tomatoes - good news and bad news

soon-to-be-ripe cherokee purple tomato

The tomatoes have been ripening quickly. The first cherry tomatoes only took about two days to go from pale green to red!

BUT - I had trouble with blossom end rot and sun scald. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on - I did see a few insects on the plants, and I blamed them at first. But after cutting into every bad tomato that I picked, doing lots of googling, and talking to some farmers, I think it was just that the blossom end rot and sun scald created opportunities for insects. I also put yellow sticky paper up around the tomato bed. I would recommend this because it showed me which flying insects were hanging around my tomatoes. Turns out there wasn't anything damaging in large numbers, just some flies.

small spot of blossom end rot (seriously, in bad cases it basically covered the whole tomato)

what the blossom end rot looks like on the inside. In every case, it went much deeper than it
looked like it would on the outside.

First - blossom end rot. It is caused by calcium deficiency in the soil but also by watering at night. This is the third year I've grown tomatoes and I have always watered them at night and never had this problem. But now I know. I tried eating the parts that didn't look damaged by blossom end rot, but they are not tasty.

two tomatoes with blossom end rot - the one on the left was picked early, before the rot spread
and before insects took advantage. The one on the right was picked late,
after the rot spread and insects binged on it.

Second - sun scald. I think this was caused by the long stretch of very hot weather we got. These were just small spots and if I brought the tomatoes right when they began to ripen, bugs didn't get to them. So I was able to just cut off the sun scald and eat the tomato anyway.

tomato with two spots of sunscald

Two things for next year: I am going to plant repelling flowers like marigolds and borage around the tomatoes. I may not have insect trouble with tomatoes this year, but as I've said before, I'm going to be much more proactive next year. Second, I thought with 20 tomato plants designated for canning, I would have an easier time getting large amounts of fruit ripened at once. So far I am getting a handful of tomatoes every day. In addition, I began examining the canning books to see how many tomatoes you need for a pint of tomato sauce. It is a lot! I think it was 10 pounds per pint. So, I will actually at least double my tomato plants next year, or plan my garden for summer eating and buy a ton of tomatoes direct from a farmer.

I must say I was very relieved when I determined that the tomato problems were not caused by insects. I am upset about losing the squash, but I would be DEVASTATED if I didn't get the tomato crop I wanted. For the last couple of weeks I have been able to bring in lots of perfect tomatoes so I'm feeling hopeful!

birds as insect management

I know that experts on integrated pest managment will probably think this is way too obvious - but I had an epiphany the other day when touring a neighbor's garden. I pointed out hundreds of squash bug eggs and babies on her squash plants, and she wasn't concerned. She said that they always have them but they don't cause any problems. I wondered how this could be, and she said "the birds eat them!" At that moment I paused to listen to my environment and I heard the chattering of several birds, dozens probably, in her gorgeous tree-shaded yard. I noticed the bird bath and the bird houses scattered around. Returning to my garden, I heard.......nothing. For some reasons I don't have any birds in my yard!

Now I want to get birds into my garden, pronto! We do have one tree nearby but we will have to add a few nice homes (different types to attract different birds), places for the birds to rest in the actual garden, and a place or two that will provide them water. We are going to work on that this weekend, and I want to pick up a few bat houses while we're at it.

Of course, then I might have a problem with birds eating my garden, but I guess like everything else I will worry about that later.

squash update and new trellis

Although I said I was giving up on the squash, you knew I wouldn't be able to totally do it. I'm not inspecting the leaves the way I was, but I did decide that if the plants were trellised, it would be easier to find and remove bug eggs. My spouse and I together designed this tent-style trellis that will be easy to store and easy to put up next year. The squash plant seems to love it - though I did have to uproot some of the areas where it attached, it has grown quite a bit since we put the trellis up.

This is the trellis, modeled by two watermelon plants.

I'm considering trying to grow squash again - just once more. If I do, I will be extremely proactive about insects and I won't add any new vegetables, so I can focus my attention and energy on successfully growing squash. I know now the importance of checking your garden every day - I would train the squash (so it didn't grow through the neighbor's fence), inspect it, put out insect traps, etc.

However, the squash plant that had the large fruit set on it is officially dead. It was looking pretty bad near the root, but one of the vines still looked strong, so I put extra dirt around its root and gave it some water in hopes that it would become the new root. Each day it looked worse and today, the large fruit had fallen off. It's been 10 days since we performed squash surgery, so I don't know if the plant died because of the surgery or because we didn't find all of the borers. The other plant that we found about a dozen small borers in looks really good - for now - though it doesn't have any fruit set.

The zucchini is still growing strong and we've harvested several. A summer squash that I planted later is growing slowly - maybe it is working on its roots or maybe it doesn't like the heat wave we've had.

