It’s August and everybody’s vegetable gardens crank out delicious organic food. Yum-oh! But sometimes gardeners find holes in the middle of the leaves of their vegetable crops. Large holes. Many of them. Who’s the culprit? Caterpillars? Grasshoppers? Beetles?  Or maybe snails!

Snails and slugs both glide through your garden on a ribbon of slime, the shiny, sparkly stuff the snail in the photo above is leaving behind. At bottom left you can see the slime glistening on the ground. These animals are mollusks, related to oysters, clams, and octopus.

A trail of dried slime across the large hole in this green pepper is the definitive clue. A snail or slug definitely made this hole. Anytime you find holes in the leaves or fruit of your vegetable plants look for slime. Slime, this incontrovertible evidence tells you who to blame. And then you know how to fix it.

If you catch the buggers red-handed in the act of destroying your produce you don’t even have to search for evidence. This slug has just devoured the side of a friend’s tomato. Yuk!

But often, you can’t catch them in the act because they hide in the heat of the day. They come out at night, on overcast days, during rain storms, or when the sprinklers come on. They like it cool and wet and they hide under boards and pots – in any cool, shady, damp place where they can survive the mid-day sun and heat.

You can go out into the garden at night with a flashlight and hand pick snails easily. Just pick them up by the shell put them in a brown paper bag. Then you can step on it to crush the critters and bury it in your compost. Slugs, however, have no shells and are too slimy to pick up. Because slugs and snails hide during the day you can also make traps for them and that way you don’t have to go out at night with a flashlight. Put upside-down flower pots around your garden. They’ll hide inside them where you can easily harvest and destroy them in daytime comfort.

Iron phosphate controls these mollusks in the garden. You’ll find it under the brand name Sluggo. Iron phosphate is not toxic to pets, children, or birds. It also has no effect on insects. It kills mollusks and only mollusks. Slugs and snails eat it and they die.

 Older style, toxic, non-organic slug bait uses a poison called metaldehyde. Metaldehyde is poisonous to your pets, your kids, and wildlife. Avoid it.

 Some people swear by beer to kill slugs and snails. You’re supposed to put a shallow bowl of beer out in the garden, the slugs and snails are attracted by the odor, crawl into the beer and drown. Maybe I just don’t do it right but it’s never worked for me. 

Tiz the season . . .  for squash bugs to attack. They’ll torment any member of the squash family, especially winter squash, summer squash, and pumpkins. But they also go after cucumbers, cantaloupe (including other melons like honeydew), and watermelon. Like all true bugs (see our blog More Bugs That Suck) squash bugs have needle-like mouth parts. They stick their sharp little beaks directly into your plant’s veins and suck the life out of it.

 The damage they do kills your plants!

An infestation of these bugs causes the leaves of your squash plant to turn yellow. The whole plant slowly turns brown and dies.

If you think you have squash bugs, look on the underside of the leaves for clusters of tiny, brown, football shaped eggs. These eggs can be anywhere on the plant (leaves, leaf stalks, stems) but they won’t be on the upper surface of the leaf where you can spot them easily. You have to turn the leaves over and look on the underside. Look all along the stalks and stems as well. When you find eggs, destroy them. Remove the leaf tissue with the eggs on it and crush the eggs. Or just smash them in place with your thumb.

When the eggs hatch, the baby squash bugs look a bit like aphids except that they move around fairly quickly and aphids don’t. Babies of true bugs are called nymphs. They look somewhat like the adult squash bugs except that they don’t have wings. Squash bugs, like grasshoppers, aphids, and stink bugs have incomplete metamorphosis from egg to nymph to adult. The baby insects in this group look like miniature adults in most cases. (On the other hand, insects that experience complete metamorphosis, like butterflies, bees, and flies grow from egg to larva to pupa to adult. A baby butterfly, a caterpillar, looks nothing at all like the winged adult.)

As squash bug nymphs grow they get bigger and easier to spot. They crawl all over your plant. Like all insects, the nymph has to molt (break out of its hard exterior shell, its skeleton) as it grows. You may find some left-behind shells stuck to your plants. Eventually, the nymphs reach their maximum size. Then they are ready to become adults.

The winged adult squash bug flies swiftly. Moving fast, they can be difficult to catch. Sometimes you can catch them in the morning before the day gets hot. Insects become more active in heat, less active in cold. Carry a jar of soapy water with you and dump all the bad bugs you catch into the soapy water. They die quickly (which is very satisfying!). Because the adults are good fliers they fly into your garden from your neighbor’s garden.

