Dirty Business: Pest Control

If you’re going to grow a vegetable garden, then you’re definitely going to have to deal with all kinds of pests.  I’m not talking about the neighbor or family member who jams you every year for fresh produce.  I’m talking about pests that destroy your crops.  They come in a variety of forms, from birds to mammals to bugs.  So, we’re going to—very briefly—go through some pest types and what Mrs. Butcher and I do to keep them at bay.

Pest #1:  Birds.

Birds, generally speaking, are great.  They sing, they have pretty colors, and they eat from our various and sundry bird feeders which is fun to watch.  However, certain birds can be a real problem when it comes to fruit crops.  We have a small blueberry patch which we have to make sure is harvested right on cue because the birds (especially, my favorites:  the orioles) will strip those bushes clean in no time.  The past couple of years I’ve tried to keep them away by installing a wren house near the blueberries because wrens don’t eat fruit and they chase away other birds.  But, this year, no wrens have come to take up residence.  So, we got some bird netting from Johnny’s Selected Seeds.  The netting is 30’ x 14’, so it won’t cover all the way to the ground, but it will cover enough to flummox the birds.  If I just draped the netting over the bushes, it wouldn’t do any good.  The birds could still land on the bushes and eat most of the berries.  So, instead, I needed to sink some 1’ x 1’ posts in the ground and drape the netting over the top.  Then I wrapped the netting against itself along the sides and tied them together with twine.  The result is that probably 80% of the berries will now be out of the reach of the birds.

Next year, when we start harvesting the strawberries, we’ll have to do something similar, but we’ll probably use chicken wire because the squirrels can chew through the netting.

Yes, Blue Lou Marini, chicken wire.

Pest #2: Mammals

There are all kinds of mammals which can decimate a garden, but probably the two most common are groundhogs and rabbits.  You know you have a groundhog problem when you leave the house for a few hours and when you return your garden has been completely annihilated.  Rabbits tend to be more judicious in their eating habits than groundhogs, but can still do real damage.  Because our current garden is grown in a series of landscaped beds, rather than a rectangular flat area, we had to make certain compromises to address both problems.  In the past, when we had rectangular gardens, we just ran a length of rabbit guard fencing around the perimeter and then lined both sides of the fence with cinder blocks to keep the groundhogs from digging underneath.  Well, we can’t do that here, so instead we had to build cages for some of the plants. 

These cages aren’t made from rabbit guard because rabbit guard is designed to be used as a fence, with smaller holes near the ground and larger holes near the top.  We needed something that was uniform so we used galvanized fencing to deal with the larger and more immediate problem of the groundhogs.  We don’t cage everything because as voracious as groundhogs are, they won’t eat certain plants:  most herbs, anything from the onion family, and tomatoes.  The cages are movable because we rotate our crops each year, and we designed them to have wire doors on the tops so we can easily get in there to harvest or mulch.  They’re not pretty but they do the job.  We haven’t had a problem with the groundhogs in a few years.

But, as you can see, the holes are large enough to let smaller mammals through, such as a certain little bunny to which Butcher Dog alerted me recently.

You’ll notice, however, that this little guy isn’t munching on the basil leaves in the bed.  That’s because we thought ahead when going with the cage system and planted a bunch of clover seed all over the place.  There’s a clearer picture of the clover in the first picture of the cage, above.  Bunnies prefer clover compared to other things like herbs or cabbage, so if there’s an abundance of it, then they’ll go for that first.  So far, so good.

Pest #3:  Aphids

Mrs. Butcher was looking at what has now become an officially invasive crop of cilantro when she noticed that it was covered in aphids.  Now, being the sensible person that I am, I saw no problem with that because the foulness of the cilantro would very likely poison the aphids.  But, where there is one aphid, there are thousands—and they don’t restrict themselves to only eating disgusting garbage like cilantro.  For instance, take a look at these tomato plants:

Now, we could certainly have sprayed everything with an insecticide and be done with it, but we try, as much as possible, to use organic means in our garden.  So, there are no better destroyers of aphids than ladybugs.  I did some research online for suppliers and decided to go with Nature’s Good Guys.  I’m very happy I did, too, because when FedEx screwed up and wrecked our shipment, Nature’s Good Guys immediately shipped out a fresh box.  They could see by the FedEx tracking that it was stuck in Memphis (probably because they damaged the box and now they have 1,500 ladybugs running roughshod in their warehouse) so there was no back and forth with trying to justify the 2^nd shipment.  You can order ladybugs (or really any variety of beneficial insects) by the quantity which will be appropriate for the size of your garden.  The total cost, including shipping, for our 1,500 ladybugs was around $36.  Once they arrived, Mrs. Butcher and I immediately put them to work.

Here’s the thing about releasing ladybugs into a garden:  you can’t just open the bag and shake them all out and expect them to form ranks to seek and destroy the aphids.  If you do that, then the ladybugs will just fly off and you’ll have wasted your money.  Instead, it is a very deliberate process of slowly depositing them on the plants where the aphids are so they can see the food source and stick around.  It’s also important to do this either at the beginning or the end of the day when they are less active and therefore less prone to taking off.  We did this at 5:00pm.

The ladybugs come in a bag and you’ll need to cut a small hole in the corner to let them out in a controlled manner.  Mrs. Butcher cut a hole that was bout ¾ of an inch in size.

Then, you have to hold the bag gently, so as not to squash any of the bugs, and hold the bag near each plant where you want them to go and wait for them to find their way out.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “herding cats.”  Well, try herding ladybugs.  This process is not as easy as it sounds.  The first thing is that the ladybugs tend to keep crawling on the outside of the bag, rather than immediately grab onto the plant.  So, in order to get them where they need to be, we would use a combination of scraping the bag along the edge of a leaf to get the ladybug to grab it, and—when there were too many at one time on the outside of the bag—gently flicking them onto the leaves.  Once they’re on there, though, and they spot the aphids, they’ll stay there until they have eaten their fill.  Quite a few of them fall off and land on the ground, but that’s still fine because they can hunt there as well and still find their way back onto the plants.

Notice those really tiny red bugs on the leaves?  Those are predatory red mites.  They are not to be confused with red spider mites.  In fact, red predatory mites will eat spider mites, so they are another beneficial insect.  However, they didn’t appear to have much of a taste for aphids so that’s why we got the ladybugs.  We don’t have to concern ourselves over the ladybugs eating the red mites instead of the aphids because—generally speaking—beneficial insects don’t interfere with each other.

All told, we spent an hour getting the ladybugs distributed throughout the garden.  I did a fairly quick pass through the tomatoes, eggplants, cabbages and strawberries so I could make sure they all got some.  Then I did a more thorough depositing of ladybugs in those beds on the second round.  When I got down to probably the last couple of hundred ladybugs, I cut a larger hole in the bag to help the stragglers get out more easily.  When I was down to probably the last 20-30, I just ripped the bag open and tapped them down onto the plants. 

The next day I took a look and there were still quite a few ladybugs hanging out in the garden, so they’ve found enough food to keep them busy.

I’m thinking that next year we’ll order some nematodes from this supplier to eradicate all of the underground grubs, cutworms and even detrimental bacteria.  They sent a catalog with the ladybugs, so you can bet I spent a lot of time poring over the possibilities.