Their backs turned to us: no problem. Our backs turned to them: catastrophe!

At this point, most people are at least dimly aware that it ain’t about the honey. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are essential to the commercial production of most fruits and vegetables and those bees are in deep, deep trouble.

Being a locavore helps, especially if the locality is your own back yard, but staying away from agribusiness produce isn’t going to fix the problem. Even crops grown on small farms and in gardens need pollinators, and in many respects the woes of (non-native) honeybees are also the woes of native bees (there are scores of species) and other native pollen transporters.

What to do?

Planting bee-friendly plants helps. Eschewing strong pesticides, both chemical and organic, is equally or more important. It never hurts to spread the word; there are still many conservation-minded people who have no interest in bugs and (who could believe it?) don’t care about food.

And you can always get out there and count.

The folks at The Great Sunflower Project have teamed up with those at Your Garden Show (see button at right) to make July 16th another banner day for citizen science. People all over the country are invited to count how many bees they see in 15 minutes.

It’s scientific enough so they want everyone observing a prescribed asssortment of plants, including sunflowers -  specifically the cultivar ‘Lemon Queen’  – which you may or may not feel up to finding. Many of them are popular and common, so it isn’t really all that hard to find a few, even if you don’t grown them yourself.

But even if all you do is tune in, there’s plenty to enjoy and share, including a searchable map that shows how many bees got counted in your zip code. This probably shows as much or more about populations of internet-happy conservationists and elementary school teachers as it does about populations of bees, yet that too could be useful information, especially if you’re a gardener with young children and are considering a move.

Lots of nifty, somewhat more sophisticated additional information can be found at Urban Bee Gardens, compiled at U.C. Berkeley. Although it’s aimed at Californians, almost everything on it, including bee descriptions and plant lists, works fine all over the country.

Got bears as well as bees? We do. Here’s how Bill protects our hives.

Want to skip directly to eating? Bake some easy Honey Bars with Walnuts.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

A Luna moth (Actias luna). Not the enemy, even though its children are very large and green.

I don’t have a picture of a hawkmoth, aka sphinx moth or hummingbird moth (so named for its ability to hover and its very long tongue). But if you see one of these gray-brown creatures, almost big enough to pass for a small bird, you’re seeing disaster on the wing. The Hawkmoth’s very large green children are hornworms.

Tomato – or more likely tobacco - hornworm (Manduca quinquemaculata or M. sexta), both voracious consumers of tomato, pepper, petunia, tobacco and other plants in the nightshade family.

In our New York and Maine gardens, hornworms usually show up in late July or August. But I’m thinking about them early this year because a Facebook friend in Virginia is already beset.

“Hornworms are eating my tomato plants,” she wrote, “anyone have advice on how to get rid of them?”

But of course!

Try the tips on Hornworm eradication at the end of this post, I replied, and if you get the chance, employ these two major organic defenses:

1. Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), kurstaki strain, a widely-sold bacterial insecticide that kills caterpillars but is otherwise more or less harmless. It must be eaten to do its work, so baby butterflies are safe as long as you spray it only on the  hornworms’ dinner.  Unfortunately, Bt is most effective on hornworms when they’re still small. By the time they’re big enough to notice – or do damage that’s noticeable – Bt is no match for them.

2. The Braconid wasp Cotesia congregatus. These tiny, deadly parasites have evolved to prey only on hornworms and are generally available anywhere hornworms are found. To get some, simply notice which hornworms have white bumps and leave those alone.

This hornworm is (inadvertently) an organic gardener’s dear friend.

I used to think the white bumps were wasp eggs, which would on hatching enter the hormworms and eat ‘em up, but that was literally backwards. The bumps are cocoons, spun by the wasp pupa after they’ve eaten the hornworm and emerged, ready to transform themselves into adult wasps.

Same difference in the control department except you don’t have to worry about how much Mr. Bumpy might eat before the wasps get busy. By the time you see the cocoons, he’s on his last legs and no longer very hungry.

PS. Wondering what the Luna moth has to do with anything? Nothing, except that it’s prettier than a hornworm. To view the Luna moth’s children, check out this series of photos.

Two cases in point: Hurricanes and Hornworms.

