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| Yesterday's harvest from the front yard. |
Even though the garden still is fairly bursting with good food, it is time to begin the transition to cool season crops, which will provide fresh vegetables in winter.
Showing posts with label pickleworm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pickleworm. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Vegetable Abundance
Even though the garden still is fairly bursting with good food, it is time to begin the transition to cool season crops, which will provide fresh vegetables in winter.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Attack of the Pickleworms
My garden has been attacked by pickleworms before, so this is nothing new, but can I just say that I am not happy to see them? Luckily, so far they are not in the zucchini or melons, but they like those, too.
If your cucumbers have been attacked, what you'll see on the outside of the cucumber is likely to look a lot like this:
If you slice into the cuke carefully, you may find the whole caterpillar. Of course, you might also find just half the caterpillar, which is a little disconcerting.
Since I don't like to use much in the way of pesticides in my garden, my options for controlling the problem are limited. One year, I thought I'd try covering the plants at night, then uncovering them in the morning. Since the worms are the babies of a night flying moth, covering them at night would keep the moths away from my plants.
It turns out that I don't love cucumbers enough to go to all that work - I would forget to cover them at night, and sometimes, when I'd managed that, I'd forget to uncover them in the day, which meant the new flowers didn't get pollinated.
If the rain would hold off for a few days, I'd spray the plants with Bt for caterpillars, which is supposed to not harm any other kind of insect, but the weather-radar this afternoon is showing little storms all over the Southeast, several of which are pretty nearby, and one of which is pouring water all over my yard right now.
The real trick would have been to get the cucumbers planted earlier, so my harvest-window would be longer, but the cool wet spring delayed planting, and my garden was plagued by crows as the seedlings began to show above ground. The crows kept pulling them up, and I kept replanting them. It may be a miracle that we have any fresh-garden cucumbers at all!
The good news, sort of, is that the onslaught of pickleworms coincides with some other cucumber-related problems. Even if I could keep back the pickleworms, there's still downy mildew, and we have some cucumber beetles, too, eating the leaf tissue while leaving behind a netted lace of the leaves' veins.
Sometimes, the best thing is to prepare to say "goodbye" to the cucumbers. While I wait for the other problems get worse, I will be trimming away the wormy spots, to get as much good cucumber as possible for as many more cucumber salads as I can.
If your cucumbers have been attacked, what you'll see on the outside of the cucumber is likely to look a lot like this:
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| Evidence of pickleworms: Pale green frass and little round holes. PHOTO/atlantaveggies.blogspot.com |
 | ||||
Actual pickleworm, tucked neatly into a cave of his/her own making.
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It turns out that I don't love cucumbers enough to go to all that work - I would forget to cover them at night, and sometimes, when I'd managed that, I'd forget to uncover them in the day, which meant the new flowers didn't get pollinated.
If the rain would hold off for a few days, I'd spray the plants with Bt for caterpillars, which is supposed to not harm any other kind of insect, but the weather-radar this afternoon is showing little storms all over the Southeast, several of which are pretty nearby, and one of which is pouring water all over my yard right now.
The real trick would have been to get the cucumbers planted earlier, so my harvest-window would be longer, but the cool wet spring delayed planting, and my garden was plagued by crows as the seedlings began to show above ground. The crows kept pulling them up, and I kept replanting them. It may be a miracle that we have any fresh-garden cucumbers at all!
The good news, sort of, is that the onslaught of pickleworms coincides with some other cucumber-related problems. Even if I could keep back the pickleworms, there's still downy mildew, and we have some cucumber beetles, too, eating the leaf tissue while leaving behind a netted lace of the leaves' veins.
Sometimes, the best thing is to prepare to say "goodbye" to the cucumbers. While I wait for the other problems get worse, I will be trimming away the wormy spots, to get as much good cucumber as possible for as many more cucumber salads as I can.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Pest Control: Cucumber Pickleworms
Planting time is a good time to think about pest control, so I looked up the UGA fact-sheet on growing cucumbers and found a warning about cucumber beetles—keep them under control (through unspecified means) because they spread disease. That could be a useful warning, but I am pretty sure I have never had a problem with cucumber beetles. My pest problem in cucumbers is cucumber pickleworms .
Last year, the cucumber pickleworms had a very good year, and my cucumbers had a correspondingly bad year. Almost all of my cucumbers had the little shot-holes that show where a larva has eaten its way into the fruit. The little pests were also worse than usual at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden where I volunteer, so I know the problem was not just in my yard.
