. And again when they swarm the pussy willows they get nuked with the sevin. Been years when they were so bad we had a ring of them 4" deep around every pussy willow and they that many stink to high heaven when they rot.



    I use sevin because bugs can't develop a resistance to it and it breaks down to inert in 24-48 hours in sunlight.

    Bad grasshopper years I gave up and just started using netting on the things they like to destroy most, which seem to be my bell pepper plants.

    On a high humidity day when heavy smoke will stay low to the ground, smoking the gardens drives a lot of pest insects out of the garden, in particular the nasty little white flys that love carrots. a nice smouldering pile of green hickory does a very good job and the bugs seem to hate the hickory smoke more than any other wood. Must make the leafs taste bad as well because they stay away for a week or more after a garden smoking. Makes green cabbage worms fall right off as well. Tomato Horn Worms must like it though since the are like "yeah baby lay some more of that smoke on me!"

    Don't buy the expensive Food Grade DE, instead buy the Livestock and Ag grade DE that most elevators that sell feed and supplement carry. $60 per 50 pounds VS $12 per 50 pounds and they kill bugs equally as well. Best to use DE low though as it kills all bugs including the pollinators like the Bees if it gets on them from the flowers. Same with the Sevin spray.
     
  4. UncleMorgan

    UncleMorgan I like peeling bananas and (occasionally) people.

    Thanks, Thunder5Ranch.

    Super post, you tricky devil, you!
     
  5. Gator 45/70

    Gator 45/70 Monkey+++

    Planted 2,Recovered 16,Used compost and cow paddy's chopped up for fertilizer.

    Cow paddys,The other fertilizer!

    20210626_170014.
     
  6. kckndrgn

    kckndrgn Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I was out in the garden this week, doing my daily squash bug check and I noticed something about using DE. On Sunday morning, I did by bug check and put DE around the base of each plant. This is where the nymphs (babies) seem to move to and where the adults like to hide. Well, I must have covered one of the adults with a bunch of DE cause the next day I found a DE covered adult on one of the leaves. I know that DE kills by cutting up the exoskeleton, and it can take time. In this battle for my plants, a day or two is too long. That bug got a nice soapy water bath and was dead a minute later.
    DE may be good, but for me a day or two is too long for killing these bugs.

    This year I've opted to use cattle panels and incorporate them as trellises and arches. I have my cucumbers, some squash, beans, peas and cantaloupe on the trellises. I noticed last year I had a cucumber plant grow up a tomato cage, it made the harvesting of the cucumbers so much easier. Same has been true this year, no more digging through the leaves looking for cucumbers and finding them days after they have matured.
    My biggest issue with the trellises was that a couple were installed too high from the ground, I had to wait for the plants to get big enough for me to get them trained to go up the trellis.

    Planted 6 cabbage in the spring, was able to only harvest 1, bummer. Between worms and other bugs, it was a bust on the cabbage, starting another round soon for a fall harvest, then will plant a third round to grow over our "winter".
     
  7. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    On the squash the initial damage usually looks a lot worse than it really is. So in most cases you have more time to deal with a beetle infestation than you think. Its when the eggs hatch and you have a bazzillion of them where the real damage happens. The DE is much more effective on the young beetles, the adult beetles have a much harder exoskeleton to slice up. Best to just spray heavy with sevin BEFORE they make flowers and kill as many of the breeding adults as you can. If you eliminate 95% of the breeding adults right off the bat keeping the remaining ones under control is a lot less work and the DE much more effective. You will also find that they will tend to attack a handful of plants hard and barely touch others, concentrate your efforts on the plants the like the most. A adult hard shelled squash beetle does take 3-4 days for the DE to kill vs 10-12 hours for a young one that has not developed the hard shell.

    You are actually much better off leaving the fence or cattle panels 8'-10" above the ground. Just have to wait and train the plants onto them. But makes weeding 1000x easier goes digging through pictures............. And as usual can't find the ones I am looking for but here is cattle panels with Juliette Grape tomatoes growing up them Cattle panels here are all 8" off the ground. 7' T post with 6' above ground, looks shorter in the pic cause I am standing on the kubota deck to get above them. But the panels and post are permanent and I rotate This spot with Juliettes, then Cumbers the next year and Blue Lake Stringless pole beans the 3rd year and then back to Juliette's again. Takes a little time to train the plants to the panels with the gap but saves hours of weeding by not having to walk both side and still have to hand pluck the base of a fence or panels.