Starting your squash plant seedlings under row covers of light weight fabric that lets in sunlight, air, and water but keeps bugs out will protect them from the adult squash bugs and give them a good start in life. Eventually though you have to lift the covers to allow the bees to pollinate the flowers or you’ll have no fruit. You can hand pollinate the flowers yourself and keep the plants under cover if you wish. Even so, many squash plants get huge and are hard to contain under cover.  

 Go out into your garden every day, search for squash bug eggs, and crush them. Since the nymphs don’t have wings they can’t get away from you very fast so knock them into your soapy water or smash them with your hands. You can also squirt them with insecticidal soap but be careful because squash plants are sensitive to soap and you can damage your plants. If you make your own soap spray, be sure to use a genuine soap, not a detergent.

We recently visited two side-by-side gardens in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One garden, where the green peppers and other vegetables are thriving, is all organic. Every morning the organic gardener goes out to inspect her squash plants, and she finds and crushes all the squash bug eggs. There are no squash bugs on her plants and her plants are healthy.

The neighbor is not organic and uses any harsh chemical he can find. Most of these photos of problems came from the non-organic garden. Because the ecology of the non-organic garden has been completely disrupted by the indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum insecticides, the predators have been killed. As a result, the non-organic garden has many more problems than the organic garden.

True bugs. Forewings cover half of the abdomen (aka backs) of true bugs. They are in the order Hemiptera, which means half wing. Many other insects are often called bugs, the lady bug for example, which is actually a beetle (a lady beetle). But the only actual bugs are insects in the order Hemiptera.

 All of the true bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts like hypodermic needles. The bugs that damage our vegetable gardens are ones like stink bugs, squash bugs, harlequin bugs, and tarnished plant bugs. But there are also good bugs, beneficial predators, like minute pirate bugs, that use their needle-like mouth to stab other insects and suck the life out of them. Aside from the bugs you find in your garden there are also bugs like bed bugs and kissing bugs, ones that feed on us humans by sucking our blood.

This green stink bug has its needle-like mouth parts inserted into a flower bud and is busy sucking nutrients out of the plant. You can clearly see that the hard forewings (green with yellow dots) only cover half the bug’s back. The membranous hindwings stick out from underneath the forewings and are easily visible to the naked eye. Stink bug feeding leaves Yellow spots of damaged tissue on developing fruits are the tell-tale clue that stink bugs leave behind.

This insect is a spotted asparagus beetle, not a bug and not a lady beetle. Like all beetles, the hard, colorful forewings (red with black spots in this example) completely cover the abdomen and the membranous hindwings are not visible. Beetles have chewing mouthparts, unlike bugs. This pest lays eggs on asparagus plants, and its larvae eats the asparagus berries.

All of the true bugs have incomplete metamorphosis where their babies (nymphs) look like the adults but without wings. The bug nymph shown here on an asparagus plant has very rudimentary wings and strongly resembles the adult bug. When it reaches maturity it will have well developed wings like the green stink bug in the first photo shown above.

The squash bug feeds on squash plants and their relatives. It, like the stink bug, is a true bug. The adults and the babies (nymphs) stick their sharp little beaks into the leaves and suck out the nutritious sap. They can seriously damage your summer and winter squash, and pumpkins, but they will also feed to a lesser extent on any other member of the cucurbit family. The nymphs look a bit like gigantic gray aphids clustered on the undersides of the leaves. When they reach adulthood they have well developed wings and are swift flyers.

In contrast to insects that have incomplete metamorphosis, those that have complete metamorphosis, like butterflies, have babies (larvae) which do not look anything like the adult. The butterfly larva is a caterpillar, a very different creature from the adult. The fly larva is a maggot, also very different from the adult.

 Effective organic controls for pesky true bugs in the vegetable garden include hand-picking where you grab them and dump them into a jar of soapy water. Insecticidal soap is also safe and easy to use. Just be sure that the bug you spray is actually a pest and not a beneficial insect because the soap will kill pests and beneficials alike. If you are plagued by bugs in your vegetable garden this year, think about putting up some row covers next year to exclude the bugs completely.

 Be careful and think twice before using any chemicals to control insects in your vegetable garden. Remember, you’re growing food that you intend to eat. Never spray your food with poison. 

Most of these “bugs” have mouthparts like a hypodermic needle. They stick their needle-like mouth parts into the veins of plants and suck out the nutrient rich sap. As their populations build they can seriously impact the energy budget of your vegetable plants and limit your crops. Also, just like a mosquito sucking the blood from your arm to give you malaria, these insects can transmit serious diseases to your plants.

