The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

While inspecting my garden today I ran across some very cool looking structures on the underside of a leaf. I could tell immediately that they were lacewing eggs. The thin stalks each holding up a tiny white egg on its end was a dead giveaway.

The eggs are held up on thin stalks about 1/4″ to 3/8″ tall.

Lacewings are a good ally to have in your war against insect pests because they are a major predator of aphids and other soft-bodied insects like mealy bug, mites and even small, newly hatched caterpillars.

It is the larva stage of the lacewing that terrorizes the other small insects, especially aphids.

If left alone, aphids can rapidly overwhelm a plant by sucking the juice out of a plant’s leaves and stems.

Lacewings eat so many aphids that entomologists have nick-named them “aphid lions”. A single lacewing larva can eat over 200 aphids a week. The adult on the other hand, eats only nectar and pollen.

Depending on the weather conditions, the lacewings will stay in the larval stage for about two to three weeks devouring small insects all the while. When the time is right, they then spin a cocoon and emerge five days later as an adult. The adults mate and the females lay their eggs on the underside of a leaf. About four or five days later the eggs hatch and the cycle starts over again.

Watch for lacewing eggs on your plants and avoid spraying insecticide when you find them. Let them do their work and they will reward you by building up their population and eating even more insect pests.

Bob

We’re seeing the first flea beetles in the garden this season. These tiny pests can cause a lot of damage to small plants if they’re not knocked back early on.

Usually the first thing you see when flea beetles enter your garden is the distinctive chewing pattern they make on the leaves and not the beetle itself. Flea beetle damaged leaves are riddled with small holes.  Imagine what would happen if a garden fairy took its tiny shotgun and blasted away at the leaves, that’s what flea beetle damage looks like.

The beetles themselves are black and less than 1/16″ long. They sometimes will jump, sort of like a flea, when disturbed.

Like many insects, they have their favorite foods. In our garden eggplant and potatoes are the first to be gnawed followed by tomatoes then all of the other vegetable plants.

Numerous small holes are indicative of flea beetle damage. Vigorous plant s are usually able to shrug off a flea beetle attack.

The greatest danger to the garden is when the plants are small and growing. At that young stage flea beetles can stunt or even kill plants. As the plants get larger, they can sustain much more feeding by the beetles.

Fertile soil and timely watering will help plants stay healthy and grow past that vulnerable stage.

A homemade concoction made from garlic and hot peppers will fend off the beetles for a while. Take a half dozen cloves of fresh garlic and crush them up. Add the garlic along with a tablespoon of dried, crushed red pepper to a quart of water. Let it steep for a couple of days. Strain the mixture. Spray it onto your plants every three days or so to chase away the flea beetles.

If you have a really bad infestation or a big garden, you can use any garden spray or powder that is labeled for killing beetles in the vegetable garden. Organic gardeners can use that old stand-by rotenone. Pyrethrum or spinosad, both considered organic insecticides, are good too.

Bob

If you see a rather large, black wasp with an iridescent blue tinge and brilliant orange ring on its body. Kill it quick! Spray it, swat it, stomp on it. It is the adult female of the peach tree borer.

This insect is not really a wasp, it just looks like one when you first glance at it. If you look closer at it you will see it doesn’t have that distinctive pinched body shape like a wasp.

A peach tree borer moth zooms quickly when it flies, very similar to a wasp. Most moths we see sort of bounce around when they fly, much like a butterfly. None of that lazy zig-zagging around for them. So actually, it won’t be very easy to stomp on them.

I spotted both male and female adults separately. Then a day or two later, I witnessed a pair mating. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me either time to get a photo for you to see.

It is not the adult that directly harms peach trees, it is the larval stage that does the damage. The adult female lays its eggs on the bark of the tree near the soil line.

Once the egg hatches, the tiny larvae start chewing their way into the inner back. There they feed and grow, burrowing their through the lower trunk of the tree. You can imagine how destructive this can be to a tree. The tree is either weakened so much that it becomes susceptible to other pests or it may, more likely, die outright from the damage.

Since the adults are mating and laying eggs right now, you may want to try using a preventative insecticide spray. Drenching the truck and lower branches with an approved insecticide may kill the newly hatched larvae before they have a chance to bore into the tree.

Once the borers are inside the tree, they are protected from sprays. At that point the best thing you can do is look for holes in the lower trunk made by the borers. Scrape away the bark and feeding debris. Be gentle, you don’t want to cause even more damage. Check the spot in about a week. The active areas will have new frass and other debris. That’s where the borers are living.

Make a vertical cut through the borer hole then poke a piece of thin wire into the feeding tunnel. If you’re lucky you’ll kill the borer. It’s a lot of fussing around but you may be able to save your tree.

There is another similar insect called the lesser peach tree borer that feeds higher up on the trunk. The adults look somewhat different but are just as destructive.

Bob