In the Organic Garden: 2020 the year of the Borer

 The garden is growing pretty well. This is the second year I have used alfalfa meal as my nitrogen fertilizer. It has done well even though its been the pandemic year of the borers! I have encountered many borers this year. Borers are like a small caterpillar that bores into the stem of a plant and then the borer eats it's way up the inside of the stem basically killing the plant slowly. I first encountered one in a pepper plant. The top of the plant just wilted for no apparent reason.

This plant was actually in the garden and I dug it out and replaced it because I did not think it was savable. If you look partway up the stem you see the tell tale hole where the borer went into the plant.

I watched a youtube video to learn how to slit the stem upwards to find the borer. 

You can see the little caterpillar on the leaf after I pulled it out of the stem and squished it a bit. On the right you see the plant. As I did not think it was going to come back to life, I ended up cutting it off. Since it had a few leaves at the bottom I figured I would just see how it did. 

This is that same banana pepper today. You can see it grew back with a vengeance and has set quite a few fruit. I am truly amazed! After the pepper plant, two of my tomato plants had the same wilt of the top part of the plant, and upon inspection I found the borer hole. 

I cut upwards from the hole, split the stem a little bit with the tweezers, and kept going up until I found it and pulled it out. As the video on YouTube showed, I wrapped the stem using the medical wrap I found in the first aid box. It worked very well as it stuck to itself and would be expandable. The video had said that the plant probably wouldn't do much after the borer extraction, but like the pepper plant I let grow giving it some water every day for about a week to help it re-establish itself. You can also see my grass clippings in the garden for mulch which helps the second problem of blight from splashing back on the plant. 

As you can see, the plant recovered nicely! It even grew another leader from below the wrapped area. Next year I am going to try a yellow container with soap water at the beginning of June per the suggestion of my friend Gosia, because the adult moths are sometimes attracted to it and will drown before they lay their eggs. 

This is what my soil top looked like at the start of the planting season. I am sorry I didn't get it posted at the start of the season, but better late than never I guess. In this picture you see egg shells, potash (hard to see) and then the alfalfa meal on the top of the soil. This all gets raked into the soil and that's all there is to it. Our growing season isn't much longer than 3 months and that is usually how long organic fertilizers last. I did notice that my green beans looked like they had used up the nitrogen in the soil so about the second week of August, so I sprinkled a little bit more alfalfa meal around the plants for a late season boost. 

I leave you with one of my favorite visitors to the garden, the swallowtail butterfly. I always plant some carrot seeds just in case one of them needs to lay their eggs in the garden. As with many other things this year we need to look for the positive or the beauty in life in order to keep our sanity. So get outside and happy gardening!