Carol Allen may be a plant geek, horticulturist and organic gardener, but she’s also a self-professed LAZY gardener.  So when she teaches her favorite ways of dealing with garden pests, you know it’ll be the most effective, easiest to do, and also the easiest on the environment. Here are the highlights of her talk at our Beltsville store today on this favorite subject of hers.

The Best Defense? Healthy Plants

easiest ways, which also happen to be the easiest on the environment.  Here are the highlights of her talk at our Beltsville store today on this favorite subject of hers.

The Best Defense?  Healthy Plants

• So put the plants in the right place, which starts by giving them the amount of light they need.   Since most of us overestimate the sun we get, it helps to check several times a day and note the actual number of hours.
• Test the soil, at least for pH. The test is cheap and easy and ensures that your plants get the nutrients they need.
• Add plenty of organic matter.  Carol’s favorite is her own homegrown compost, followed by locally made Leafgro compost.  She keeps some bags on hand at all times.
• Water correctly. That means no broadcast spraying – plants need a long drink, not a quick shower. The water has to get not only to the rootball, but also saturate it. Correct watering is deeply and thoroughly, not frequently and shallowly.
• Mulch for plant and soil health.  For veg gardens she loves straw mulches but for trees, shrubs and flower beds she uses shredded bank or her own cropped-up dead leaves.  Why waste ‘em?
• Don’t over-fertilize! Research at the University of Maryland and elsewhere is showing that less is more – it prevents fertilizer from running off into the Bay and killing our crabs.  (Speaking of which, crabshell-based fertilizer is excellent!)  Carol uses little to no fertilizer in her garden but when she does feed, she uses Espoma’s line of organic products.  They feed slowly and safely.

Best Methods for Dealing with Pests

• Prevention – using that list above.
• Knowledge – identify the pest before deciding on a “treatment,” if any.  Two great sources to help with that are Va Tech and the University of Maryland.
• Barriers, like floating row covers
• Mechanical removal
• Encouraging beneficial insects
• Chemical controls, especially spot-spraying with safe organic products (yes, organics are chemicals, too.)
• And take notes so that next year you have a chance to prevent the problems you’re dealing with this year.
  

  Ladybug Larva

Recognizing some of Gardeners’ Best Friends

Sure, we all know that ladybugs (more properly called ladybug beetles) eat destructive insects like aphids, but do you recognize this little guy?  It’s the ladybug beetle’s larvae and they’re “bug-eating machines”!

For the green lacewing (below), it’s the same story.  Those babies don’t look like much but they’re great workers in the garden.

Green lacewing adult and larvae

Below, more beneficial insects – the soldier beetle and an assassin bug eating a pest.  But be careful of the assassins – if handled roughly, they’ll bite the gardener, too.

Soldier beetle (L) and Assassin bug (R)

More good-guy bugs include spiders, yellow jackets, parasitic wasps (which plant their eggs IN aphids!), syrphid flies, and wheel bugs.

How to Attract Beneficial Insects?

Grow a diversity of plants.  Especially among vegetables, it’s important to grow a variety of these flowers that do a great job of fighting pests on your edibles:  carrot, yarrow, Queen Anne’s lace, zinnia, ageratum, sweet alyssum, blanket flower, cosmos, sunflower, tansy, marigold, aster, daisies, mums, black-eyed susan, coneflower, coreopsis, bee balm, salvias, nasturtiums, and poppies.  Plus, these herbs: mints, dill, fennel, coriander, parsley, anise, thyme, sage, oregano.  This is generally the same group of plants that attract butterflies.

Organic Pesticides

• Horticultural oil like All Season Horticultural Spray Oil works by suffocating the target bugs, but make sure you get the spray on their bodies. Hort Oil is effective in controlling cucumber and bean beetles as well as on ornamentals for scale insects. Be sure to follow the temperature requirements on the label, to avoid burning the plant’s leaves.
• Neem oil like Schulz’s Fungicide (that’s the product name, but really a multipurpose spray) is another good one for general use.
• Horticultural soaps are products Carol doesn’t use as often because they kill only larvae and are less effective on adults, while oils kill both. Also, they sometimes burn leaves.
• Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) is a naturally occurring bacteria that messes with the digestive system of caterpillars, causing them to die of starvation. Asked how to use this product without killing the caterpillars we WANT (butterflies especially) Carol explained that Bt should be used selectively on just the plants that are being fed on by the target insects (like for cabbage worms). So for example, you wouldn’t spray it on parsley or pawpaw trees because they’re fed on by butterfly larvae.
• Spinosad, contained in Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew, works on beetles, caterpillars, sawfly larvae, and soft-bodied insects. It’s another naturally occurring bacteria. Carol recommends it for such ornamentals as roses and Mugo pine.

Next, Carol highlighted some of the worst pest offenders, and what to do about them.

Tent caterpillar's egg mass, and caterpillar-filled tent.

Eastern Tent Caterpillar

This native caterpillar feeds on cherry, apple trees, and serviceberries and can be vanquished easily if you spot the black egg case in winter. Just rub it off of the twig or branch it until it drops to the ground. If you miss it, you can’t miss the caterpillar-filled tent that appears in the crotch of target trees in the spring – remove that with your gloved hand and send it off with the trash.

