Garden Update 7/14/2017

Greetings fellow Steemians! I know it has been a while since I last posted. I keep planning on doing a post and then life happens and before I know it, it's bed time. This is the busy season at work though, so it's not unusual for me to not have a whole lot of free time to do the things I would like to do. Like blog on Steemit lol Hopefully I'll be posting more when things slow down. Today I'm just going to do a quick garden update.

The biggest things going on in the garden this week have been pest and disease problems.

Peppers

I have a fairly large planting of peppers this year with everything from various types of bell peppers to jalapenos to carolina reaper peppers and ghost peppers. I'm not a pepper fan but the owner is, so I made sure he has lots to choose from. On Monday, I got to work to discover that half of the peppers were badly infected with Bacterial Leaf Spot (Xanothomonas sp) and Cercospora Leaf Spot (fungal). I spent over an hour removing diseased plant material on Mon, and probably close to another hour today removing more. Right now, removal of infected plant material is pretty much the only control method I have available. I've put in a request for an organic certified fixed copper spray which should be effective in helping to keep both under control.

In this picture you can see that different leaves appear to have somewhat different symptoms. The two leaves in the top corners of the photo have circular tan spots that look like Cercospora. The leaf at the bottom of the picture with the black splotches looks more like Bacterial Leaf Spot.

The slimy looking tan spots in this picture are what are referred to as water-soaked spots and are generally a pretty good indication of a bacterial infection of some sort. These water-soaked spots turn into the black splotches seen in the previous picture.

Squash

My peppers aren't the only things having problems. My squash plants have been under attack this week as well. And here my squash was doing so much better than last year. Then the weather threw my spray schedule off (Bt and insecticidal soap) for a week. Apparently that was enough of an opening. There's even a new squash pest that has shown up this year that I didn't see last year.

First up for squash pests I'm dealing with right now are Squash bugs (Anasa tristis). The adults tend to move fairly quickly when disturbed so I haven't managed to capture any pictures of them, but I did manage to snap this one of some of the nymphs before they scattered.

These guys really aren't too big of a problem at this point as I have been able to keep their population fairly small using insecticidal soap and hand removal of any eggs I happen to find. Unfortunately, I have two other squash pest problems currently going on as well.

The second squash pest I'm dealing with right now are Squash Vine Borers (Melitta curcurbitae). These destructive little pests fairly well decimated my squash and zucchini plants last year, so I was expecting them this year. Unfortunately, it would appear that the week that my spray schedule was thrown off due to weather just happened to coincide with some eggs hatching and my plants weren't protected with Bt allowing them to get inside the plants before I sprayed again.

Usually the eggs are laid down around the base of the plants on the main stem and will enter the plant there. Oddly enough, I found several different leaves that had entry spots at the base of them.

That yellow blob that kind of looks like a fungus? That's vine borer frass (poop). If you see a spot like this on your plant, you already have a vine borer inside. I made the mistake of thinking it was a fungus when it showed up last year. I knew better this year. Once the borers are inside the plant, they are much harder to get to in order to kill them. Spraying the outside of the plant doesn't really do much good. So today I took a syringe and injected Bt into my squash and zucchini plants (basically into the main stem and areas around any entry points I found) in an effort to kill off the borers that I know are there. I found this method online last year, but didn't have a chance to try it before the plants were dead. I'll keep you all posted on whether it works or not.

I mentioned above that I had a new squash pest show up this year. When I first spotted these little guys I thought they were some sort of caterpillar. They aren't. They're the larvae of the Squash Lady Beetle (Epilachna borealis). This is one of the only species of lady beetle that is actually a pest rather than a beneficial since the larvae feed on plants.

Beans

The last thing I have going on this week that I'm going to talk about is the sudden death of one of my scarlet runner bean plants. It was fine one day, the entire plant dead the next.

Still not sure what actually happened to it. The other three plants in the same container are doing fine as of this morning. Hopefully it will only be the one plant that is affected.

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Until next time