Bugging the Bugs that Bug the Beans

About five weeks ago I started seeing something on my bush beans. I was expecting them and knew what to look for.

Those pretty yellow bumps are the eggs of a Mexican bean beetle. The adults, which I don’t have any of my own pictures of, resemble ladybugs. They are related, but the bean beetle has more of an orangey color and small spots in horizontal bands.

When the eggs hatch you can find the larvae feeding on the underside of leaves. They’re yellowish as well and are covered with spines.

The adults and larvae feeding on the leaves of the bean plants can obviously do a lot of damage. What I find interesting is that they appear to like some varieties of beans more than others. In this picture there are three rows of beans. From left to right they are Black Valentine, Jacob’s Cattle Gasless and Lina Cisco’s Birdsegg.

Notice anything? It looks like the beetles don’t especially care for the Black Valentine compared to the other two. They’re also more or less leaving my white kidney and pole lima  beans alone.

So how does one control them in an organic garden? At first I was doing the simplest approach—removing and destroying the eggs and adults whenever I found them. But given the number of bean plants I have and the fact that I can’t get to the garden every day that approach wasn’t going to do much.

Here’s one of the advantages of having a plot in a community garden. I and several other gardeners on the committee were charged with monitoring our bean plants and reported when the first eggs were spotted. Whoever was in charge of such things then ordered some predatory wasps that, being really, really pricey are out of the range of most home kitchen gardeners. The timing of the wasps’ release is very important so they are shipped overnight just before they emerge.

 

A little mesh bag is hung inside the bean plants (I moved this one out for a picture) so the wasps don’t have to go far. They’re very tiny and I haven’t seen any. The wasps lay their eggs in the bean beetle larvae where they hatch, feed on the beetle thus killing it, pupate and then emerge to start the cycle all over again on more larvae. These little buggers are gruesomely effective. This is the third year I’ve been growing beans here and the first time the beetles have been noticeable. The wasps have been used in the past and other gardeners report that they worked very well in knocking back the beetles for several years. My plants are forming beans that should mature and be harvestable. With some luck next year’s crop won’t have to suffer this kind of infestation.

Using the wasps to treat for the beetles is an example of a biological control. Do you employ biological controls in your garden?

Tommy Bound

Tommy the San Marzano tomato is growing by leaps and bounds. All of our tomato plants are thanks to the organic compost I planted them with and regular watering during this annoying drought. I’ve had to pay close attention to keep them from growing into an unrestrained tangle. Last year I tried pruning and staking my tomato plants. It’s not just my inner Bondage Master at work, either. Tomato plants are vines. Except for varieties that have been bred to stop growing at a certain height, they continue to grow through the season and can become a big, sprawling mess. I prefer to keep my plants up off the ground. I do this by pruning them to one or two main vines and tying them to upright stakes.

Pruning tomatoes is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. On a tomato vine the leaves grow out each side as the vine grows longer. Left to its own devices, another branch of the vine called a sucker would sprout from the vine right above each leaf. Here’s a pencil-sized sucker that I’ll remove to keep the vine restrained. The vine is on the right, the leaf is on the left and the sucker is sticking up between them.

 

 

To remove suckers I just snap them off with my fingers if they’re small, or snip them with shears if they’ve gotten big and woody. Then the plant looks like this. The spot where the sucker was removed right in the middle.

 

 

The second part of this equation is keeping the pruned vines up off the ground. Those wire tomato cages you see everywhere? They’re pretty much worthless for any but the smallest plants. I use wooden or plastic-coated steel stakes eight feet in length buried about eighteen inches in the ground. The vines are tied to the stakes using old t-shirts ripped into strips. The fabric is soft and doesn’t cut into the vines if they blow around in the wind. I first tie the strip tightly around the stake, then bring the vine next to the knot and tie a loose loop around it so it has some room to move and grow.

 

 

Why go to all this effort? It’s more than just keeping the garden neater. The spores of diseases that can damage the leaves and fruit of tomatoes are harbored in the ground. Splashing rain—assuming we ever get any again—would move the spores up onto the plants more easily if they’re laying on the ground. Also, by keeping the plants slender and up in the air, they dry off quicker. It’s also been claimed that by limiting their growth this way that they produce less fruit but that it’s larger. That may be true because last year I had some pretty big tomatoes. I don’t particularly want larger fruit, but I do want the other benefits of pruning and staking. Training the plants this way also makes it easier to monitor and pick the fruit. Less stooping is always welcome.