I have a copy of The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control , and when I realized the cucumber harvest was in serious jeopardy I checked the pickleworm section for advice. One suggestion was to plant a “trap crop” of yellow squash, since the pickleworm likes those even better than it likes cucumbers. The other advice was to plant early maturing varieties of cucumbers so that a good harvest could be brought in before the pickleworms totally demolished the crop.
This advice might have been useful a couple of months earlier (at planting time!), but it didn’t help much at the time. However, spring has come around again, and I have another chance. I am not changing my cucumber varieties, though, because they already are varieties that mature fairly early, and I don’t really have the space for trap-crops, other than the zucchini that usually keels over before the onslaught of the pickleworm, so I am hoping for a different solution.
The Pickleworm Management page from North Carolina State University, recommends the use of Sevin (carbaryl) to manage pickleworms. People who are averse to using pesticides (even this one which is a relatively safe chemical for home gardeners to use), are going to hope for another option.
According to the fact sheet Cucumber, Squash, Melon & Other Cucurbit Insect Pests from Clemson University, pickleworms don’t survive winter freezing, and the adults fly up from Florida each year:
It seems reasonable that when the Southeast has an early or unusually warm spring, or early, strong winds heading north out of Florida, the pickleworm damage might start earlier than usual, like it did last year.
A couple of those linked resources also mention that the parent of the pickleworm is a night-flying moth. This seems like information that could be used to thwart those pickleworms. I am thinking about covering some of my plants at night, to keep the moths from laying eggs on my plants, then uncovering the plants in the morning, so bees and other pollinators can get to the flowers.
This sounds like work, I know, and some of my cucumbers will be trellised and a serious hassle to cover up each night. So, I will leave the trellised vines uncovered and only cover the pickling cucumbers that will be sprawling on the ground this year. This way I will have both an experimental plot--covered-- and a control plot--uncovered-- (ignoring that they are different kinds of cucumbers), so the experiment may be able to tell me whether the nighttime covering makes a difference in pickleworm infestation.
I’ll let you know how the experiment turns out.
Last year, the cucumber pickleworms had a very good year, and my cucumbers had a correspondingly bad year. Almost all of my cucumbers had the little shot-holes that show where a larva has eaten its way into the fruit. The little pests were also worse than usual at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden where I volunteer, so I know the problem was not just in my yard.
I have a copy of The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control , and when I realized the cucumber harvest was in serious jeopardy I checked the pickleworm section for advice. One suggestion was to plant a “trap crop” of yellow squash, since the pickleworm likes those even better than it likes cucumbers. The other advice was to plant early maturing varieties of cucumbers so that a good harvest could be brought in before the pickleworms totally demolished the crop.
This advice might have been useful a couple of months earlier (at planting time!), but it didn’t help much at the time. However, spring has come around again, and I have another chance. I am not changing my cucumber varieties, though, because they already are varieties that mature fairly early, and I don’t really have the space for trap-crops, other than the zucchini that usually keels over before the onslaught of the pickleworm, so I am hoping for a different solution.
The Pickleworm Management page from North Carolina State University, recommends the use of Sevin (carbaryl) to manage pickleworms. People who are averse to using pesticides (even this one which is a relatively safe chemical for home gardeners to use), are going to hope for another option.
According to the fact sheet Cucumber, Squash, Melon & Other Cucurbit Insect Pests from Clemson University, pickleworms don’t survive winter freezing, and the adults fly up from Florida each year:
“In South Carolina, pickleworms starve or freeze to death during the winter. They overwinter in Florida and spread northward each spring. Severe damage usually does not occur before summer in South Carolina. Heavy populations generally do not build up before the first flower buds open; however, late crops may be destroyed before blossoming.”
It seems reasonable that when the Southeast has an early or unusually warm spring, or early, strong winds heading north out of Florida, the pickleworm damage might start earlier than usual, like it did last year.
A couple of those linked resources also mention that the parent of the pickleworm is a night-flying moth. This seems like information that could be used to thwart those pickleworms. I am thinking about covering some of my plants at night, to keep the moths from laying eggs on my plants, then uncovering the plants in the morning, so bees and other pollinators can get to the flowers.
This sounds like work, I know, and some of my cucumbers will be trellised and a serious hassle to cover up each night. So, I will leave the trellised vines uncovered and only cover the pickling cucumbers that will be sprawling on the ground this year. This way I will have both an experimental plot--covered-- and a control plot--uncovered-- (ignoring that they are different kinds of cucumbers), so the experiment may be able to tell me whether the nighttime covering makes a difference in pickleworm infestation.
I’ll let you know how the experiment turns out.
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