    Cabbage worms Use BTK or BT powder its a natural bacteria that won't harm the plants and is harmless to humans and mammals but makes the worms guts explode inside of them. Great on Kales, Cabbage, Broccoli, cauliflower etc. Stuff is cheap and a can of it goes a long way.

    If you are real cheapskate like me, use zip ties to secure the tomatoes to the panels, just insert the end of the zip opposite of what it should be and they hold firm enough to keep the vine up and a tug pulls the end right back out instead of connecting the way yer supposed to and the end locking in. Get 3-4 years out of a zip tie that way LOL.
    67820071_2431426196895835_8565107615149850624_o.
     
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  8. UncleMorgan

    UncleMorgan I like peeling bananas and (occasionally) people.

    I've had a major problem with leaf-rollers for years. They can demolish my bean plants faster than a plague of locusts.

    The moths lay their eggs in huge numbers, then come around and do it again a few more times at intervals.

    The eggs hatch out into tiny worms that grow to an inch or more, eating all the way.

    The worms cut a leaf at the edge when small, roll the cut piece over themselves, and tie it down with silk. That's how they hide. Every time they outgrow their hiding place, they move a short distance away, then cut and curl over a larger piece of leaf.

    Eventually, they'll roll a whole leaf over on one side.

    Then they start stitching overlapping leaves together.

    I've sprayed with pepper water, soapy water, and soapy pepper water. I've hand-picked them in their teeming billions.

    I could barely keep up with them, at best.

    This year I have bean plants out the kazoo. Fat juicy bean plants with foliage so thick you almost can't find the beans.

    So far, I've found one large clutch of newly-laid worm eggs, and one or two very small roll-overs--freshly cut--but not a single living worm.

    It's a miracle.

    Either that or it's the horde of geckos that have moved into my garden and started eating every bug in sight.

    They're everywhere. The bugs just don't stand a chance.

    They showed up after I put a lot of containers of standing water out in the garden, among the plants, and let a whole bed grow knee deep in weeds and wild flowers.

    That was for the bees. I'd seen four bees in my garden in the last three years. Before the big bee die-off, they showed up by the buzzing dozen as soon as I started bottling up a batch of mead.

    What's good for bees is apparently good for geckos.

    The standing water and flowers seem to have worked: I've been seeing bees six or more at a time out in the garden, and everything that needs pollinating is getting pollinated.

    There's also a species of micro-sized wasp getting in on the flower action. Definitely pollinators. I'd never seen them before.

    So now everybody's happy--except the bugs.

    The water pans I use are old oven drip pans like this:

    drip pan.


    I get them for pennies from yard sales & thrift stores. They have a zillion uses around the old homestead, and they last forever.
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2021
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  9. Thunder5Ranch

    Thunder5Ranch Monkey+++

    Make yourself a little flowing stream. I have mine tore out at the moment but it is basically a 28"wide ditch with a 100' liner and two 175gpm ornamental pond pumps at each end. The bottom end is just a 2' deep pool of water with a push pump in it to send the water back up to the top and the top pump is in a 3' deep 12' diameter pool of water with a 6' tall waterfall in it that the second pump pushes the water up to. Primarily use the waterfall to keep the water aerated. The top pool and bottom pool are just big round plastic stock tanks from TSC. Mrs T5R wants more little pools and something other than plain old limestone rip rap for the stone work :) But when it is installed and running it attracts lizards, frogs, salamanders and birds by the thousands and even find snapping and painted turtles hanging out in it. There is a very notable decline in the pest insect populations when it is flowing down the middle of the garden on the edge of the woods. LOL probably due to the thousands of toads, frogs, snakes and lizards that it attracts. Drawback to it is it also attracts squirrels, coons and possums.
     
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  10. kckndrgn

    kckndrgn Monkey+++ Moderator Emeritus Founding Member

    I pulled most of by squash & zucchini this weekend. Bugs, bugs and more bugs, needless today, they met their end in my firepit!
    Here are some examples from my cantaloupe plant:

    I started using a portable shop vac and vacuumed the bastards then drowned them in soapy water.
    My cucumber plants are suffering as well, something is killing them off, can't win for losing.

    I am getting a bumper crop of tomatoes and green beans right now. starting seeds for fall harvest now.
     
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