 

Thanks to this tough love Tommy and his friends are coming along well in spite of the uncooperative weather. Before long these green tomatoes will be ripe and ready for eating and preserving.

 

 

How do you grow your tomatoes? Do you prune and stake them? I’m interested to hear about others’ experiences and what they’ve learned.

Bee News Updates: Bad, Good and Good!

Life's that thing we all do that requires taking some bad with some good and hopefully making the best of things along the way. We’ve had bad and good news lately regarding the bees, but fortunately the good is winning out.

 

When we were out adding supers to a couple of the busier hives in the country apiary the other day we got the bad news: An elderly neighbor who had problems with the way we were keeping our bees –he thought we should have them in the shade!—was still pestering our host. In the interest of maintaining good relations, we agreed to move them to a new location. Fortunately, and I mean really fortunately, another neighbor of our previous host was not only willing to host them, she has a nearly ideal spot, doesn’t mind how many we have, and says we can keep there for the foreseeable future! On top of that, I’ve renewed an acquaintance from twenty-plus years go. With a new site available, we screened off the entrances, tied and taped the hive components together and loaded them on and in The Other Mark’s van.

 

 

A short drive later we had them placed and leveled. The whole process went quickly and smoothly and we never suited up or used smoke. We put brush and boards in front of the entrances so they’d be confused when they emerged and have to reorient to their surroundings. This should keep them from trying to fly back to their previous location when they come back in from foraging. Fingers crossed.

 

 

 

The other news concerns the queen cells we installed when we did the splits as related in my previous post. The split we made from Margaret, the booming package hive, had its queen emerge normally, but the one we made from Mary and placed in our back yard never emerged at all. I was able to obtain another VSH queen cell and install it a week after the first one. Today I opened the hive to check and found an encouraging sight.

 

 

See how the end of the cell is opened in a nice, neat circle? That indicates that the queen, the “real” Ruby for record-keeping purposes, emerged normally and should be somewhere in the hive. I didn’t go looking for her. I’ll leave the hive alone for a couple of weeks to give her time to mature and mate and then do a full inspection to see if she’s started laying eggs. Wish her luck!

That Time I Did the Splits

Yesterday morning The Other Mark and I got together at the apiary and did splits. We had been discussing for a while whether we could or  if we should even try. With the input of more experienced beekeepers we decided to go ahead and give it a try. What? You knew I was talking about beekeeping, didn’t you?

The Dane County Beekeeping Association received a grant to obtain and propagate Varroa Sensitive Hygiene Queens. In brief, these queens have been selectively bred for behavior that protects their hives from a plethora of pests and diseases greatly reducing the need for nasty chemical interventions. And they’re expensive. The grant and generous work of one of our members allowed others in the association to purchase them for much, much less so I ordered two intending to use them to requeen the two package hives we got back in May. Then, we learned at the last meeting that we could use these queens to make new hives by splitting our existing ones

Splitting a hive involves removing frames of brood, pollen and honey along with any bees on them from an existing hive and putting it into an empty hive to start a new colony. This is one of the honey frames we took from Mary, the hive we rescued from a wall. We also took a couple of frames with brood in various stages including capped, and another frame of honey and pollen.

The queen cells were brought home in a wooden block that had holes drilled to accommodate them. The queen cell hangs down from a little plastic cup. How it’s constructed I don’t know but I should read up on that. It’s doubtless an interesting process. We selected a frame that had a nice patch of brood in various stages of development…

…and just jammed the cell into the middle of it maintaining the vertical orientation.

Then, we placed the frames in their boxes and, in the case of the split we took from Margaret, positioned the hive on the last vacant stand in the apiary. The one from Mary—and this is the exciting part!—I loaded into my car and brought home to a spot I’d prepared in the back yard. Meet Ruby.

We did the splits early in the morning before the foragers had started flying for the day. When I got home and removed the screens we’d stuck on for transport they slowly, placidly began coming out to explore their new home. By mid-morning there were a good number of gentle, relaxed bees flying around the hive. I spent a good part of the day just watching them.