From left, gypsy moth egg mass, aphids, and cabbage worm

Gypsy Moth

These voracious eaters are doing great damage to our trees, especially oaks.  If you spot their egg mass in the spring, just scrape it off with a putty knife, bag the mass and throw it away.

Aphids

Aphids come with a leg-up in the survival sweepstakes of Nature – they’re born pregnant!  The best way to deal with them is to simply wash them off, and attract those great aphid-eating beneficial insects.

Cabbage Worms

If you grow vegetables in the cabbage family, you’ve probably battled these little crop-eaters.  They’re best prevented with the use of row covers, or by spraying with Bt.  Sure, they can also be removed by hand but it’s hard to stay ahead of their munching.

Japanese beetles and brown marmorated stink bug.

Japanese Beetles

Introduced to the U.S. in the early 20th century, Japanese beetles are kinda fun to hand-pick and drop in soap water but can be largely prevented by spraying milky spore on your lawn. – because lawns are where the grubs live for most of the year. Just don’t buy traps for them – they only attract MORE beetles to your garden.

Brown Marmorated Stink Bug

This is a newcomer to our gardens, having been discovered just 14 years ago, but it’s rapidly becoming a major pest here in the Mid-Atlantic region – even in our homes! So lots of research is being done on this stink bug, especially by the University of Maryland, including on the efficacy of traps. In the meantime, there’s one product Carol recommends – the clay-based Surround. Spray Surround on developing fruit such as tomatoes, peaches, and apples to protect them. It’s also a good idea to clean up the vegetable garden before winter, to reduce the chances of wintering-over pests – not just this stink bug but many others that could emerge in the spring to eat your crops.

Lacewing larvae photo credit.  Lacewing adult photo credit.  Ladybug beetle larvae photo credit.  Soldier beetle photo credit.   Assassin bug photo credit.  Tent caterpillar photo credit.  Gypsy moth photo credit.  Aphid photo credit.  Cabbage worm photo credit.  Japanese beetle photo credit.  Stink bug photo credit.

Posted by  Susan Harris.

We assume you’re ALL out in the garden getting it ready for the new season and are well on your way to having your borders cleaned up.   (To summarize spring clean-up, it’s removing dead plant material, hacking back ornamental grasses, weeding and mulching.)

But there’s one other chore that has a huge impact in the garden and that’s creating edges to your borders that are nice  to look at – either straight lines or gently curving ones, depending on your taste – and a barrier to turfgrass and border plants encroaching on each other’s space.   And we all know how that encroachment looks by mid-summer, right?

Stone edging looks great but...

So creating and maintaining clean edges is a big topic among gardeners, one I’m asked about frequently.  Usually the asker is trying to avoid the expense of bricks or stone, like the lovely ones you see above, not to mention the extra work required after mowing.  Yes, this pretty edge IS high-maintenance, requiring the gardener to use clippers of some type to trim the grass along it because mowers can’t get close enough to those stones.

Some people have had success with plastic or metal edging that’s pounded into the soil, allowing the mower to trim right over it, and I say whatever works.  But if you don’t like that look or don’t want to have to buy it, there’s another, totally natural way to edge, the way I recommend and used in my own garden when I had a lawn.

Those Victorians got it Right

Behold the “Victorian trench,” and I’ll never know why it’s called that because we don’t usually associate the word “Victorian” with anything naturalistic.   It does what edging needs to do — holds back the lawn from the garden and the garden from the lawn — without being an eyesore in the garden.

How to Do It

It’s easy. Just take a flat-edged shovel and dig straight down 3 inches along the outer edge of the lawn. Then dig a second slice that’s at a 45-degree in the direction of the border or bed. So you’ll end up with a trench that’s straight downward on the lawn side and angled up to the border. Remove the extra soil. Then mulch the border, allowing some mulch to cover the slope of your new edge, and voila — you’ve got an edge that looks spiffy but natural.

How to Maintain It

Okay, here’s the downside. It needs to be spruced up at least once a year. That means removing any grass on the border side, border plants on the grass side, and re-digging the edge as needed. But hey, even hard plastic edges allow for the occasional movement of plants in the wrong direction, and they’re known to pop up and need maintenance to keep them in place.

Also, think of all the maintenance saved by not having to hand-trim grass along the edge, since the mower wheels can be directed into the edge or along the top of the border to ensure mowing of the whole lawn.

Another pretty example of natural edging.

Posted by Susan Harris.

Gardeners are starting to get busy, and if you’re not sure what to do this month, just click here.  That’s our TO-DO list for March, combining the wisdom of experts on staff at Behnkes and at the University of Maryland.

And if you have any question at all about these tips, don’t hesitate to leave a question in a comment to this blog story, and we’ll get you an answer pronto.

Montgomery County helps its property owners become more Bay-friendly in lots of ways – including educating its residents and providing MONEY for needed improvements.  And coming up soon is some excellent training in what they’re calling “rainscapes,” to be held March 9 and 10 at Brookside Gardens.  The training session will help individuals, businesses, organizations and homeowners identify steps they can take to filter and reduce runoff from impervious surfaces. Churches and businesses with large asphalt parking lots, take note!

