Good Earth Garden; 118

Hi welcome back to the good earth garden. Marilyn's organic gardening calendar. I just found something I'm really excited about. I found my first melon. Can you see it here. It's known as so well camouflaged that it actually took me a few days to find it. It's a sugar baby type of watermelon. A small icebox watermelon believe it or not this is the most promising looking melon I've had in years. I guess that black plastic is doing some good after all. If you're growing your melons on a trellis like I am I'd suggest you support the fruit in some way because as the fruit gets heavier it'll pull the blinds down. I used a large pot here and shoved it up under the melon. You could use a coffee can or a small fruit basket or use a piece of software Tiriel like a nylon stocking and make a sling for the melon. Just take it and tie it to the trellis. Oh how I missed fish. Do you like watermelons. It's hot down here. We even if you're not growing your melons on a trellis I suggest you keep the fruit off the ground somehow. That will help to keep it from rotting

and protect it from the small marauders like turtles. I'd be really mad if something else got the melons besides me. I haven't had much trouble yet with with animals getting into my garden except for those cats that saga usually begins when the corn starts to ripen. The raccoons just clean me out every year. If any of you have some ideas on how to keep them out I'd be glad to hear about it. I've tried just about anything besides a shotgun. The last piece of advice I got was to hang some sweaty clothing in the rows of corn and some people have had success with that. Someone else mentioned using cans of ammonia and setting those in the corn rows and the vapors from that seems to keep them out. So I'm going to try all these things and see if I actually get some corn this year. The biggest problem I'm having right now and probably you are too is trying to keep everything watered. It's really hot and dry. We've gone from the Saudis spring to a real drought situation this year. I hope there's some rain soon in sight. That would be the best solution of course and a nice long rain. Rain has a magic effect

that we just can't duplicate even with a good soaking with the hose. But until that rain gets here let me give you some tips on how to make your water more effective. Most importantly try not to water when it's hot water early in the morning like before 10 o'clock or after 4:00 o'clock in the afternoon. The reason is if the plants sort of close themselves up during the heat of the day to help prevent against moisture loss. So your water won't be that effective at that point. So it's important then to water when it's cool and not so hot. Another reason is if you get little droplets of water on the leaves they could actually be magnified by the sunlight and burn holes in the plants. Also water the ground soak that good as opposed to letting the water come down over the leaves. It's much more effective to give a one long soaking to than just as a series of short sprinkles and mulch if there's one piece of advice I could give you now would be to mulch everything you can with anything you can get your hands on. I'm using straw and grass clippings and leaves and just piling for about a three to six inch layer

up around the plants. This helps to retard evaporation also. Even if you don't have anything like leaves or grass clippings to use to use you can probably get your hands on some newspaper. Just take that and spread it around using some rocks or seems to will hold it down and keep it from blowing away. It makes a very good mulch and it's really an organic type of mulch too. And it when you tilt up your garden in the spring you'll find that it's added lots of good texture to the soil. If you're using newspaper as mulch. Remember to use the black and white pages only the inks in the colored pages have the metals that could be harmful to the garden. One other job from Midsummer is to keep up with fertilizing. I talked about follow your feet for your feeding as one way of fertilising. I want to show you another technique today called side dressing. I'm going to side dress these eggplant here with some organic fertilizer. They have lots of

blossoms on them so that's a good signal to fertilize plants. The side dress plants figure out where the drip line of the plant. That's sort of an imaginary line from the outermost leaves. Then make a band around the plants about 1 to 2 inches deep. I just do it in the front here so you can see. Then use one of two handfuls of organic fertilizer for every plant. Just sprinkle that in the band that you made. It covered up with soil and I just pulled the mulch up around these plants so they can try to beat the heat. Holds the moisture in. If you want to fertilize a row of plants as opposed to a single plant it's basically the same idea. Just take your hand or your trowel and make a trough about 1 to 2 inches from the base of the plants all the way down the length of the row.

