Another Bug

As Cindy was gathering the last of the Champion tomatoes this morning, she found another unusual looking bug on one of the tomatoes.

It was about 5 millimeters long, with a black body with a pattern of white and yellowish spots on the body and orange spots on the side by the head.

It was about the size and shape of a Lady Bug Harmonia axyridis, but the spots were the wrong color and pattern.
It was actually a very pretty bug, but the fact that we found it on the tomato plants was a matter of concern.

Southern Green Stink Bug Nymph

So, was it a beneficial bug, or was it the harbinger of another invasion of pests?

I posted these pictures on BugGuide.net and it was quickly identified as the nymph of a Southern Green Stink Bug, Nezara viridula.  This nymph is probably in its the second instar; eventually the adult bug will become all green with an elongated shield shape.  The pattern of dots on the nymph is where the wings will form on the adult.

With the identification we found that the bug is definitely not a beneficial bug and is considered "an important pest of vegetables and field and orchard crops, especially legumes and crucifers."

While we're not growing cotton or peanuts, we do intend to keep growing tomatoes and Cindy is just about ready to start her winter crops, many of which are crucifers.

I think Cindy has been feeding the birds too much; they should be eating some of these bugs.

Keelbacked Treehopper

Nymph

The San Diego County Cooperative Extension Farm & Home Advisor office came through with an identification of the strange looking bugs we found on our Iochroma plant.  Cindy dropped off a bag of them at the County Ag office last week and they have now been identified as nymphs of the Keelbacked Treehopper, Antianthe expansa.

The nymphs are these brown strange-looking, pig-snouted, spiny, wingless bugs.  The adults are a bright green color and can be mistaken for small leaves.

In addition to the Iochroma, their preferred food sources include other members of the Nightshade (Solanaceae) family:  tomatoes, tomatillos, potatoes, peppers and eggplant.  That's not good news for the garden, since much of our produce comes from these plants.

Infestation

Worse yet, other types of Treehoppers apparently like to lay their eggs in slits in the woody stems of plants so the species can over winter in the mild California climate, and the Iochroma plant seems ideal for this purpose.

So it looks like we'll have to figure out how to get rid of the nymphs before they become adults and breed even more of them to eat our vegetables.

Adult Keelbacked Treehopper

Hard to Spot Them

Strange Bugs

Iochroma

Our neighbor knocked on the door yesterday and told us that our purple Iochroma was covered with strange looking bugs.

We thought at first they might be aphids, but on closer inspection they looked different from the usual sort of aphid we have all over the Asclepia in the butterfly garden.

Ants tend the aphids for the honeydew they secrete, and these insects also had ants close by who appeared very interested in them.

The majority of the bugs were quite small, about two millimeters long, although there were a few larger ones about four to five millimeters.  The larger ones were rounder, with yellowish bodies and what appeared to be long, pig-like snouts.  They're pretty tiny, but they look like they should figure in a science fiction movie.

So what are these things?  Hairy aphids?  Punk versions of a Leafhopper nymph?  Pig-snouted, spiny sap-suckers?  

Cindy dropped a bag of them off at the San Diego County Cooperative Extension Farm & Home Advisor office, aka County Ag. this morning.  The entomologists there should be able to identify the bugs and will send Cindy a report by e-mail in a few days.  

They really don't look like anything beneficial, and there are a LOT of them.  

A Tasty Snack...For The Birds

Hornworm In Action

We were having lunch on the patio the other day when Cindy spotted a yellow bird among the leaves of the tomato plant nearest us.  The bird was a female Lesser Goldfinch, and at first we thought she was trying to add some salad in the form of tomato leaves to the Niger Thistle seed from our feeders.

As we watched her trying to hover in the air as she pecked at some of the leaves, we realized that she wasn't after leaves at all; she was after the enormous Tomato Hornworm that was chowing down on the tomato leaves.

She managed to take a pretty good chunk out of the Hornworm, but she flew away before she actually got the Hornworm off the branch, although that was enough to draw our attention to its presence.

Since we thought that was by far the best way to dispose of this pest, Cindy clipped the leaves off the tomato plant and left them, with the damaged Hornworm, under the bird feeder for the birds to finish off.  After about an hour, there was no sign of the Hornworm, so somebody took care of it for us.

Hornworm Down

A tasty snack for them and no more damage to our tomato plants.

A Story

While I was writing the series of posts about construction of the varmint panels, Cindy reminded me to add a power drill to the list of tools used to construct the panels.  You need that to drill pilot holes in the plexiglass and to drive the screws into the 1 x 1 wooden stakes.