This is the time of year to be getting a beehive ready for winter, believe it or not, and that’s done by making sure you have a young, laying queen in residence. These queens should emerge in a few days, spend about another week maturing and then yet another week or so after that making mating flights. After that, we should start seeing eggs in the new hives. Our fallback plan, should the new and/or existing hives not be strong toward the end of summer, is to remove the old queens and combine each new hive with an old one. I’m really hoping it doesn’t come to that.

Tommy Gets Buried

 

It’s been quite a while since I reported on Tommy’s progress so I thought it was time I tried to catch up. He’s been busy!

 

On May 14 Tommy was moved to his final home in the garden. Earlier I had installed stakes for all the tomato plants and sowed buckwheat as a spring cover crop. The buckwheat didn’t do so well because the weather turned cool again as soon as I planted. Still, some came up so I now know what it looks like for future reference.  Anyway, here’s how I transplant tomatoes:

 

Start with a sturdy plant you’ve either started from seed yourself or purchased from a local grower or friend. I’ve read that you’re actually better off with a shorter, sturdier plant than an impressively tall one. My plants got a bit taller than I would have liked because I started some of them too early and I even ended up transplanting them a couple weeks before I expected to because the weather was so nice. Thank you, Global Climate Change!

 

 

Next, I dug a hole a few inches from the stake. A deep one. Most plants you buy or grow for your vegetable or perennial garden should be planted in the ground at the same level they were at in the pot. Not so with tomatoes. If you pull off some of the bottom leaves and put the plant in the ground deeper, it will grow roots all along the buried section of stem and make for a stronger plant. Tommy was probably a good eighteen inches tall at this point so I buried about another six inches of stem.  Alternatively you can also dig a horizontal or slanted hole and lay the plant down but I like to have the initial roots deep.

 

 

I dug the hole even a little deeper than I wanted it to finally be and put a big handful of compost in the bottom. Then  I watered the hole.  That’s right, I watered the hole. Think about it. Where are Tommy’s roots going to be when he goes in there? And when he’s all good and planted how long do you think I’d have to water to get the soil down around those roots wet?

 

Next I gently removed Tommy from his pot and placed him in the hole.

 

 

I backfilled with the soil I removed to make the hole with out stomping, tamping , or even patting. I want rainfall and irrigation water to infiltrate down and around and into that soil and leaving it a little on the uncompressed side facilitates that, so I let it settle on its own. Halfway through the backfilling I watered again just for the heck of it.

 

 

When I’d finished returning all the soil to the hole I tried something new. Last year I had some issues with blossom end rot. It looks like a disease, but is actually caused by a deficiency in calcium uptake. It’s probably more pH related than the actual presence of nutrient in the ground but I threw some crushed oyster shell around Tommy and lightly scratched it into the soil. I don’t really expect it to help all that much, but I’ve got pounds of it on hand from my old Chinese-slipper-orchid-growing days.

 

 

Next time things get  a little kinky with young Tommy and his friends.

The Queen is Dead? Long Live the Queen!

A little over two weeks ago we obtained our first colony of bees via a route I hadn’t quite planned on. Armed with a saw, crowbars and various other pieces of equipment we extracted from the wall of a house. When we were done we were not sure whether we had gotten the queen or not. Since installing them in a Langstroth hive the bees have been coming and going, bringing in pollen which is an encouraging sign.

Yesterday we finally opened the hive for the first time to see what was really going on in there. The anticipation was killing me. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but considering how it was established, we weren’t surprised. One of the two boxes of frames had only empty cells and capped brood we presumed was dead since the bees weren’t on that comb to speak of at all. In the other box we did find nectar and honey stores, lots of workers, lots of drones, and no eggs or larvae. We also found queen cells!

The queen cells we saw were opened on the side like these two. This is the result when the first queen emerges and then goes around destroying her rivals. It means that there may be a virgin queen wandering around in the hive. The weather here has been cool and overcast for a while now. If she’s in there, Mary, or perhaps we should say Mary II should come out on a mating flight some sunny day and then eventually start laying eggs. This would be the ideal outcome of this situation since that would perpetuate the genes from the queen that had a hive survive through the winter. I’m crossing my fingers and hope to report good news before the end of May.

Free Dinner!