I'll just do a small section here. I need one to use about 1 pound of organic fertilizer for every 10 feet. Just sprinkle along that trough that you made to cover that up with soil. I'll pull my mulch up again. So keeping up with the heat is one job right now another job is keeping up with the insects. They seem to get meaner once it gets hotter. You might remember that I've been using an onion and garlic spray to help repel them. I'm growing some garlic in my garden and a viewer in Baltimore asked me about that. So I'd like to show you the plant. Garlic is in the onion family and it forms a tall flower head like this one. And the ball goes down in the ground. The view was that her eyes were blooming like this one. Then what was next. Once the flowers that they had which these pretty much

have in the foliage is whether it's time to dig up the ball from the ground and just use a trowel and dig it up. Just let the ball dry here in the sun for a couple weeks and you can break the close off the the stock and store it in an airy dry place like in a plastic mesh bag that's hanging up somewhere where there's good ventilation it will keep for quite awhile like that. Well as I mentioned last week we're going to have a guest on the show today. I'm hoping to finally find out what's wrong with those ailing tomato plants that I have. We're planning to get to some squash and bean problems too so that should help you out. I'll be back in a minute with Ethel ducky. That's where the University of Maryland. For now take a look at how well the garden is growing and still hanging in there despite the heat.

That's all these tomatoes I have in this part of the garden are doing just fine.

I have some over here that are really causing me some anxiety. Let me introduce my guests. So is Ethel ducky. She's a plant to fall just with the Department of botany at the University of Maryland. She's going to find out what's wrong with these tomato plants. Thanks for coming by Ethel. Oh it's a pleasure to be here theman. Well as I was telling you these plants just a couple weeks ago started wilting and I haven't been able to find anything obviously wrong with them but they're not recovering from the Will problems. How would you diagnose this. Well first of all we look around the garden here and will see that the tomato plants that are wilting are just in this area whereas your potatoes over here and your tomatoes right next to them here all look really fine there's no sign up well. So this makes me feel that it probably isn't one of the fungal wilt diseases few Saryan welter of psyllium wild or a nematode problem. And sure enough if I look and see what could be affecting just this part of the

garden over here I see a young vigorous walnut tree the black walnut and a great big walnut tree behind it and about 100 years ago or more. Say a pathologist discovered that if walnuts were growing near fields where tomatoes were growing the tomatoes would wilt and by the roots make some sort of a poisonous chemical that's called juggler and that kills the tomato plants. I've heard that could be a problem and I've never had a problem before but I guess the roots could just gotten far enough how would you check and see. Well it will have to pull the plant out of the ground. Well it looks like it's all gone anyway. Go ahead I'll let you do it. Now we want to cut into this. And what we would be looking for is a brownish discoloration in the stem in the tissues that conduct water and nutrients here distinctly Brown. Now a

fungus welt would also cause a brown discoloration and in a laboratory we would take a little bit of this tissue and grow the fungus out and identify it so that we know exactly what fungus it was but since you have this walnut tree right nearby I would say you have a case of walnut wilt and you'll have to either get rid of the tree or just not grow tomatoes or peppers or other so thankful that lands and plants in this in this area area. Well that's I'd like to. Diagnosis I had thought that could be a problem. It is it once a tomato plant got sick it started showing lots of other diseases that that tomatoes are susceptible to I see some blossom in Iraq that you could talk about there. OK here we can see the ends of the fruit. It's called Blossom and rot because the flour used to be attached at this end of the fruit. And. This is a disease that all home gardeners and commercial growers also see in their fields. As soon as the weather starts to get hot and dry a lot of work has been done to find the causes it seems to be related to a water balance in the

soil. But as you have more of it if you have droughty periods interspersed with very wet periods and that unfortunately is what Maryland weather is and also it's a lot more severe if you have not enough lime in your soil so we advise gardeners to larn their vegetable gardens well and to use mulch which is something you do here. Plenty of mulch to keep the soil from having wide fluctuations that is an oyster real dry and real wet sort of keep it more uniform. I also works in Epsom salts into the tomatoes in the areas where I was playing that helps to regulate the cat the salts. That's something that and I haven't noticed that prob in any of the tomato plants and bean plants I want to get to so let's go over there. Just go right through that made it there. You know how about we send you some of that plant back with you you can find out for sure what it is. So I'd be

interested I'm pretty sure it's a walnut but I'll check it out for the longest. OK I have some beans at PR I want to show you. I'm having some discoloration of the leaves. I see what you mean. Here we see kind of fine red stippling on the upper surface of some of the leaves in this planting but others the younger ones look kind of a real nice nice and green. And you mentioned you thought this might be being lost. I think this is air pollution injury. If it were being lost when we turned over on the lower leaf surface here we would see a little little postulates breaking through on the lower surface and up to rob with our hands. And take that hand up. We do have bright orange rusty spores and here you can see it's perfectly normal on the underside. So this is. An injury to the green cells in the plant that was caused by probably going in