Most of these tomatoes would still be on the vine if heavy rains weren’t on the radar. The very green ones are almost ready, btw. They will still be green when ripe, just slightly yellower

HURRICANE /HEAVY RAIN WARNING

If you’ve had plenty of rainfall or have been irrigating your tomatoes, this does not apply to you, but if things have been dry lately and heavy rains are on the way it’s likely that you have many tomatoes that aren’t ripe enough to pick yet but are too ripe not to pick – because they’re going to crack, every last one, if they’re still on the vine when the roots get a thorough soaking.

Tomatoes that are fully mature and well-imbued with strong color will ripen off the vine because tomatoes are climateric fruits, like bananas, peaches, avocadoes and pears. They can continue to improve after picking as long as they were full grown when they left the plant. Non-climateric fruits like strawberries, melons and cherries do not have this property. With non-climaterics, what you pick is what you get no matter how long you wait.*

Left to right: Pruden’s Purple, Sweet Chelsea, Cosmonaut Volkov. On top, too ripe to leave on the vine if danger threatens; on the bottom, the color they should (and will) be for best flavor and texture.

For tips about ripening tomatoes indoors, consult There’s More Than One Way to Ripen A Tomato, over at Margaret Roach’s A Way To Garden. I agree with most of it.

HORNWORM ALERT

Tomato hornworm, Manduca quinquemaculata. Spawn of the devil (spawn of the 5-spotted hawkmoth, actually)

Or maybe spawn of the (too-closely) related Tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta.

Quinquemaculata has v-shaped white markings and a red horn; sexta has white diagonal stripes and a black horn. This distinction matters to somebody.

To tomato growers, not so much. Both of them are big and green and well equipped with teeth.

My index finger isn't that big for a finger. A very hungry caterpillar the size of my finger, however...

Hornworm front end. Get a load of them choppers.

They eat tomato leaves and fruits and stems, also peppers and potatoes and, less commonly, eggplants. Also wild solanaceae like Deadly Nightshade which is alas not deadly to them.

And they are very cleverly camouflaged, you almost always see the damage before you see them. Then you look and look for them… in vain; you still don’t see them.

Even after they’re enormous they somehow manage to hide, so you find yourself staring at a wounded plant and reflecting that the attacking organism is about the size of a Volkswagon and you still can’t see it.

Keep trying. Hand picking is the best organic control – the only organic control after they get big and semi-immune to Bt – and once they start bulking up they can completely defoliate a good sized plant in just a few days.

Pepper plant with hornworm damage; every one of those cut-off stems had leaves and flowers and baby fruit

Finding hornworms. It does get easier as they get bigger, for obvious reasons, but in the meantime:

1. Search at dawn and/or dusk; they don’t like sunlight and hide deep in the foliage in the heat of the day.

2. Look for the droppings, dark green to black, about the size of bb’s. Then look up.

3.  I’ve heard that some gardeners go out at night with black lights. On top of everything else, they glow when thus illuminated.

*Tomato ripening note: At a farmers’ market the other day I heard a vendor explaining that he always waited to pick the tomatoes until they were fully vine ripe because they didn’t ripen off the vine as we well know from supermarket tomatoes blah blah etc.

I don’t know if he knew he was lying – and certainly didn’t ask! – but it’s been bothering me ever since. Oversimplification in the service of great local vegetables isn’t all that high on the list of vices but it does give ammo to the people who want to equate sustainability with ignorant romanticism.

Ornamental millet ‘Limelight', in a bed with peppers (at right) and Verbena bonariensis. That's the tomato patch in the background.

Not long ago, I found and wrote a brief post about an amazing millet bug – amazing in that it was huge, gorgeous, and something I’d never seen before.

I was hoping somebody would recognize it. So far no luck. Also, at least so far, no one who shares my appreciation of its beauty. Commenters have been silent, but e-mails and conversations with friends have reminded me that for many people, bug = disgusting.

Too bad. Some insects are just plain creepy – earwigs come at once to mind – but a lot of them are drop down gorgeous, however disgusting their behavior.

The bug, a stinkbug of some sort I think, appeared the very day we left the Hudson Valley for Maine, so I have no idea whether there will be anything left of the millet by the time we get back.

By then it won’t matter. I did plant the millet on purpose, unlike commenter Lynn, who has hers “coming up from the birdseed.” But I wasn’t hoping to harvest food. My goal was those beautiful green seed heads, very useful in flower arrangements.

So most years it’s all cut and gone long before there’s anything that resembles grain; when I don’t pick it, helpful friends do. But every once in a while a head or two makes it all the way to ripeness and then as far as the birds are concerned I am growing it to feed the family.

