All Things Gardening
Gardening questions: too many sumacs, hungry grasshoppers and tomato-eating birds
Brown beetles landing in your hair when you try to enjoy an evening on your porch? Crows taking just one bite from your ripe tomatoes on the vine? Charlie Nardozzi offers guidance on these questions and more issues that are bugging local home gardeners this summer.
- Duration:
- 4m
- Broadcast on:
- 11 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
- And I'm Mary Angish, and you're Charlie Nardosi. Hi Charlie. - Hi Mary. - Keep the gardening questions coming, and do you have time to answer a bunch more, Charlie? - I do, let's do round three of the lightning round. - Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay, here we go. This first one from Elizabeth in Heartland. Elizabeth writes, "We feel like we're living "in a horror movie every evening if we're outside. "There are swarms of brown beetles "that love to harass the humans on our deck. "What can be done about these creatures? "We don't want to use toxic chemicals if we can help it." - Elizabeth, it sounds like they might be the Asiatic brown beetle. Comes out at night, flies around, attacks plants, but also can get into your hair and your clothes and everywhere else too. Because it's similar to the Japanese beetle, you would approach it the same way. Get those Japanese beetle traps with the pheromones and place them about 50 to 100 feet away from your house so you can draw them away when they come out at night. That would be one possibility. I also read from North Carolina Extension, a kind of a cool little home remedy trick, is to get a light bulb, hang the light bulb, plugged in of course, over some water, not touching it of course too. A couple inches above some soapy water, a dish with filled with soapy water and the beetles will be attracted to the light and fall into the water and drown. Long term, the best solution would be to use beneficial nematodes. These are nematodes that attack the grub stage of these brown beetles, similar to the Japanese beetle. So you want to spray that around the areas where you see those brown beetles coming out of the ground. You'll do that probably later this month and water them in well. That should lower the whole population. Okay, here's another insect one from Claudia and West Norawitch. I've never had a significant amount of grasshoppers at my house, but this year there are tons of them. My asparagus plants are two years old and the foliage is being eaten leaving skeleton-like remnants of fronds instead of nice, busy fronds. Are the grasshoppers the culprit? Well, it could be the grasshoppers. It could also be the asparagus beetle. The larval of the asparagus beetle can defoliate, especially young asparagus plants, pretty easily. So if you have grasshoppers, it's usually not a perennial problem in Vermont because they like kind of dry or warm, dry conditions. We don't have the dry conditions here in the summer, especially the last couple of summers. If you can mow down weedy areas, that's where they're hanging out, waiting to come into your garden. They have lots of natural predators, lots of different birds, mammals. And what you can do for your asparagus, of course, is to check and see if you see those asparagus beetle, little kind of gray colored grubs on them. And if you do, you can spray with spinnasad. And that would be something to spray on the asparagus fronds to kill them. And I don't think the grasshoppers are probably the primary cause of the problem. - Okay, here's one from John. John writes in to say, "A few years ago, a winged sumac appeared in my yard. It might have crept in the year I tried no mow may. Well, now I'm overrun with them. I can mow over the small ones the minute they pop up, but if you miss one, they grow incredibly fast. Is there some way to stop them from propagating an out of curiosity? Is it by rhizomes that they are managing to spread?" - They are spreading by rhizomes under the ground. You will have to play wack a sumac for a little while longer. If you can continue to mow them down, that will exhaust that root system and stop them from coming up. You can just draw a line in the sand, so to speak. So decide this area. I'm gonna keep it clean of sumac. The rest of the sumac can go over there and have a good time. They are a real beneficial plant to have in the landscape for bees, for birds, medicinal uses for humans and for food. So mowing them down or digging out the roots are really the two main options. - Here's one from Diana and Essex. Diana writes, "We have a yuri pear tree. "It's not too old, maybe 10 years, "covered with pears now. "And we have three hawthorn trees kind of scraggly. "We grew them from six years ago. "They're about 20 feet tall, "but this year, two of the hawthorns "are producing pears, so confused." - I was very skeptical at first when I read this one, but then I looked into it and there is, in fact, a hawthorn called the pear hawthorn, which is a hawthorn tree that produces pear-shaped fruits. They're very small, they're much smaller than the European pears, but they are pear-shaped, they are edible, so it's possible. Go out there, harvest a few, see what they taste like, maybe you wanna eat 'em. - Diana in Northern Vermont writes, "My daughter has problems of crows "attacking her tomatoes, taking a bite out of each tomato, "and then leaving it on the ground." What's up, how can she save her tomatoes? - Well, crows, blue jays, cardinals, a lot of the bigger birds love to go after tomatoes, so the best thing to do is to create a cage. If you can create some kind of wire cage using chicken wire, wire mesh, or even some of the plastic wire, deer fencing over those plants and make it very sturdy, so when the heavy crow lands on it, it's not gonna collapse, and that should keep them away so you can get some tomatoes. - Okay, and send your questions to gardening@vermontpublic.org, and Charlie, you have a demonstration coming up. - I do, at Garden Supply Store in Wilson, I'll be talking about organic pest controls. That will be Monday, August 12th, from five to six, and you can sign up online at the Garden Supply website, and I'll be seeing you in the garden. [Music]