Training
Two separate Rainscape trainings will be held March 9 and 10, 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. both days, at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton. The workshop will provide an introduction to Montgomery County watershed and stream health issues, and discuss the types of projects that are offered through the RainScapes program, followed by a hands-on training about rain gardens.

Each attendee will receive a topographic map of his/her property, and will participate in an individual consultation with an expert in rainscaping to identify specific projects that would reduce storm water run-off from the property.The cost of the training is only $10. Property owners need only attend one training session. To register, go to www.PARKpass.org. (The course number for Friday’s class is 182150 and the number for Saturday’s class is 182151.)

Financial Support
Now about the financial help in making these changes.  Montgomery County’s Rainscapes Program offers rebates of up to $5,000 for commercial and institutional property owners and $1,200 for homeowners to install rainscapes projects on their properties. These are typically low-cost, small-scale projects. Benefits of rainscapes projects include reduced water usage during droughts (thus reduced water bills), reduced energy costs, increased property values, improved water and air quality, enhanced wildlife habitat, and reduced storm water run-off. For more information contact John Brill on the Silver Spring Green Program Committee, who can help with questions, registration, etc. John can be reached at 240-328-8180 or jbrill64@yahoo.com.

By Susan Harris

Having moved just last month, I’m thinking a lot about my new garden and I’m determined NOT to repeat these mistakes that I made in my last garden.

1.  Neglecting to take “before” photos is something I’ve regretted a gazillion times over the years.  It’s simply impossible for visitors to imagine the jungle-like state of my back yard when I moved in – I barely remember it myself.  This sole photo from 1985, while documenting the ugliness of the rear facade of my house in Takoma Park, faces away from the jungle.  It didn’t occur to me then to photograph the chaos.  (Also, I wish I’d taken some shots without me in them.)

But for my next garden – in Old Greenbelt – I quickly grabbed these photos from the realtor’s slide show about my new rowhouse, and I took a bunch more as soon as my offer was accepted – before all the leaves dropped.

Above, the perfect-size-for-me-back yard is, except for a few azaleas which will soon be offered to anyone who’ll dig them up, a blank slate.  Goody!  On the right is the view from the back door, where my new screened-in porch will go.  I’ve coveted these bug-free oases for years now and soon I’ll have my own!

Below, the front yard is all lawn with a few more azaleas (the default shrub for the Mid-Atlantic, no matter the exposure).  Like the azaleas, the lawn is doomed, to be replaced by some seating for sure, but what else?  That brings me to the next mistake I won’t be repeating.

2.  Not getting design help.  Now to be fair to my 1985 self, I did enlist the free services of a nursery’s designer for my back yard, and have thanked her a bazillion times for creating the bones of a great design and steering me toward great shrubs I’d never heard of (because they aren’t azaleas) like Viburnums, Pieris japonica and cherry laurels.  But I had a small budget and the garden was a DIY job, design-wise and plant choice-wise, and my mistakes still show.

Especially challenging was my small front garden – small spaces being much harder to design than larger ones – and I hated the result until finally (after nine years there) I paid all of $250 for a fabulous design that transformed not only the front garden but this gardener into the avid one I’ve been ever since.  (Here’s my 2006 story about the transformation and the landscape architect who made it happen.)

This time around, every square inch of my manageably sized garden will be professionally designed before the first daffodil shows its face in March.  Terraces and paths will be created and the larger plants installed before I start playing with the small stuff.  Can you see the determination in those italics?

Of course I’m still a cheapskate, but a lot of help can be had for not a lot of money – by asking for help with the overall concept and hardscape details, but choosing the plants myself.  And I’ll be supplementing a paid designer’s suggestions with free ones from blog readers.  Garden blogs don’t pay  much, but readers are very generous with their thoughts.

Reader mistakes

On the national blog GardenRant I asked readers to tell us about their worst garden mistakes, and got this interesting collection – very instructive!

• Several said they didn’t pay enough attention at first to hardscape – good walls, lighting, terraces, etc.  One reader said that next time, she’ll spend more money on all those outdoor elements (including a swimming pool) and less on the house itself.
• Another very popular response was not fixing the bad soil first.  Creating good drainage is so important, it’s worth bringing in truckloads of soil if the existing soil is really bad.  And almost any site could be improved with organic matter added to the soil.
• Making the beds too small is another common mistake, as is making the paths too narrow.
• Not planting enough “boring” evergreens was mentioned more than once, too.
• One reader said she’d hold off on buying any perennials the first year, concentrating instead on trees and shrubs.  And several said they wish they’d just watched their new garden during their first year there, before doing anything.
• And several wish they’d been more ruthless – about removing existing plants they hated for years before finally removing, and about removing invasive plants that plagued them for years and were harder to get rid off once their gardens had matured.
• Oh, and I like this one – the mistake of giving in to the “Noah impulse”, which is buying two of everything, rather than drifts and masses and just a few accent plants.

What’s YOUR worst gardening mistake?  Tell us in a comment!