OK, I exaggerate. It’s the last time, I promise. But today I did score some comestibles free of charge by doing a little foraging while hiking on some beautiful public land. I wish I knew more of the edibles out there, but for the time being we were focused on one seasonal treat I frankly don’t even like all that much.

 

 

That ugly fungus is a morel, a member of the genus Morchella but I couldn’t tell you which species.  If you live where they grow, I don’t need to tell you some people are positively crazy for them. The appear for a brief period in the spring and lure hundred, probably thousands of Midwesterners to the woods. I found a few while hiking with friends today so they’re going to work their way into dinner somehow. Right now the dish in the lead combines them with shallots and brown rice. That will make a nice accompaniment to the main course which features the leaves you see to the left of the morel.

 

Garlic mustard, is an invasive exotic weed that, unfortunately, carpets much too much of the woodlands of this region. Its only, meager saving grace is that it’s edible. So, in the event I could find some inspiration for how to use it this evening I pulled a bundle and brought it home.  Here’s what I came up with:

 

First, we’ll enjoy some hummus that is made with garlic mustard instead of garlic. I was hoping it would be more green.

 

 

Then I’m going to broil some lambchops and slather them with a garlic mustard pesto.

 

I must say, there’s something uniquely satisfying about stuffing an invasive, exotic weed in the food processor and gleefully mashing the power button.

Puzzlement in the Carrot Patch

I’m puzzled about the carrot seeds I’ve planted. I made seed tape with two varieties of seed I purchased this year following this method and planted them back during the freaky warm spell that is now decidedly over. A few days later I found a package of those cool spherical Parisian carrots on the share shelf at the community garden. They were dated for sale in 2008. In a what-the-heck moment I grabbed them and sowed them thickly in a row since I didn’t know how long carrot sees remain viable in storage. A week or more later I sowed a couple more rows of the seed tape carrots. Here’s the result.

 

See that fuzzy green strip in the middle of the five rows? Those are the old Parisian seeds planted after the supposedly fresh, seed tape seed.  There is one seedling popped up in the first seed tape planting. Otherwise nada. Several factors need to be considered here like the quality of the new seed—I did go with the “low bid,”—the interaction of the clayey soil and the tape tissue, heck, it could even be that the hi-liter I used to mark the seed locations is an inhibitor. Regardless, I’m disappointed since we were hoping to grow lots of carrots this year. It may be time to buy different seed and start all over. What do you think? I really wanted those Atomic Red carrots.

Banana Appétit!

Today I whipped up a batch of something I wouldn’t have even considered until recently. You see, all my life I’ve believed I have an allergy to bananas. It’s never been a problem since they’re pretty easy to avoid and I don’t even care too much for the smell of them. That all changed on our trip last February to Costa Rica. At the last place we stayed, we were served a sweet, red spread with breakfast that I thought was delicious. It turned out to be Banana Marmalade!

 

 

I’ve never had a problem with the flavor of baked foods like banana bread or cookies so maybe it’s just raw bananas that turn me off. And I’m pretty sure if I ever was allergic I’m not now.  In any case, I asked the lodge owner how it was made and she gave me a quick description but no set measurements. Today I just googled for a recipe and used one that appeared several times in the first page of results.

 

I started with a pound and a half of bananas and a lemon. The recipe also called for the zest of half an orange but since I didn’t have any I used the dried stuff from Penzey’s. And, of course, there’s lots of sugar. Everything just gets dumped in a pot and cooked. I was skeptical at first that there was enough liquid. Having never eaten a raw banana, I always just assumed they were as dry and spongy as they looked.

 

 

Once they got cooking I was surprised at the amount of juice that came out. I kept stirring and cooking them on medium-low heat and watched as the fruit broke down and the mixture got thicker.

 

 

Eventually the marmalade took on a translucent sheen and a spoonful on a chilled plate had the right consistency after a quick visit to the fridge. You’ll notice, if you’re as attentive as I think you are, that it doesn’t have the pretty red color that the Costa Rican marmalade had. The lodge hostess told me there were no red ingredients and that the color was just from the caramelization of the sugars. Since my batch was getting thick I was hesitant to push it any farther and end  up with a scorched flavor. Maybe next time I’ll be more daring.

 

 

I jarred it up and left it to cool before the final tasting. Since it was going in the refrigerator to be eaten right away I didn’t bother with a full-on processing, although the second jar did go in the freezer. Hopefully it’s sugary enough to not expand and break the jar.