(7/28)

squash surgery

We tried the surgery to salvage the squash last night. I don't really care about the zucchini plant but I will be sad to lose the galeux d'eyesines squash. I'm excited to try them, and I was really hoping to be able to give a few to friends and family. They travel better than tomatoes or spinach. So we're going to do what we can.

leaves wilting like this is one of the signs of squash vine borer larvae in your plant.

Galeux d'eyesines squash with evidence of squash vine borer larvae damage near the root - see the orange sawdust-like substance? That shouldn't be there.

zucchini with same stuff

We went outside with a small knife, the bucket of water, toothpicks, and gloves. My spouse used the knife to cut vertically above the holes where we could see the orange strawdust-like substance that squash borers produce.

The plant felt pretty strong - it was actually difficult to cut into, which is good news (less damage so far). But, we couldn't find any caterpillars (squash borers at larvae stage). We moved on to the zucchini - same thing.


When he cut into the last plant, the second winter squash, we found about a dozen teeny-tiny caterpillars. I really couldn't even see them from where I was standing - they were about the size of a short grain of rice. We also found one large one, about an inch long. He would scrape them out, then drop them in the bucket of soapy water. The toothpicks came in handy here, since they were so small it was hard to get them with the knife. After he had scraped everything rotten out of the plant, we declared the surgery over and I put a shovelful of rich dirt on top of the wound. This makes the plant more likely to live through the harrowing experience.

photo of an out-of-focus small borer larvae on a toothpick.

Now that we'd seen them, we went back to the other two and tried again. We still couldn't find any on the zucchini but we found a few on the other winter squash plant. They made it through the night without collapsing, but I expect it will take a few days to know if they really lived through the surgery. And of course we have no idea if we got all of the borers or not. I was noticing a few other places I thought we should check, so we might be performing surgery again tonight...

Update: the plants all lived through the surgery, but we didn't get all the borers. I think the problem was that the plants were so big by the time we did the surgery, and the roots were so stocky and thick that we just missed them with our cut. It's also possible that new eggs hatched. Twelve days later the second plant died, which was the one with the big fruit on it. I do not expect the third plant to live because it had serious damage and I had to remove the main root. The photos below show the borers and the shredded roots a little better. But, it's still there two days after these photos were taken and the plant is still alive, so maybe there is reason to hope.




If I plant squash again, I will use an aggressive strategy to prevent the borers. They seem like a more serious problem to me because they completely killed two of our plants before we got any produce from them. At least with the squash bugs there's a better chance that you will get to collect a little on all of your hard work. I will use trellising, wrap the base of the plant in foil, put out yellow pans filled with water, sprinkle diatamaceous earth, and spray neem oil. At this point I am not sold on row covers - they seem like more trouble than they're worth because they also keep out pollinators. I haven't heard good things about them from the forums I've read.

I might wait a few years before trying squash again in hopes of discouraging the borers from hanging around my garden - but then again, there was no garden in this spot for several years so I'm not sure this will help. The only reason I'm still considering this is that I'm certain the yard was sprayed using artificial chemicals, probably excessive amounts in last two years. I think it's possible that in the process of transitioning this space of land from conventional to organic, I've been hit hard with insects that were being suppressed unnaturally and unsustainably prior to us. I don't actually know if this is how it works but it seems plausible.

squash update - it's not good

I had a post written over the weekend about how well my squash was doing. It was growing so fast!

zucchini

It looked beautiful!

galeux d'eyesines winter squash

I already had fruit set!

(can you see the baby winter squash hanging on the vine?)

But things change quickly.
First, I saw a couple of clusters of small reddish-orange balls on a couple of my winter squash leaves.


I didn't know what they were and I found them right before I went to Saturday market, so I took a couple of photos and asked the MGs and my farmer about them. They were squash bug eggs, probably one of the most common problems affecting squash. They can really devastate a crop, so I knew I would need to go home and remove them. I tried scraping them off with my gloved hand, but they are too small and sticky. I then tried using a paper towel soaked in soapy water, but what worked best was just scraping them off with my fingernail. Honestly, it grosses me out to think that they are bug eggs so I just pretend like they are little clusters of seeds - that is what they feel like so it works. Anyway, I put a bucket of soapy water under the leaf because some of the eggs fall right off, and I want them to land in the bucket of soapy water. Plus when they stick to my fingers I just dip my fingers in and they fall right off. I know some of the eggs landed in the dirt, and I don't know if they will still hatch or not - but there wasn't much I could do about it so I tried not to worry about it.

(close-up of recently hatched squash bugs and their eggs)

As soon as I started looking for more, it went from bad to worse. I ended up spending FOUR HOURS searching my four squash plants for egg clusters. They were on the underneath of several leaves, so it took careful attention to detail. It was quite laborious, but I felt like I got them all. Occasionally I found a group that were recently hatched, which was even grosser to me because they look like spiders. I had a serious arachnophobia when I was younger and though I am much better now, I still have a visceral reaction to the sight or thought of spiders. Generally when I put the bucket of soapy water underneath them and brushed them, they fell right into the water. Some of them ran away and I just tried to squish them.