Will these Brandywine blossoms make it to tomatohood if the weather stays hot hot hot?

Our friend Melinda writes:

“It’s been my understanding that when it’s too hot for a sustained period (including high overnight temps–like around 80), that many veggie plants drop their flowers before they fruit (e.g., tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc.). Is that true in your experience?”

Yes, but less often than you might think – or fear, given the ongoing heat wave. High night temperatures sterilize pollen and flowers that are not pollinated fall from the plant. But the window for this kind of blossom drop is comparatively narrow.

Pollen forms before the flower opens, but not that long before, and after the flower opens it must  be pollinated within a day or two (over the course of a single morning, in the case of squash), no matter what else is going on.

Maglia Rosa cherry tomatoes on the way

After the flower has been successfully pollinated the baby fruit won’t be affected. Or at least it won’t be affected by high temperatures. The drought that may accompany the heat and the fungus diseases encouraged by high humidity are another story.

Meanwhile, back at the thermometer, the thing to keep in mind is that flowers are forming more or less continually and maturing ditto, so even if one or two or three fall, more should soon appear to take their place.

Example: The Maglia Rosa cherry tomato in the picture is growing in the greenhouse, where I do not keep a thermometer because there’s nothing I can do if it gets too hot. Nevertheless, I know it must have been well over 100 in there for at least two days after the formation of the fruit on the left.

Nothing has dropped yet, and maybe nothing will ( see below) but even if the branch isn’t filled there will be tomatoes on it.

Tomatoes start suffering when nights are warmer than 75 degrees; flowers fall at around 80. Peppers – it figures – are cool up to 80 but drop if it goes over 86. Days over 95 spell trouble for everybody.

Fortunately, still being 80 when dark descends and staying at 80 all night are very different things. Individual varieties have different heat tolerances. Shade matters, during the day, for plants as well as people. Good leaf cover can save flowers that would die in direct sun.

The numbers make it sound as though you could look at the thermometer and know how hungry you’re going to be, but it’s more of a crapshoot than that, so don’t get discouraged.

Do try to be sure that what pollen there is gets transferred. Tomatoes and peppers are both self-fertile, but the pollen must still move from the male to female parts. If insects are in short supply and the air is still, gently brush/stroke/shake the flowers or use a fan to provide a light breeze.

You can also play cupid with a cotton swab, if you don’t have many plants or much else to do with yourself.

All that said, successful pollination will only get you so far. Tomatoes and peppers will rid themselves of new flowers and new fruit when deeply stressed, no matter what the cause. They’re conserving their energy so at least a little fruit will ripen and produce viable seeds. If the situation is really grim, consider removing some flowers yourself. After the weather moderates (it’s got to, or we’re all toast), plants that haven’t been struggling in vain will be stronger and better able to take up where they left off .

The iridescent green of the head is also in stripes at the joints, so the side view shows a string of jeweled beads

Anybody recognize this creature on the Limelight millet?

First pass at google confirms the likelihood that it is as it appears to be, some kind of stinkbug; they seem to be major pests on millet. But none of the common green and brown ones are anywhere near this large – it’s about an inch long.

Dial “M” for millet, right? It was the only one I saw but I fear it has friends and relatives nearby.

part of our Hudson Valley vegetable garden

In Kitchen and Garden has always been In Garden for Kitchen as much as anything else, so there’s a lot about growing vegetables tucked in among the posts about flowers and shrubs, preserves and pastries and architecture and wild mushrooms and coyotes and

where was I?

Giving pointers on food gardening, I think. Here are a few posts that may prove helpful as we teeter on the brink of the 2010 growing season:

The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Gardeners – just what it says… except of course it shouldn’t say “the,” implying as it does that there are only seven. This is just seven of the most important.

Planting a Delicious New Year, Favorite Sources for Seeds – Descriptions of and links to a few of the seed companies I buy from every year, along with a few words about heirlooms and hybrids

Tips for Success with Vegetable Seeds – or more accurately, success with vegetables like lettuce and carrots that are usually directly seeded, rather than grown from transplants.

High Return Vegetables – maximum bang for your (metaphorical; I’m not talking about money) buck when growing space, gardening time or both are limited

Concerning tomatoes: Cool Tomatoes (planting and mulching); Keeping Track of Your Tomatoes (labeling tips) ; Organic Tomatoes Triumphant (why organically grown tastes better and has more nutrients) Tomato Season Starts Now; It’s Time to Choose the Seeds – actually about making choices that (may) help avoid late blight.

