2023, gardening, home, Nature, Science, Uncategorized

Scientific Method II: Weeds And Pests

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Our gardening goal this past week was to weed the veggie gardens and flower beds. After today’s carpal tunnel surgery, Husband will be somewhat out of commission for outdoor work.

Many people we know use the good old hoe to weed. That system has never really worked for us, as the weeds grow back so fast, so we are down on the ground puller-uppers and digger-outers. It is more labor intensive, but works much better. We also put down wet newspapers between the veggie rows and cover them with top soil. That method keeps weeds down all summer, and the newspaper disintegrates and can be tilled into the soil and improves the soil texture. It is a lot of work, though.

We don’t use herbicides at all, and only spray a fungicide called Daconil on tomatoes, roses, peas, peonies, and monarda to prevent powdery mildew and black spot. We use bacillus thuringiensis, an organic pesticide for cabbage worms. When the flea beetles attack the brassica veggies I will use Sevin, but most other insects are free to live in the garden unharmed. Bunnies just are kept out with fences. Our next door neighbor has threatened to get his shotgun and dispatch the rabbits in his yard. I would never go that far. We have never had problems with moles or voles.

Flea beetles are horrible, with hundreds of the tiny creatures showing up overnight devouring every thing in the cabbage family they can find. The flea beetles are often used as an organic solution to an invasive plant around here called leafy spurge. It is poisonous to cattle. People somehow catch a bunch of flea beetles and take them out to patches of spurge, and the flea beetles, who have a great love of spurge, eat it up. I think that is really cool! I just wish they would stay in the pastures and not come to town.

Would you consider yourself a scientific gardener? What are your preferred methods for weed and pest control? What are the worst insects, pests, and weeds you have encountered?

34 thoughts on “Scientific Method II: Weeds And Pests”

  1. One bedbug. It came home with my sister from her trip to San Francisco. We paid $1000.00 for whole house treatment. Used up my quarters bin for laundry. Peace of mind can be costly.

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  2. Daughter picked up fleas doing intensive on-home therap. They infested her car as well as her apartment. I think she had to vacate her apartment for a night when the exterminator set off a bug “bomb”.

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  4. I’ve mentioned that I’m not the real gardener here, and at this point no one is using the scientific method. Preferred methods include real weeding, as described by Renee, where you actually get the roots. For the ants I’ve finally resorted to Terro.

    My roommates and I encountered fleas when we moved into a San Francisco apartment – woman before us had several cats. To his credit, Owner took care of it with a flea bomb, if memory serves.

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  5. I have used Bt (Bacillus thuriengensis) on Spruce budworms and other munching worms that like to eat up trees and garden plants too. Unfortunately, like other control methods, it also works on desirable species. It can kill the larvae of lots of pollinators so I learned to use it sparingly and in a specific location, monitoring results frequently and looking for all the species that might be affected.

    I don’t use anything anymore, scientific or not. If I get more aphids than I can handle with my fingers or a spray of water, I just remove the plant and try to keep them away from the rest of the plants. I do have an old spray bottle of Safer’s Insecticidal Soap. It helps a bit. I hope it doesn’t harm other species.

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  6. I’m a more organic than scientific gardener. Truth be told, I’m not very scientific about anything, including cooking. Through years and years of observing, experimenting, reading, and listening I’ve accrued a fair amount of general knowledge that helps me navigate the world as I know it.

    The first time I encountered a cockroach was in Moscow. On my very first night there, only an hour or so after arriving, I was sitting on the toilet in our apartment, a new high-rise building, when a lonely roach came marching across the floor. Having never seen one before, I mentioned it to Mr. Ege, my employer, and asked what it was. He shrugged and told me what it a cockroach and that they were pretty much everywhere. He had been there a few months by then, and was pretty familiar with them. I wasn’t thrilled when I learned I was going to be sleeping on an air mattress on the floor for the ensuing three weeks. I imagined roaches marching all over me while I was sleeping. If they did, I was oblivious; they never stung or bit or hurt me in any way.