 Years ago, when Cindy was constructing the very first set of panels, she first tried using nails to secure the plexiglass to the stakes.  That idea didn't work too well-- it was tedious, time consuming work and the nails tended to rust and pull out through the plexiglass, so she decided to use the zinc screws instead.  With the wider heads on the screws, they don't tear out of the plexiglass like the nails did.  You could also use 3/4 inch zinc wood screws with washers, too.

So she borrowed my electric drill to drill pilot holes in the plexiglass and drive the screws into the wooden garden stakes.

After she had driven about half a dozen screws in, I asked her how it was going and she told me she didn't think the drill was very powerful because it took so much effort to drive the screws in.

I took the drill, flipped the switch from "reverse" to "forward" and gave it back to her.

It worked much better in "forward", but she must have driven all those first screws on sheer arm strength and will power.

Cindy's Varmint Panels #6--Construction of the Panels

Construction of the panels is pretty simple.  You need a supply of 1 x 1 wooden garden stakes, hardware cloth, plexiglass and screws.  A power drill/screwdriver is really helpful, and if you have to cut any of the plexiglass, you will need a jigsaw or saber saw to cut it.  We've tried scoring and snapping plexiglass and it just didn't work for us.

The screws we use are zinc #8 3/4 inch self-drilling phil mod truss lath screws; the zinc won't rust and the wider head of this type of screw distributes the pressure over a wider area of the plexiglass and also is wide enough to capture quarter inch hardware cloth.

Panel With Center Support Piece

The number and size of panels you will need will depend on the size and shape of your raised beds.  Our first raised bed was roughly L-shaped and required a lot of carefully tailored panels to enclose it.  

Each panel consists of two upright stakes, two cross stakes to make the bottom and the center of the panel rigid, hardware cloth on the bottom and plexiglass on the top part of the panel.  Measure the distance between the PVC tubes you screwed to the insides of the raised bed to determine how wide each panel should be, or, if you haven't installed the pipes yet, construct the panels and then mark the location of the stakes on the inside of the raised bed so you know where to locate the PVC pipe.  The plexiglass and the hardware cloth must be screwed onto the outside of the stakes, otherwise the varmints can crawl right up the wooden stakes to get into the garden.  The smooth plexiglass on the upper part of the panel prevents them from getting a handhold at the top of the panel, and the hardware cloth below allows air to circulate through the garden.  

Leave about six inches of stake at the bottom of the panel to insert into the PVC tubes secured to the sides of the raised bed, and leave about two inches at the top.  We secure the panels to each other with twist ties at the top of the panel stakes to keep them in place but make them easily removable when we want to get into the bed to tend the plants or harvest the vegetables.

Your panels should be able to slide into the PVC tubes and fit behind the sides of the raised beds closely enough that most of your resident veggie-eating neighborhood critters can't squeeze into gaps and get at your plants and vegetables.  

Constructing these panels takes some work, but it means that you get to harvest the vegetables you've spent time and effort growing.  

  

Cindy's Varmint Panels #5--The Next Steps

The next step in construction of the anti-varmint system is to install your irrigation system connections, because those will probably have to run under the sides of the raised beds and through the hardware cloth barrier.  The final configuration of the irrigation system will have to wait until the soil is in the bed, but the connections should go in before the soil does.

Another step before the soil goes in is to use galvanized pipe strapping to secure PVC pipes to the inside of the beds in the corners and wherever you may want a support stake for a large panel.   These tubes will hold the panel stakes.  Tip:  make sure the PVC pipe you use is large enough for the garden stakes you will use to fit inside the pipe.  Also, wait to secure the PVC pipes until you've constructed the panels; it's easier to adjust them than it is to re-cut a panel.

For the first few years that we had this system, Cindy simply drove the stakes into the soil of the beds when she wanted to replace them after she had removed them to tend to the plants.  This became very tedious and she came up with this solution, which has made removal and replacement of the panels much easier.

This picture shows a corner with two panels inserted into their tubes.  

Then it's finally time to add the soil.  If your soil is as horrible as San Diego's soil, which is composed mostly of sand, clay and lots of rocks, it's well worth your time to buy some decent soil for your garden.    Cindy also enriches the soil each year by growing a cover crop that can be chopped up and mulched back into the soil to provide additional nutrients.  

Next: Construction of the Panels

Cindy's Varmint Panels #4--An Essential Tool

Since construction of the raised beds and the panels involves using a lot of hardware cloth, it's well worth the effort to get a tool that cuts through hardware cloth like buttah.