through the mites and just killing the cells around each summer. This is why you have to start out as a very fine stipple and then it gets worse and worse. There's really not much you can do about them besides move far far away I guess you know that air pollution injury is really funny because it will kind of go up in the atmosphere and then come down miles away from your source of pollutant. And we see a lot of this on the eastern shore and commercial beads that test that you showed for finding a fungus by scraping. Do you have a powder come off that works for most of the fungus is. Well some of them a lot of the ones on foliage things like powdery mildew. You can test and see if you can rub it off easily. What other kinds of being problems have people been complaining about because of the weather this year. Well we've seen quite a bit of bacterial blight. More than I have normally seen on beans. Bacterial blight causes leaf spots that have a bright yellow halo around them. They're kind of interesting looking. There really isn't anything much you can do once you see the symptoms but you want to remember that this is a good reason why people don't shouldn't save their bean

seed. They should buy it from a reputable source that's been grown in a real dry place like Arizona or somewhere where they don't have a lot of rainfall that spreads disease organisms in amongst the planting beans in general are pretty fail proof crop or whatever good good home garden. Yeah suitable right. One thing that I've always found helpful is not to work in the foliage when the leaves are wet and that's a good rule for all vegetables and also with your flowers too. Not even to harvest when they're when they're damp because that can spread. But what kind of disease doesn't spread the fungal diseases you know most of the Foley or leaf spots leaf blight and things like that. Right. I want to show you some squash I've been perplexed with do you have here at the end of the room. I keep going about squash was my this is something different. Another leaf discoloration. See this white on the well-being of the plants. Well this is so I think this is just normal.

It does look like. You can notice that it's the same on the on leaves that on the older leaves in that the silver ring appears at about the same place on all the leaves in the on the whole plant. And you wouldn't expect a fungal disease to keep appearing like this all over the whole plant in the same pattern the same way also I've grown this plant in my own garden and it did the same and it wouldn't happen to you is that would you tell right if it were mildew What would you suggest. Well milk is always worse where you have poor air circulation. And one thing that we suggest that's sometimes helpful with mildew if you don't want to be spraying fungicides is to remove some of the larger leave so that you have a better air circulation through the plant but basically when you get these late season mildew is the plant's gone for many months. Right. Yeah it's either that or the squash for sometimes it's you know. Let me show you this leaf here and we'll see what you think about this.

OK well we've got some insect injury here and a little bit of marginal burn. Probably as a result of all this insect and also it's been shaded under the rest of them. Yes the weather really can have a big factor on plant diseases. We've been having very dry weather which is unusual for Maryland right now. If we get start getting some human weather are we going to see some changes I'm afraid that will really spread disease as one starts to get ready. It's usually we require some water on the surface of the plant in order to have a lot of fun infection by Fungi and that the reason that you don't work in the foliage when it's when it's wet. Some people complain about their young squash roots but they're still small. Rotting. I hold this vacuum but never had that happen. There's a fungus that does cause the very young fruit to rot and I get started in these flowers here and the old spent flower parts and so we don't

recommend any sprays for this particular we like to tell home gardeners to simply pick off the old flower here. After the fruit is formed about this much. That seems the home and wants the fruit are Roddy removed from the garden. Right yeah that would be a good thing that kind of thing to do and another good general measure for keeping plants healthy is just to keep them well harvested the longer a vegetable stays on the plant the more chance something else is going to get into it. I did taste better when they're picked through the sanitation recall as part of all of this we call that sanitation when you take up any spot in leaves and remove them from the garden or any rotten fruit and that's always a good practice to minimize diseases. Now that's a good thing I'll do this because they're in my garden and just sheer off any unhealthy looking leaves. Well if I want to thank you very much for coming you really made me feel that I don't have nearly as many diseases I thought I had to practically not a really healthy guy. Yeah that starts with good soil. Well thanks again and coming up next as the garden calendar which lists some good

prevention for keeping garden diseases out of your garden and also some varieties that you'd like to plan your garden for fall now cost in just a second back in the summer house. This is an egg plant here that I have in the edible landscape around my summer house. It's a more