    They were all over the second apartment I lived in at the American Embassy as well, or possibly those were Russian spies. If they were, I dispatched a fair amount of them by whacking them with my Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandal. Not very scientific or efficient but pretty effective.

    Our second apartment in Carbondale was in an old house that had been divided up into six different living quarters. Our kitchen was lined with cheap wood paneling. At night, when lights were out, we could hear the roaches scurrying around behind the paneling. There must have been millions of them to make that much noise. We just learned to coexist with them, trying to eradicate them seemed futile.

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    1. I remember cockroaches in our neighbor’s apartment in Brooklyn – she never did her dishes, was my theory, as we didn’t ever see them in ours… Then in Mpls. a landlord brought in a “pre-owned” stove, and it was full of them. He replaced it pronto…

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      1. The only place I’ve seen them is on the house boat we rented in Charleston. But the owner called them Palmetto bugs… you know, fancy cockroaches.

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  7. Back to my childhood: all are gardens, there were many, were in rows wide enough for the cultivator drawn by a draft horse with me on top starting as a small child, a painful spread of the legs. The cultivator went deep. Otherwise my mother, who found solace in gardening, loved to hoe, but pulled some out by hand, such as thistle. She used a powder on potato bugs. I don’t remember her using any other chemicals. We spread rotten manure over the gardens every other year or so, which brought in weeds. Her flowers by the house got special attention.
    I wanted to garden but have never been in a position to do so. I had lots of flowers in our first house here. I loved when I was down on my knees pulling weeds and passersby would tell me to tell my wife she had a lovely garden.

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  9. Flea beetles are smaller than seseme seeds. I guess they use large, finely woven nets to catch them.

    OT- surgery went well today for Husband.

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        1. Chiding is a particularly ineffective approach in our household, with either of us. Good luck. A gentle reminder that what he has gained in expedience may well be paid for in long-term suffering may be more effective. But you know Chris a whole lot better than I do.

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  10. Pests and bugs are good subject today. I know that there are bugs in the house. I don’t think it’s possible to keep a house 100% sterile but I don’t like to think about them. And I really don’t like them to bite me on the back in the middle of the night. I assume it was a spider. It got me twice the other night and I woke up with it already itching and bothering me. Thank goodness for Campho-Phenique although it’s in a place that is hard for me to reach so it does require some assistance from YA. And I certainly hope that I roll over and killed it at some point during the night.

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  11. Not even remotely scientific in the garden. In fact, the last couple of years I’ve had trouble with brown bottom on the tomatoes. Talked to a lot of different people, including master gardeners at the fair, the father of straw bake gardening and even folks over at the U Ag center. Pretty much everybody said the same thing – inconsistent watering. And that just did not ring through for me. So I kept looking and kept looking, and I finally did find two or three places that said sometimes tomatoes have trouble with too much nitrogen, which of course is what we used to get the straw bales ready to go in the spring. So I am assiduously adding calcium this year in the form of ground up egg shells, and also a tomato calcium additive around the base and so far so good. Keep fingers crossed.

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  13. Iam awake and functioning now. This year I am trying zucchini again after getting tired of the squash worms. I will be injecting BT, already mentioned by Krista in the heart of the vine to kill the destructive parasite.

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  14. Not scientific, although you could probably make it so, I have learned the pressure washer with the ‘zero’ degree nozzle on it will shred weed leaves, and even pulverize a burdock stalk if held close enough and held there long enough. I amused myself with that yesterday…
    Keep your hands and body parts away from the stream! Adult supervision required!

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  15. Yesterday I had a single solitary Japanese beetle on a Nanking cherry shrub. I knocked it into a pail of water and left it to its fate. This seems weird – I haven’t had Japanese beetles for the past two years or so, but when I have seen them, they’ve come in hordes, so I’m wondering if there will be more.

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