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Today's Question: How do I keep bugs and such out of my vegetable garden?
If growing your own food was easy, everybody would be doing it. The sad truth is that all your hard work can be eaten up by little foes smaller than your pinky nail.
The latest trend in human medicine is illness prevention by healthful living and conditions. So too with your crops. Strict garden cleanliness will go a long way towards keeping away pests that are bred by lodging places for the breeding of insects.
Heaps of waste are incubators for garden killers. A compost pile will do no harm, but unkempt, uncared-for spots do invite trouble.
People see Uncle Flabby every day or so, out in the garden seeming to mindlessly hoe and rake every furrow in the lot. It's far from what it seems. The constant turning of the soil keeps it open to air and water. Sometimes it brings to the surface, pests that will be eliminated by birds. The constant stirring up of the soil by earthworms is also an aid in keeping the soil open to moisture and fresh air.
Many of our common birds feed upon insects. The sparrows, robins, chickadees, and orioles are all examples of birds who help in this way.
Some insects feed on other and harmful insects. Some kinds of ladybugs do this good deed. And toads are wonders in the number of insects they can consume at one meal. The toad might look ugly but he or she is a noble warrior and ally in your battle to grow the best fruit and veggies.
Uncle Flabby advises that all gardeners should try to make her or his garden into a place attractive to birds and toads. A good birdhouse, grain sprinkled about in early spring, a water-place, are invitations for birds to stay a while in your garden.
Put a 'Toad Abode' in your plot. During a hot summer day a toad likes to rest in the shade. By night he is ready to go forth to eat. How can you make a Toad Abode? Well, one thing to do is to prepare a retreat, quiet, dark and damp. A few stones of some size underneath the shade of a shrub with perhaps a carpeting of damp leaves, would be better than a Holiday Inn to a toad.
There are two general classes of insects known by the way they do their work. One kind gnaws at the plant really taking pieces of it into its system. This kind of insect has a mouth fitted to do this work. Grasshoppers and caterpillars are of this sort.
The other kind sucks the juices from a plant. This, in some ways, is the worst sort. Plant lice belong here, as do mosquitoes, which prey on us. All the scale insects fasten themselves on plants, and suck out the life of the plants.
Now can we fight these rats of the insect world? In most cases poisons and such should be avoided. But if you have to, these gnawing little punks may be caught with poison sprayed upon plants, which they take into their bodies when they chomp on the plants.
Sometimes we are much troubled with underground insects at work. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. Here is a remedy, but one of which you must be careful.
This question is constantly being asked, 'How can I tell what insect is doing the destructive work?' Well, you can tell partly by the work done, and partly by seeing the insect itself. This latter thing is not always so easy to accomplish. Your writer, Uncle Flabby, had cutworms one season and never saw one. I saw only the work done. If stalks of tender plants are cut clean off be pretty sure the cutworm is abroad. What does he look like? Well, that is a hard question because his family is a large one. Should you see sometime a grayish striped caterpillar, you may know it is a cutworm. But because of its habit of resting in the ground during the day and working by night, it is difficult to catch sight of one. The cutworm is around early in the season ready to cut the flower stalks of the hyacinths. When the peas come on a bit later, he is ready for them. A very good way to block him off is to put paper collars, or tin ones, about the plants. These collars should be about an inch away from the plant.
Of course, plant lice are more common. Those we see are often green in color. But they may be red, yellow or brown. Lice are easy enough to find since they are always clinging to their host. As sucking insects they have to cling close to a plant for food, and one is pretty sure to find them. But the biting insects do their work, and then go hide. That makes them much more difficult to deal with.
Rose slugs do great damage to the rose bushes. They eat out the body of the leaves, so that just the veining is left. They are soft-bodied, green above and yellow below.
A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and squash leaves. It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running lengthwise.
Then there are the slugs, which are garden pests. The slug will devour almost any garden plant, whether it be a flower or a vegetable. They lay lots of eggs in old rubbish heaps. Do you see the good of cleaning up rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other single insect pest.
Beside these most common of pests, pests which attack many kinds of plants, there are special pests for special plants. Discouraging, is it not? Beans have pests of their own; so have potatoes and cabbages. In fact, the vegetable garden has many inhabitants. In the flower garden lice are very bothersome, the cutworm and the slug have a good time there, too, and ants often get very numerous as the season advances.
A common pest in the vegetable garden is the tomato worm. This is a large yellowish or greenish striped worm. Its work is to eat into the young fruit.
Tend to your garden everyday. Water your plot just as the sun is going down. Tomatoes love water. Give them plenty every day at twilight.
Good luck and happy vegetable plucking and picking
from your
Uncle Flabby.
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