potato beetles

[marbear]

the neighbor in our community garden has a bunch of fucking potato beetles and yesterday i found one on our poor tomato plant.

do we think i will be cursed with these nasty boys or will the tomatoes live?

[mbaxter]

I pray for beetle death!

[marbear]

they're mostly gone i think. will update

[510 Baud One]

Needing that update marbear

[KoD]

Dawn dish soap works great to kill bugs around my house. Idk if that would harm the tomatoes or not though...

[marbear]

hi friends, thanks for caring about my tomatoes. the potato beetles were indeed eradicated but now i'm being completely fucked by Mexican bean beetles on my green beans. i have covered everything in diatomaceous earth but it's too early to tell if that's helping. i have nasturtium planted nearby but the beetles don't seem to care. i know i have to pick them off individually i just haven't had the daylight hours to do so yet

[Django]

try spiders

[marbear]

the bean beetles nearly eradicated my green beans - but i was able to keep them just alive enough for the beetle season to pass and now my bean is coming back to life and making new flowers and beans! so proud of it and also feeling a little cocky because all of my garden neighbors ditched their plants weeks ago but mine has new life :P

[510 Baud One]

Long live your garden, glad to hear it. That is one of the things I look forward to when I become a home owner, is being able to grow food and spices in addition to having a workshop to build and repair things. Also I have not chat with you in forever, will shoot you a text a little later

[marbear]

Long live your garden, glad to hear it. That is one of the things I look forward to when I become a home owner, is being able to grow food and spices in addition to having a workshop to build and repair things. Also I have not chat with you in forever, will shoot you a text a little later

narrator: he did not text

[marbear]

pulled up my garden 2 weeks ago. to be continued next may...

[KoD]

Tellin ya, Dawn dish soap. Works great.
Better update us next season.

[marbear]

we got in our garden a couple of weeks ago, had to buy a bunch of tomatoes because our seedlings were stunted by a nutrient deficiency. They seem to be back on track now. We were worried we wouldn’t have a place to put them in the garden now but we’ve had quite the struggle even so far. First we had 3 tomato plants and 3 pepper plants fall victim to cut worms, and now we’re being plagued by potato beetles, much worse than last year. We think it’s because last years neighbor didn’t control her bugs at all. (It was bad, they were nightmarish). We put coffee grounds around the plants to help with the cut worms but the beetles don’t seem to care. We are going to neem them today — will potentially try dish soap next if it doesn’t work but there is a shortage of dish soap here unfortunately. We also have diatomaceous earth from last year but we think it blocks too much light so we are hoping the neem does it. The past few days we’ve been crushing them with rocks and it’s really nasty so I’d like to not have to do that anymore.

Aside from the tomatoes and pepper we have planted zinnias, spinach, a kale blend, cilantro, spearmint, lettuce blend, arugula, broccoli, oregano, wildflowers, zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers and probably some other stuff. We planted cosmos and green beans using seeds we harvested last year, and we have basil starts at the house using last years seeds too! One of them is this mutated three leaf basil and it’s really cute. We are planning to plant carrots but everywhere is sold out of seeds locally, we are trying one more spot today.

[KoD]

I wonder if the Basil will help keep pests away? Or perhaps some type of mint

[marbear]

We are doing okay with pests right now, the potato beetles are trying to make a comeback but the tomatoes are so robust that I’m pretty confident any damage won’t make a difference, we’ve only seen 7 or so in the past week anyway. They’re looking good though! The ones we bought from the store are huge, and the ones we started are catching up at a decent pace.

My mint won’t come up, I did a second planting of that and broccoli which also won’t come up. We usually don’t have any issues with carrots but only a few came up so I did an additional planting of that too. Everyone else is looking great!