It's the SKIL Lithium Ion Power Cutter 2352-01.

It's compact, lightweight, holds its charge well and will zip through hardware cloth and save your knuckles while it's doing that.

Cindy wouldn't be without hers.

Cindy's Varmint Panels-- #3, Hardware Cloth, A Necessary Step

Once you have built the sides of your raised bed, the next step is to prepare the bottom of the bed before you add any soil to it.

If you used landscape fabric to kill off the grass under the bed, cut it out of the bottom of the bed, but leave the fabric under the sides of the bed and the surrounding walk way.  This will help keep grass and weeds from encroaching on the bed from outside the bed.  

We initially left the landscaping fabric under our first bed, thinking it would prevent grass and weeds from growing up into the bed.  However, we discovered that weeds weren't that much of a problem and the fabric was also preventing beneficial earthworms from entering the beds;  by cutting out the fabric from the bottom of the bed, earthworms are able to pass through and aerate the soil.  

The next step is even more important:  the bottom of the bed must be lined with quarter-inch or half-inch galvanized hardware cloth and it must be stapled to the inside boards of the bed.  

We did this with the first and second sets of raised beds we constructed, but when we built the raised beds in the picture above, we decided to skip this step, thinking it was overkill.  Because that bed is in shade much of the day, Cindy used a mylar mulch to increase the amount of light her green beans received.  Later that summer, she noticed that the bean plants seemed to be dying; when she inspected them, she discovered that gophers had tunneled under the bed and thus under the panels and chewed off the plants at the roots.  The mylar mulch had provided an excellent cover for their covert activities and the lack of hardware cloth on the bottom of the bed allowed them to do it.

That meant she had to dig all the soil out of the entire bed and retrofit it with the hardware cloth, not an easy task.  

We won't skip that step again.  

Cindy's Varmint Panels--From The Ground Up

Cindy uses a system of plexiglass and hardware cloth panels to exclude tomato-eating critters from the vegetable garden, but construction of the system starts from the ground up.

The first thing we did was to get rid of the grass lawn.  There are various ways to do this; since we planned to grow vegetables, using an herbicide was not an option, so we put down landscaping fabric to kill off the grass months before we planned to start constructing the system.

First Raised Bed

The next step is to construct the raised beds.  Using raised beds prevents varmints from digging under the panels to gain entry to the veggies on the other side.  The raised beds don't have to be too high--it's really a matter of how high you want them to be.

The first set of raised beds that we constructed was made from 2 x 6 boards stacked three high on top of each other, with 4 x 4 posts sunk in concrete on the outside of the boards every few feet to bolster the sides of the beds and insure that the mass of dirt in the beds did not cause the sides of the beds to collapse.  We also ran another 2 x 6 around the top edge to form a seat, but that proved not to be too practical for that purpose, as it's not really wide enough to sit on comfortably.

We used some plastic interlocking corners that allowed us to make them any angle we wanted, but we could have just screwed or nailed the corners together.  One thing we discovered with subsequent raised beds is that if you put your support posts on the outside of the bed, rather than on the inside, it makes it easier to construct the panel system and install the irrigation later.  

Ask us how we learned this.  

Cindy's Varmint Panels

We live on a canyon that is home to many different types of wild critters, from large animals such as coyotes, deer, Tree Foxes, raccoons and skunks, to smaller animals like the California Ground Squirrels, rabbits, canyon rats and gophers.  The problem with having a vegetable garden is that many of these animals also like the vegetables we grow.

Critters Like Tomatoes, Too.

We absolutely refuse to resort to poison to protect the garden from these critters, so that leaves exclusion as our only means of protecting the vegetable plants and fruit from the varmints that would love to eat them.

Cindy has spent a lot of time over the past fifteen years devising a system that will keep the vegetables safe from the varmints, but allow her easy access to the plants and the vegetables.  She has created a system of protective panels made from plexiglass and hardware cloth that do this pretty effectively.  

We were asked recently to provide some pictures of the panels so that the school garden program might be able to learn how to use similar panels.  I though it might be helpful to make that information available here, so I'm going to spend the next several blog entries talking about Cindy's panel system.

Please keep in mind that I hold the copyright on all pictures on this blog and they may not be used or reproduced in any form without my permission.  

Japanese Eggplant

Japanese Eggplants

I thought these Japanese Eggplants were very interesting looking, but it turns out that the spines are sharp and prickly, so they have to be approached with caution.

I love the variegated purple and white color of the skin of these vegetables.

Somehow, I suspect there will be an eggplant dish on the menu soon.