Very familiar to most gardeners, aphids (aka green flies in the U.K.) attack almost all vegetable crops. There are thousands of different species in different colors (green, black, gray, yellow or reddish-brown). Sedentary, they don’t move around much. They just sit still and suck. Some species transmit mosaic virus diseases.

Tiny thrips on an onion plant. They have rasping mouthparts. They file away the soft tissue from leaves and flowers causing silvery discoloration. Active flyers, thrips transmit tomato spotted wilt virus.

Mealybugs don’t even look like insects. They look more like q-tips in the leaf axils and undersides of leaves. They are sedentary. They transmit mealybug virus to pineapple plants.

Leafhoppers come in an astonishing array of colors, and some are quite pretty. Common garden variety leafhoppers are generally pale green, wedge-shaped, and jump away when disturbed. These are active flyers with sharp little beaks. They transmit aster yellows (a serious mollicute disease) and viruses like beet curly top and yellows virus.

It’s officially summertime. The solstice came and went. We’re tending our gardens, nurturing our vegetables and flowers. We all look forward to an abundant harvest of fantastic, home-grown, organic vegetables.

 Along the way we might run into beetles. Some beetles, like ladybugs (aka lady beetles), are good partners. Beneficial insects such as these help you achieve your goals by eating insects that damage to your plants. Other beetles damage your plants:

Japanese beetles. They’re busy eating holes in these leaves (well, they’re busy doing other things as well) and can seriously damage a very wide range of garden plants. These beetles only occur east of the Mississippi. The ones shown are the adults. Their babies (whitish grubs with brown heads that curl into a “C” shape) live in the soil and eat plant roots. You can hand pick the adults and knock them off the plants into a can of soapy water. Beneficial nematodes that also live in the soil attack and kill a wide variety of soil dwelling insects, including the larvae of Japanese beetles.

Colorado potato beetles. The adult is on the left and a baby (larva) on the right. The adults and larvae have voracious appetites for numerous garden plants and can be quite destructive. The soapy water trick works on adults and larvae alike. Bt san diego (Bacillus thuringiensis var. san diego), a parasitic bacterium that infects and kills beetles and only beetles, provides excellent control. Be careful to get the variety san diego for beetles. The more common variety of Bt is var. kurstaki which only kills caterpillars and will have no effect at all on your beetles.

Flea beetles. So called because they are very tiny and hop like fleas. These insects are too small to hand pick. They chew lots of small roundish holes in leaves and can make eggplant leaves look like lace. Their larvae live in the soil and eat plant roots. Thus beneficial nematodes make a good remedy for these beetles.

Curculio or Weevil. The long snout is the give-away.  This is a rose curculio on a ‘Harrison’s Yellow’ rose flower. They eat holes in the flower petals, chew up the stamens and lay their eggs in the flower. Hand-picking into soapy water works on these guys. The larva is a legless, whitish grub with a brown head. It drops to the ground when it’s ready to pupate to become an adult. Because it spends part of its life cycle in the soil it is also vulnerable to beneficial nematodes.

Ladybug (aka lady beetle). Not really a bug at all but a true beetle. There are many species of lady beetles and all of them are valuable partners in the garden. They are voracious predators of aphids and other soft bodied insects so they really do a good job of protecting your plants.

On a tour of secret gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kathryn and I peek behind adobe walls for tantalizing glimpses of hidden treasures. Organized by the Santa Fe Botanical Gardens, the tour provides access to several small urban gardens not normally visible to passersby.

A beautifully sophisticated yet rustic fence made of reddish twigs defines the boundary between the garden and the natural environment beyond. This very low maintenance garden, features a beautiful mix of native and exotic plant materials all well adapted to local climate conditions and low rainfall. This is a xeriscape garden. Many people think that a xeriscape consists of a cactus and a couple of rocks surrounded by gravel. Obviously, a xeriscape can be much more than that.

In the beautifully designed private garden of the Richardson home an aesthetically appealing yet functional patio provides a transition between home and garden. This garden places all higher maintenance plantings needing supplemental water within the privacy of the backyard. Kathryn and I designed this garden several years ago.

A Montmorency pie cherry tree and a dwarf peach tree provide fresh fruit in season. The fruit trees are adjacent to the patio in the photo above.

The Richardson home also features a small section of the backyard garden devoted to vegetables such as tomatoes and chili peppers. Blue Penstemon strictus, and yellow Aquilegia chrysantha (yellow columbine) are native wildflowers mixed in with the vegetables.