 

 

Once it had cooled some, I tried it on a piece of toast. Pretty yummy but doesn’t hold a candle to local strawberry jam. Since my strawberry plants are only blooming right now, I don’t think I’ll be jamming any too soon. But this tropical treat might hold us over until the local fruit comes in. My only concern is about the kinds of wildlife it attracts.

 

We Have Our First Bees!

A couple days ago The Other Mark called to say he had responded to an opportunity to remove a colony of bees from someone’s house. The notice was posted on the local beekeeping group’s listserv and he jumped right in to say we were on it. We loaded up all the equipment we could think of that we might need and headed to the home to check it out and possibly even do the removal right away.

When we got there it was sunny and warm enough that the bees were flying in and out of a hole in the siding waaaaay up on the second floor.

Fortunately the wall was an exterior screen wall and was easily accessible from the narrow, top-floor deck. After some discussion we decided to postpone attempting to remove it for a couple of days to wait for cooler, overcast weather and an earlier morning start.

So, this morning we packed up again and headed to the home. When we arrived a peek over the wall revealed that only a couple of guard bees were outside the opening and none could be seen flying around. We had listened with a stethoscope previously to guess at the extent of the colony and planned to start removing siding boards at the bottom and work our way up to try to catch the queen if she ran down when the wall was opened.

 

We all know, of course, that no matter how you plan, there are usually some surprises along the way. When we removed the first siding board thinking we were going to be looking at honeycomb and joists we instead were confronted with a layer of plywood sheathing.  It’s apparent on the left where the wood is damaged from the moisture of the hive inside.

Fortunately the homeowner had a circular saw and with a few deft cuts we were back in business and had the wall open. The colony appeared to be limited to the outermost space between the joists.

 

With the wood completely off, we could see that the honeycomb hung approximately three feet down. The Other Mark started cutting off sections and we bundled them into frames with string and rubber bands and placed them in the hive bodies we had brought along.

 

Since this was when things started to get really busy and really sticky, I didn’t take many more pictures of the process. The homeowners, however had front row seats behind the window and watched the entire rescue, taking pictures and fetching us the occasional useful item.  During the time we were working, the bees were remarkably gentle. There were moments when there were quite a few flying around us, but I only noticed a couple times that they were bumping my mask. I didn’t get any stings and The Other Mark had only one fingertip sting when he was cutting.

The colony turned out to be four layers of comb and in the end, we filled up two ten-frame medium hive bodies with lots of comb full of eggs, brood, honey and pollen. They’re pretty messed up at the moment so I hope the bees can clean up and sort things out in their new home. We’re not entirely sure we got the queen but think she might have been in one of the first clumps of bees we dumped in the hive body. Fingers are crossed.

The homeowners couldn’t have been more gracious. When we were all done with the rescue  they served us lemonade and we tasted the honey from a clean section of comb that Mark had saved. It was delicious—sweet and remarkably floral!

We securely taped together the hive and drove it to our first apiary where we’d prepared to put our package bees.  This hive has been christened Mary in honor of the homeowner. She wanted to keep the bees alive rather than have them exterminated since she’s become aware of the plight of honeybees over the past several years. The bottom two blue hive bodies contain the comb we removed from the wall. The one above it has empty frames in case they decide they still need more room to expand and the top on is where we placed the comb we couldn’t fit in the boxes for them to clean out and utilize.

After they’ve had some time to settle in we’ll check to see how they’re doing, hopefully finding eggs indicating the queen is in there, alive and well. For now they’ve got a big enough task reorienting to their new surroundings and just figuring out how to get in and out of the hive.

Beehives Decorated!

Yesterday we gathered a small crowd of the young and the less-young to put the finishing touches on our beehives, aesthetically speaking. Unfortunately the weather was on the chilly and gray side but the activity in the garage was colorful. The Other Mark started out with an explanation of the parts of a beehive and why we wanted to decorate the fronts—to help the bees know which ones are their homes.

 

He then modeled his new bee suit for the amusement of the gathered artists.

Then we all got to the task of painting. We used stencils to make the job a little easier and faster. They worked really well.

One of the artists had had a unit on honeybees in school and knew about the dreaded varroa mites.