Then of course I went out the next day and found a couple hundred more. Evidently the bugs are egg-laying machines, so it is important to take a three-pronged approach - kill the eggs, kill the babies, kill the adults. I heard if you put a board on the ground, the adults will sleep under it so it is a relatively easy way to kill a bunch of them at once (I've tried this and never found any underneath the 5 or 6 boards we laid out). Another way to find adults is to spray the plants with water around the roots (where they hang out, away from the light) - they don't like being wet, so they crawl up the leaves to dry off. I've been doing this every morning and generally find two or three.

Then, the second problem. While I was out there, I noticed one of the plants was really dead. The leaves were all yellow and limp and it was obviously done with life. I pulled it, and it came right up as though it wasn't attached to anything! Upon further inspection, the plant was rotted at the base of the stem. I came inside and searched and quickly figured out that it was squash vine borers. Although my other three plants (two winter and one summer) seem healthy, I thought I should go check on them...and I can see that they look similar at the base of the vine too.

It doesn't seem like there's much I can do at this point - obviously you can't reverse the damage, and it looks so bad to me that I would be surprised if the plants live. But I suppose it's worth trying. So far, there's a lot more about preventing than getting rid of them: kill the adults before they lay eggs (put out yellow pans filled with water. They are attracted to the color yellow but then they fall in the water and drown), or kill the eggs before they hatch and burrow into the vine (They look like small black dots).

The only option at this point is emergency surgery - cut a slit in the stem where you can tell the borers are doing their damage, and kill whatever borers are inside. The surgery could kill the plant, but it will die anyway, so it's really the thing to do. I guess it's better than nothing. So frustrating!

When I was 8 years old I had a small garden, and I grew watermelon and pumpkins but never got to enjoy the fruits of my childish labor because of the squash bugs. I think I am just not meant to grow squash!

tomato problems

We moved to our current home in the middle of summer...probably not too late to plant certain things, but late enough that I decided to wait until 2011 to get the garden going. I did however bring one tomato plant from Oregon. This well-traveled tomato plant made it through the 2300 mile car trip and after initially doing poorly, ended up producing quite a few tomatoes. However, we had quite a few problems with it that I wanted to document so that next year I might avoid them.

First, we bought the seedling from a vendor who had several varieties of heirlooms, someone we had not patroned before. I was told this was a green zebra, but these tomatoes are just typical red tomatoes. They look like they could be heirlooms but I'm not certain. Lesson: be careful who you buy from!

Second, there was a pile of dirt in the corner of our yard that I used to pot the tomato plant for the long journey. My spouse told me it was compost, and I know little about compost so I thought 'great' and potted away. However, it didn't look like healthy soil to me. Since then I have learned that even it if was compost at one time, having sat in our yard for 5 years without new organic materials added...well, it was probably not high quality at the least and it was out in the open, making it likely to carry diseases like...

Third, blight. My tomatoes were so healthy last year that I had no idea what this was when I first saw it, but I found a list of common tomato problems and did a quick google image search for each one. And it was blight. I stuck the plant straight from its pot into the ground, so the soil was not amended with good nutrition. Not sure if this would have made a difference, but healthy plants are less likely to get disease. I'm not sure if this affected the quality of the tomatoes. The few that we ate were not very tasty. The others were eaten by...

Fourth, bugs and worms. Again, had no problems with these last year. Currently the leaves are covered in dead soil gnats. Supposedly the adults are not harmful but I need to figure what I should do to make sure that the larvae do not stick around. Luckily the planned spot for the garden is far away from where the lone tomato was planted, but I do not want to take chances. I did not see many other bugs, just a single stink bug, but something was eating the tomatoes from the inside. There were several worm holes. After the earliest tomato was eaten before fully ripening on the vine, I picked others when they began to show the slightest bit of red and then bring inside to finish ripening on the sunny windowsill, protected from insect invaders. But these seemed to get eaten from the inside out. I should have taken a picture, but I did not. Another weird-looking problem that I'm guessing was a bug or worm is that as they were starting to ripen, the formally smooth skin would be replaced by this weird spider web crack. Anyway, as an organic gardener I'm happy that bugs and worms want to eat my vegetables, but I'm only willing to tolerate so much.

The fifth problem was bees. I'm not totally sure this is a problem - it could have just been that the stress I imposed on the tomato plant delayed its productivity - but I want to watch out for it next year. Most of the blossoms would die and fall off rather than resulting in a tomato fruit. I don't remember this being a problem last year - I remember every single blossom being a fruit. But maybe I didn't watch it as carefully. Anyway, like everyone else I've been hearing that bees are getting scarcer, and living in a residential neighborhood with a few kids around there's always the chance that nervous parents are trying to get rid of them. (My thoughts on that are another blog post for another day.) I know a few others who garden so I will ask them if they've had any problems with pollination, but I plan on planting clover or some other plant that attracts bees close to the garden.