Basil Time – harvesting guidance and late season care…I see where I should write something about planting the stuff; please stay tuned..

Delicious Home Grown Corn, and a Tasty Movie about the Industrial Kind – a giant love letter to Black Mexican aka Aztec Black heirloom sweet corn; why there’s no point in growing your own non-heirloom sweet corn and a friendly review of the now famous movie, King Corn.

Bill standing in the corn patch a couple of years ago. ( I think this may actually be Country Gentleman; Black Mexican plants are smaller. The purple item is Lespedeza thunbergii, in case you were wondering.)

After the 1st and 2nd snowfalls, before the 3rd and 4th. That’s a 12 foot ladder

Up until a bit more than a week ago, I was in a pro-snow mood. Seemed like everyone else in the Eastern half of the country was having piles and piles of white beauty, while we had ugly patches of bare brown ground and nothing to ski on.

Be careful what you wish for.

When all is finally revealed, this viburnum will be about half as tall as it used to be. Those three broken leaders were due for pruning but I’d have preferred to choose where to cut without quite so much help.

For almost a week, day temperatures hovered near freezing, nights went down to 20 or so. It snowed and snowed, then it rained for a while and then it snowed again until I swear the stuff must’ve weighed about a pound per cubic inch.

Clearing the parking area wasn’t just  a Sisyphean enterprise, it was also, eventually, a mighty long walk. By the 3^rd go-round the blacktop was ringed with 5 foot piles of snow, and because I couldn’t lift a shovelful much higher than 3 feet, I had to drag each and every one to the only edge low enough to throw it over.

The area in question is about 50 by 75 feet. The low spot was on a short side. You may do the math yourself; I don’t care to think about it.

I don’t care to think about what I’m going to find when all’s said and done, either. The big triple-trunked arborvitae in the corner of the east yard is now a single, and one of the single’s major branches is ripped beyond repair.

Two trunks down; the other one will probably have to go, purely on aesthetic grounds.

We lost  arborvitae trunks one and two in the second snowfall, so I went out in snowfall #3 and tried to knock as much snow as I could from the survivor and from our precious privacy hedge, which at least at this writing appears to have come through ok.

That’s me gently knocking snow upwards with an extension pole pruner, fully extended to about 10 feet. Invaluable tool.

Note: I have exaggerated for the sake of eloquent complaining. Truth is Bill did more than half of the blacktop clearing – that’s where the 5 foot piles came from.

Notice the nibbled edges on this baby and the large dark hole where a full sized head used to be.

I haven’t had the heart to look at the row  - on the other side of the garden – that I harvested extra carefully and then left covered in hopes of a super-early  spring crop. (Cutting the heads off just slightly above the base often results in regrowth, so if the weather is with you – and the voles aren’t – you get a flush of leaves and sometimes a whole new head as soon as the garden wakes up.)

Complete and utter carnage; somehow the scraps where a healthy root should be cause particular pain.

Too late now for the radicchio, but a good reminder to go out and check the viburnums and plums and

just about everything with a trunk and bark but particularly the fruit trees.

Protecting woody plants from mice and voles is a fall chore, not a midwinter one. But better late and all like that – there’s still a chance they haven’t yet hit or at least haven’t yet done permanent damage.

In the ideal scenario, I run out now and wrap wire mesh collars about 2 feet tall around all the tree trunks that don’t have collars already. Meanwhile, Bill is busily re-spraying repellant on all the shrubs, this time with rodents rather than deer in mind.

We’ll see how much of this actually gets done. Right now, Bill’s in fruit tree pruning mode and not to be disturbed; and I have to go out and buy more mesh before I can wrap it around anything.

BUT snow is the great vole-enabler, so even if don’t get around to doing anything else I will be more conscientious about keeping a ring of bare soil at least a foot wide around the most vulnerable plants. Two reasons:

1. Small rodents really go to town when they’ve got a blanket of snow to hide under. They have to be really starving before they’ll venture out in the open where predators can see them.

2. Bark at the very base of trees is tougher and (marginally) less appetizing than younger bark that’s higher up. A pile of snow is an elevator, if you’re a vole.

newly pruned apple tree in snow (last year)

It’s beautiful, all right. But that tidy collar of snow – especially the heap on the North side – looks even better to the voles than it does to us.  I went out shortly after the picture was taken and gently removed just enough to create a no-voles-land.