 

 

The Other Mark even enlisted another artist to decorate his new bee suit.

 

Once we had enough boxes done to get us started for the season we moved inside to enjoy hot chocolate and cookies and talk bees. The kids were really interested in all aspects of honeybees and beekeeping so we’re hoping to include them in hiving our first packages and in future apiary visits.

 

The bees will have to be completely insane to swarm and leave these hives!

   

For now the rest of the boxes are back in our basement where I’ll work at adding decorations over the coming weeks. After I posted the plain painted beehives a friend of mine shared a link to some Slovenian beehive folk art. Check it out. They’re charming.

 

Have you decorated your beehives? I’d enjoy seeing them if you have. Looking around the Internet, some people have really had fun with making their bees’ homes unique.

Beehives Painted!

After hours of skillfully wielding a paintbrush I’m happy to say all the beehive parts I got from the other Mark have been painted. He built them and primed them and then I took over from there.  Starting with leftover paint from the garage—sage green--I purchased a small can each of steel blue and lavender to provide some interest. This weekend, provided the weather cooperates, we’ll be gathering with some children and adults to stencil and paint flowers, bees and who-knows-what on the boxes. The additional artwork and different-colored hives should help the bees keep track of which hive is their home.

 

Tommy Turns 18!

Here’s Tommy on his 18th birthday. It seems like just yesterday that I tucked his little seed into a little wad of ecologically-unsustainable peat but it really has been over two weeks, eighteen whole days. Just look how he’s growing! He’s even cut his first pair of true leaves.

 

Tommy is an heirloom cultivar—a portmanteau word from cultivated+variety—of tomato called San Marzano and has a long and distinguished history. The original San Marzano tomatoes were grown in Italy in the Eighteenth Century and have been prized since then for their flavor.  Since San Marzanos are heirlooms, it means they are open pollinated. A plant of this variety will pollinate itself and produce offspring that are the same as its parents. Hybrid garden plants can’t do this. Because of this, seed can be saved from year to year. In fact, Tommy was grown from seed I saved last year from a plant I got from a friend. With luck I’ll be able to save seed again this year and keep my own supply of this line going.

Here is where Tommy will eventually make his home. This is a view looking northeast.

It’s kind of hard to see the beds with the leaf mulch still in place, but in this view you can see that garden is now twelve beds,  each of which is approximately 8’x3’ in size.  The second and third bed from the grass path there in the far corner have been reserved for the tomatoes and peppers this year. I prepared them in advance by installing the support stakes and then seeding the ground with a cover crop of buckwheat. My hope is that the buckwheat will have time to grow and be cut back before tomato and pepper planting time. It will help loosen the soil and then provide mulch.

Until then, Tommy’s got a lot of growing up to do. I’ll keep you posted on his progress in the coming weeks.

French Sorrel

One of the interesting phenomena of being able to tend the same kitchen garden year to year is the way the so-called garden seasons can overlap. Garlic planted in the fall emerges in the spring. Biennial crops can be overwintered in the ground, root cellar or crisper drawer to be replanted for seed production. Perennial herbs and fruits return--hopefully--like reliable friends every year.

 

It's that last category I used in my first fresh-harvested dish of the season. When I inspected the garden recently one of the emerging signs of life was the French sorrel plant. It's an herb I tried last year for the first time, not really knowing it was perennial. Since I was anxious to say "I cooked something from this year's garden!" I grabbed a couple leaves a week later and sliced them up.

 

 

Tasting them it was evident the fully flavor hadn’t developed yet. There was a faint hint of lemon and sourness but mostly it just tasted green. I went ahead and scrambled the leaves into some eggs with a little butter. In the end, it wasn’t offensive by any means, but I don’t think it added a whole lot either. In any case, I got my first meal featuring this year’s produce.

 

 

Now I’m curious about other uses of French sorrel. It’s a productive plant so when I read the traditional recipes for soup or salmon with sorrel sauce I don’t balk at the amount they call for. I wonder if two of my favorite g0-t0 dishes for green leaves could be adapted to accommodate it, saag and pesto. Do you cook with French sorrel? What are your favorite dishes? Please share in the comments if you have a delicious, brilliant idea.

 

Today’s leafy, spring-green post is part of Post Produce hosted by Daniel Gasteiger over at Your Small Kitchen Garden. Check it out!