This book is all about growing healthy, organic vegetables at home, something that more and more of us are doing these days. We also seek the satisfaction of nurturing amazing plants that become our platter of gourmet vegetables. We crave that moment when the flavor of a freshly-picked tomato explodes in our mouths. Above all, by growing our own food, we know it is safe, clean, and chemical-free.

We take a different approach from the diagnostic system we developed in What’s Wrong with My Plant?

We begin with suggestions on how to prepare for success. Four essential physical factors affect how successful your garden will be: temperature, soil, light, and water. No matter where you live you can modify or improve each of these somewhat unpredictable factors to an extent, and give each vegetable the best growing conditions possible. Considering these factors from the beginning will take a long way toward the delicious harvest of your dreams.

Following this brief introduction, we present plant portraits of popular vegetables in alphabetical order. Each plant portrait gives you all the information you need to grow that beautiful, sumptuous vegetable and its kin: a description, including growth habit; information on the plant’s season; temperature, soil, light, and water requirements; and best garden uses and planting techniques. This part of the book helps you decide which plants you can grow, and how to plant them, as well as guiding you in their proper care. You can fine tune your choice of cultivar (cultivated variety) by having a look at the Appendix.

If pests or diseases are already visiting your favorite vegetable, consult the Family Problem-Solving Guides. Each vegetable portrait directs you to the proper one. These visual guides will help you identify and eliminate pests and diseases in the garden. We supply you with a photograph of the problem, symptom descriptions, diagnoses, and page numbers to find solutions.

The final part of the book, “Organic Solutions to Common Problems,” presents in detail every solution listed in the problem-solving guides. Here you will learn how to change growing conditions to solve problems, and be introduced to organic techniques and remedies for garden pests and diseases, from deer to fungi.

We urge you to use organic solutions and remedies for growing condition, pest, and disease challenges for three reasons. First, organic remedies are just as effective as synthetic ones. Second, we want everyone to have access to healthy, affordable, chemical-free food. And third, we want to protect and enhance the natural ecosystems that surround us. What works in nature will work for you.

Please click on our “store” tab to find out where you can buy our book.

This book is available by pre-order from timberpress.com and at amazon.

This beautiful bird is an American avocet. We found him wading right beside the road.

Lazuli buntings were everywhere, snatching bugs out of the air like tiny flycatchers.

We found this nutria at the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge in Washington.

All in all it was a fantastic trip and we’ll certainly do it again.

Tiny female flowers are housed separately from the long, supple catkin filled with male flowers. The female flowers will mature into tasty nuts. We once watched a pair of magnificent Stellar’s jays methodically harvest every single nut from the tree outside our dining room window. They buried them in the forest floor, much like squirrels do, to preserve them for food in winter.

Indian plum

Another early sign of spring is the leafing out of the Indian plum, Oemleria cerasiformis. This prettly little shrub is just now leafing out in the Pacific Northwest in mid February. In less than a month it will be in full bloom with dangling clusters of small white flowers.

Both the hazel and the Indian plum let us know that spring is just around the corner.

Joe is so knowledgeable and personable he made the whole interview fun and informative. Check out the other podcasts on his website. They’re full of good information.

Question: Say your brother had some land on the Pecos River and wanted to plant some trees on a “shelf” in the river. That is, the water level would only be a few feet below the surface.
What should he plant? He wants to do fruit trees, but I think it may be too salty. How would he check?
Cottonwoods are another thought, but he claims that only seedless cottonwoods are sold in NM now, and they are not the great majestic trees that we love in the bosque.
Ideas?

Answer: Planting trees on the flood plain of the Pecos should not be a problem. Once the roots reach the water table the trees will never need supplemental irrigation so that’s advantageous. Fruit trees should work well because they are relatively shallow rooted. Certainly, people living in the flood plain of the Rio Grande in the North Valley seem to have no problem with fruit trees or any other kind of tree and I don’t see that the Pecos is any different. A friend of mine in Corralles has a successful apple orchard with 57 different varieties and the water table is very close to the surface.

He could talk to the Master Gardeners at NMSU Cooperative Extension on Rodeo Road (by the rodeo grounds) for advice regarding salinity issues on the upper Pecos. Also, check with the Santa Fe County Extension Agent at NMSU in the same office. Both the Rio Grande and the Pecos increase in salinity in their lower reaches but the upper reaches in Northern New Mexico are not salty to my knowledge.

Talk to the Master Gardeners as to which fruit tree cultivars perform best in that area. Also, chat with adjacent landowners and find out which cultivars work well for them. Apple cultivars that bloom late might avoid late spring killing frost, for example, and provide better yields. Planting the wrong cultivar can lead to major disappointments.

Regarding cottonwoods. All cottonwood species have male trees that produce pollen and female trees that produce seeds. They’re dioecious. It’s the cottonwood seeds produced by the female trees that float about in the air on the fluffy cotton attached to the seed. It is now illegal to plant female trees because they produce so much cotton. All the cottonless cottonwood trees are just male trees. All the great majestic trees that we know and love in the bosque are either male (cottonless and legal) or female (illegal). The trick is to get the right species of cottonwood. There are many different kinds of cottonwoods. Look for Populus fremontii. Local nurseries may carry other species or interspecific hybrids and they may or may not know the difference. Plants of the Southwest, in Santa Fe, will have what you want and it will be correctly identified and properly labelled.

 The cabbage worm eats holes in the leaves of your cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and other brassicas. It only devours the foliage of vegetable crops and weeds in the cabbage family (Brassicaceae). It does not move by looping like an inchworm. It crawls about like most other kinds of caterpillars.

A white butterfly, the adult cabbage worm feeds on nectar of a wide variety of flowers. Like all butterflies, she has straw-like mouthparts. She can’t eat leaves, only her babies can do that. She’ll lay her eggs, usually one at a time, on the underside of brassica leaves.

The cabbage looper, another caterpillar that trashes your brassicas, moves like an inchworm. It loops its head-end forward first, then brings the rear-end forward arching its body into an upside-down U. It has an appetite for many different kinds of vegetables, not just cabbage family members.

A grayish-brown moth with a white monogram on its forewings, the cabbage looper adult flies about and lays her eggs at night so you usually won’t see her. The moth, like the butterfly, has straw-like mouth parts.

Brassicas under row covers exclude the adult butterflies and moths. Keep the adults out and you’ll avoid the damage that their caterpillars do to your crops. Cover the plants with a lightweight, white fabric that lets in air, light, and water but keeps bugs out.

Cocoons of a tiny parasitic wasp hang like little white footballs off a tomato hornworm. The female wasp laid her eggs inside the caterpillar, the eggs hatched, and the baby wasps (maggot-like) ate the caterpillar alive from the inside out. When the wasp larvae matured they ate their way through the caterpillar’s skin and spun all these little cocoons. Pretty soon the baby wasps will all fly away and hunt down more caterpillars. A gruesome tale, we know, but the point is that nature has lots of little helpers to aid you in your endeavors to grow clean, healthy vegetables without spraying poison on your food.

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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. 

 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.

 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.