Organic management tools include:

Fungicide

Fertilizer

Being There

Being Careful

Being Realistic

Being fond of cherry tomatoes

And perhaps most importantly, Being a procrastinator – at least in our case… If I’d done all the tomato grafting I’d planned to do, there wouldn’t have been any leftovers in the greenhouse.

Tomato plants in the greenhouse have so far escaped the blight.

* The Fungicide is Serenade, approved for organic gardening and a fairly effective prophylactic as long as it’s applied frequently. Late blight can’t be cured, and if it’s well established it can’t be stopped. But if it hasn’t yet taken hold it can be held at bay by Bacillus subtilis, the “good” bacteria that is Serenade’s active ingredient.

Seven days is the recommended interval between sprays unless disease pressure is intense.  We were only waiting 4 or 5 when the rain was incessant. Complete coverage is the goal but I’ve been paying special attention to stems since they take longer to replace.

* The Fertilizer is mixed fish emulsion and liquid seaweed, alternating with half-strength commercial soluble 20 -20-20, to provide as much instant nourishment as the plants can use.

In a good year, tomato plants don’t need much feeding, but this has not been a good year. Cold and wet kept them small and weak with poorly developed root systems, ill-equipped to fight the blight organically. Being robust is a plant’s best defense no matter what your gardening style, and it’s especially important if you don’t want to use strong toxins.

* Being There is essential. I’m sure one of the reasons we lost the New York tomatoes is that we weren’t watching over them. Here in Maine I’m monitoring the plants several times a day, removing leaflets that show signs of blight before the lesions can spread (far) or produce (gazillions of) spores. In rainy weather, leaves that looked fine in the morning can show definite signs of distress by late afternoon.

Stems are another story; once they get black spots all the leaves above the spots will almost surely perish. It’s best to cut off the whole branch below the spot so the plant can spend its limited energy making new growth. Of course after a few rounds of this you may not have much plant left  - see Being Realistic, below.

Everything removed should be bagged at once, then deeply buried, sent to the landfill or burned as soon as possible. Don’t put it in the compost or on the ground in the deep woods.

Post Season Update: In the end it didn’t help – except in the greenhouse, where removing all infected material as soon as it appeared pretty much stopped the problem. But in the greenhouse there wasn’t much of a problem to start with. Henceforward I’ll be playing the percentages, trimming early if there’s not much damage, removing plants if early trimming doesn’t make a big, quick difference.

* Being Careful can minimize the inevitable spread of spores. Try to avoid working in the tomato patch when the leaves are wet or when there is a breeze. If you have multiple tomato locations, start your patrols in the least infected.

And when the diseased material is deep in the plant behind other, apparently healthy growth, try to cut back by degrees from the outside in, to minimize disturbance.

* Being Realistic can be painful, but it’s a big part of being a successful gardener, organic or conventional.

It is now mid-August. Before deciding to keep diddling in an attempt to have some tomatoes; look honestly at each plant’s size, general health and leaf cover as well as the number of blossoms and baby fruits.

Is it realistic to expect mature tomatoes from this thing before frost and if so, how many? In a lot of cases it’s going to make more sense to simply destroy the tomato and spend the saved gardening time caring for the crops that are doing well – or would be if they got a bit more attention – and planting fall salads, cooking greens and roots.

* Being Fond of Cherry Tomatoes may or may not make any difference. The fact that our cherries are generally doing better than the main crop plants might be just an accident of placement – I plant the cherries nearest the main paths for easy browsing.

But as a subset cherry tomato plants do seem to be stronger than others. Might be because they have more leaves in proportion to fruit, might be because they’re closer to the original species. And of course might only be true in our gardens.

* Procrastination isn’t really a virtue, even if it did give us some plants better protected from blight.

The most interesting thing it’s given us is the opportunity to test a (presumably) vulnerable heirloom alongside a (presumably) tougher hybrid. The leftovers were from a spring plan to graft ‘Lilian’s Yellow,’ a reputedly very fussy heirloom, onto the rootstock of ‘Big Beef,’ a sturdy hybrid if ever there was one.

The successfully grated plants in New York died. The bits and pieces in Maine languished for months in not big enough pots until the blight drama started.

Now they are in bigger pots. If they keep on being healthy for another week or so I’ll run strings to the greenhouse rafters and start having hopes.