unusual type of eggplant really more of an ornamental type that makes a small white fruit. It looks a lot like a bird's eggs. The fruits are edible but they never get very large. So it's really more of a plant to grow just for fun something that isn't much fun right now or keeping up with those Japanese beetles. It's really distressing to see how much damage they cause. Where it's tell you a bit about the nature of the beast and give you some tips for getting rid of them. Japanese beetles are a good example of why the government is so tight and restrictive on plants coming in from other countries. The Japanese beetles first arrived in the form of a grub in the roots Jock's of plants that came from Japan right around 916. And because they didn't have any natural predators in this country they've spread unchecked just about every state east of the Mississippi. There are a number of things you can do to try to keep up with Japanese beetles. I'll give you some ideas. What I usually do is just catch the Japanese beetles in a jar of water like a big Manet's

jar here take the lid off and use a little tap to the foliage where the bugs are to they fall right into the water and drown. And you can really catch a lot of beetles that way. You could pay your kids to do it. Another thing that you can do is is to let the beetles drown in this water as I mentioned and use that water to make a spray. After the bugs die in here the water is really foul smelling. And just a couple of tablespoons of that mixed with a pint of water can be poured into a sprayer and you can use that to spray the plants that seem to be most affected by the beetles. The idea is that the beetles are repelled by the smell of their own kind dying. So catching the beetles in one form or another or repairing them with sprays are two ideas. There are some things you can buy too. Some of that came out recently. It's called Milky Spore disease. It's a bacterial disease that affects the Japanese beetle in the grubstake So let me tell you a bit about the life cycle of the beetle beetles that you see now are adults and they'll mate and lay eggs and these eggs hatch into white

grubs and these grubs feed near the surface of the soil up until the fall and then over winter deep in the ground. I mean the start of coming closer to the surface of the soil in the spring then finally emerges adult beetles early in the summer. Those are the ones that you see now than they mate and lay eggs again and the whole cycle begins this Milky Spore disease is a bacterial disease that infects the the beetles when they're in their grubstake. So the bee the grubs that never hatch and to beetles It takes a while for this to be effective but it is a very good cure. Do you use this you buy this in a nursery store. It costs about $10 for a 10 ounce size here and a pound a cover about 4000 feet. It's a dust that you spread on the ground and you can spread it any time of the year when the ground isn't frozen. You usually need to apply it once because the bacteria will multiply over time and continue to spread. Now the few restrictions about using it are that it can be fairly costly if you have a lot of ground to cover. Or if you live in a neighborhood and no one else in your neighborhood is using it

they'll probably be just about as many beetles and they all come to your yard. So that would be one thing to consider then if you're going to use it. And it also won't kill the beetles that you see now. It's going to kill them in the grub state. So you might want to try some of the traps that they're selling. That will help you catch the beetles you see now. There's a couple different types. I can type or the bag type that's a little more common now and these both work in the same way of having a bait that and includes a sex attractiveness. The smell of the beetles and heat I guess you say. And a floral scent that attracts both sexes of the beetle. A few cautions and using these traps. I put them at least 50 feet away from the plants that they're getting into. If you don't want to attract any more to your guard than you already have in the vegetable gardens Japanese beetles going to particularly bad for corn because they strip away the silks before they have a chance to complete the pollination process so you can really lose a whole crop of corn from Japanese beetles if you don't keep up with them to try to set these traps

50 feet away from the plants that they're getting on. I've noticed them a lot this year on rhubarb which I thought was unusual because I thought the leaves were poisonous but doesn't seem to affect the beetles at all. Hopefully some of these ideas I'll help you cut keep up with the Beatles. Fortunately that we have a very active department of agriculture here in Maryland. There keep trying to find new ways to help keep the Beatles in control. They're working on a parasite now so this should be even more relief in sight. Well I'm just about out of time for now. I want to thank you for coming back again each week. I just want to remind you that gardening shouldn't be all work. Try to work in the garden when it's not so hot not like me. Like early in the morning when it's cooler in the afternoon and take some time just to enjoy all the good work you've done. I'll see you next time. Make it a good week. Do you have any questions or suggestions. I'd be glad to hear from you. My address is. But Earth garden Maryland Public Television. Owings Mills Maryland 2 1 1 1 7.