In the front yard of the Richardson home we see a water conserving xeriscape of native wildflowers, shrubs, and succulents in dramatic contrast to the lush greenness of the private backyard. This portion of the garden faces south and is exposed to the intense heat of full desert sun. The function of the dry streambed is to direct and control excess rainwater from summer thunderstorms.

One aspect of gardening in the high desert of New Mexico is that most of the rainfall occurs during the “monsoon season” in the summertime. Snow in winter also provides some water, but most of the water arrives in torrential summer thunderstorms. All the precipitation (snow, hail, rain) that runs off the roof of the house is captured by downspouts and fed into cisterns which store the water in this garden. An extensive drip-trickle system distributes the water to organically grown vegetables.

Another water management technique is the sunken garden shown here. The rainwater and snowmelt which runs off of impervious surfaces such as the roof of the house is directed into these pit gardens which are sunken well below grade. A Russian olive tree rooted in the bottom of the pit shades the garden and provides a moist, shady microclimate for the plants surrounding it.

This adobe wall and dramatic blue gate provide access to a small urban garden featuring permeable paving using flagstones and creeping thyme. Permeable paving allows precipitation to percolate into groundwater without being shunted off into municipal stormwater drainage systems.

Our book “What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?)” has just been reviewed by Dominique Browning at the New York Times, May 27, 2010. And it’s a really good review too.

Her topic for the reviews is “Gardening Books.” She reviews several good gardening books and our book is among them.

Here’s what she has to say: “Many gardeners find it hard to ask for help. The excellent (and sturdy) WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY PLANT? (And How Do I Fix It?) (Timber Press, paper, $24.95), by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, will be indispensable to them, and to the rest of us as well. The information is concise: “A borer’s hole and frass (poop) are obvious on this asparagus stem.” (Thank you very much.) The illustrations are clear, the remedies organic. I promise you, things will go wrong. Be prepared.” You can read the whole article  at this link

Our book has now been reviewed dozens of times, from the NY Times to the Washington Post and many more. All the reviews have been very positive and we are very grateful. Our book is now an award-winning best-seller. And that is very gratifying indeed.

Today we pay tribute to David’s father, Lawrence Edwin Deardorff, who passed away on May 11 at the age of 97. Larry first took David into the garden when he was 6 years old, and he learned about the world of plants at his father’s side. Larry was an avid gardener his entire life, and became our partner when David and I owned Island Biotropix, an orchid nursery and tissue culture lab in Hawaii. Thank you, Dad. We will miss you terribly.

David wrote this memory of his Dad last year and we’d like to share it with you today:

 My father’s huge hands scooped a small hole in the rich garden soil and placed a tomato seedling in it. He mopped his brow, sweating in the humid afternoon of an Ohio spring. As instructed, I knelt beside him, scraped soil around the root ball with my small eight year old hands, and pressed it down. My first lesson in how to be a good provider. A man’s job.  Our backyard vegetable garden became an important source of food for a big family with a meager income.

 Dad hammered a wooden stake into the ground beside the plant, showing me how to place the stake to avoid damaging the roots. More interested in completing my bug collection than in embracing the moment, my mind wandered and precious moments with my father melted away like winter snow.

 I loosely tied three or four strips of an old sheet to each stake, optimistically anticipating the eventual height of the tomato plants. As spring passed into summer the tomato patch became a jungle and helping Dad tie each plant to its stake as the plant grew taller was my responsibility.

 On a hot summer afternoon when Dad was at work, I walked into the garden alone. “Keep Out” he had decreed. Ah, but he was not home and I was a bad boy.

 The evocative aroma of the tomato plants enveloped me as I brushed past their leaves. Taller than me, the exuberant vines hid me as I hunted for bugs. Large green fruit hung down in clusters on all sides. A solitary fire-engine red tomato, like a buoy in that sea of green, called out to me. Furtively, I snatched it from the vine.

The fruit radiated heat from the sun into my hands.  I took a bite. The flavor exploded in my mouth. Incredibly complex acidity, sweetness, and aroma. It was magnificent, and so vivid it is burned into my memory banks. I have never forgotten the taste of that forbidden fruit.

 When Dad came home he went directly to the garden. I’m sure he’d been dreaming about that ripe tomato, the first of the season, all day long. He must have stared in disbelief at the empty space where it had been. I can imagine the storm clouds gathering in his face and almost hear thunderous bellowing that came after. But I wasn’t there to see. Long gone, I played at a neighbor’s house, and missed the outburst.

Later that evening, at supper, Dad brooded, certain that one of us children had stolen his tomato. His dark mood infected the house. He didn’t know which of us had done it. All of us were suspect. Safe behind Mom’s protection, all my sisters maintained their innocence. As of course, did I.

 We moved out west in 1957, where summer nights are cool and dry, and not as friendly to tomatoes. I’ve grown tomatoes in the west for more than fifty years, but I’ve never duplicated the sensational taste or size of that stolen tomato of my childhood.

 Dad planted a vegetable garden every year. He even bought the vacant lot next door and turned that into food production as well. As he aged he began to complain about the hard work. Each year he swore he would never plant a garden again and yet, by summer his garden would always be in full production. Throughout the growing season he distributed baskets of onions, squash, beans and tomatoes to all of his children.

As I matured and put down roots thousands of miles away to found my own family, my father and I remained close. We conversed for hours about orchids, birch trees, and tomatoes. We debated the merits of fertilizers, hand tools, and special cultivars. I convinced him to try native wildflowers in the flower beds, he convinced me to grow his favorite open-pollinated pimiento. The garden has been a conduit for our love for almost sixty years. 

 Over all that time I never told Dad that I was the one who ate that tomato. He would laugh about it now, if it were possible for him to understand me. But it’s too late.

After ninety six years he’s gone away, leaving his body behind. The doctors call it senile dementia, not Alzheimer’s, but the result is the same. He has no memory of any of his children, of his wife of seventy-one years, or of anything to do with gardening. I am a stranger to him now. Just a nice guy who brought him the last ripe tomato of the season.

Our blog post for today is a guest blog written by Olivia Dunn, Publicist at Timber Press.

Book publicity is a little bit like a junior high dance. If both the author and the publicist are ready to dance, it can be a ton of fun and really successful. If one party decides to stay on their side of the gym and leave everything up to the other person, it can be dull and lifeless. As a book publicist, I always hope for the former, and with the publicity campaign for What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How do I Fix It?) winding down, I thought it might be fun to explain what made the campaign so successful.

When I first met David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth of What’s Wrong With My Plant?, I was instantly struck by their willingness to do anything to help with the book’s publicity. Get up at 4 am Pacific time to do an East Coast radio interview on the phone? Check. Pack everything up and go on an 8 week West Coast bookstore tour? Check. Having authors willing participate in their book’s publicity is huge because no one knows the book better than they do.

After author participation, the second biggest piece needed for a successful publicity campaign may be the most obvious — it’s the media. Sometimes you have a book that clicks with the media and What’s Wrong With My Plant? was just such a book. If you haven’t seen the amazing praise for this book, check out the page on our site and read through it.

I could go on and talk about press releases and review copy mailings, media pitches and book tour organization, but that would probably get a little tedious. Let’s just say there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes in order to create a successful publicity “dance.”

In the end, though, it really comes down to having a book you believe in. One you can stand behind, and one you know needs to be in everyone’s hands. That’s what made working on What’s Wrong With My Plant? so easy — it’s a book I felt was important, and I had fun making certain that everyone else felt that way, too.

Garden Art means different things to different people.

In the vegetable garden it can take the form of a screen to mask the compost bin, or a painting on the side of the tool shed. Some of us – and by us I mean gardeners – take care to lay out our herb gardens to create patterns that please the eye. Then we add decorative elements that bring us joy or remind us where the time has flown.

Herbs join flowers, ceramic fish, and a sun-dial in this garden in Santa Fe, NM

Most of the time garden art means a sculptural element that we add to gardens as focal points, as whimsical elements, to make statements, or as mementoes. Focal points work especially well when space is limited and the city encroaches just outside the garden walls.

Alert to the urban sounds just beyond the fence, bronze deer bring a welcome reminder of the natural world to a pocket garden in Portland, OR.

Focal points also serve to draw us along the garden path, sometimes giving us pleasant surprises.

We take a turn around a newly-installed garden in Port Ludlow, WA where a civic-minded resident transformed his empty lot into an informal neighborhood park.

We appreciate the bold statements some art makes. It draws our attention to elements of the context in which a garden sits, to contributions of indigenous people, to the past from which the garden derives.

The courtyard of a museum in Santa Fe NM reminds us of the cultural context from which much of the art and gardens of New Mexico grow.

Whimsy plays a vital role in the choice of garden art. It brings magic and mystery to gardens, and enhances the joy of growing flowers, herbs, and trees.

There be dragons among the gaillardia, yarrow, rosemary, and apples in this Santa Fe, NM garden.

But I think we love it best when the garden is the art and its plants serve as sculpture, form, and function. David and I designed the informal park in Port Ludlow I mentioned above. It is such a delight to take a blank slate and transform earth and light, soil and water into a lovely place to be.

We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details. If you have a favorite spot we should not miss, please let us know.