Ending and Beginning

Planted another 30′ row of potatoes. Sure hope they start coming up soon….

Was reading a bit about potato bug control yesterday, and it appears that the options are hand-picking or heavy-duty pesticide. I’m not going the pesticide route, so it looks like it’s hand-picking into soapy water (with the soap in there just to break the surface tension so they’ll sink and drown).

And while I’ve done that before, and I don’t think of myself as excessively squeamish, it’s a pretty disgusting job. Neither the adults nor larvae are small, and they lay lots of eggs. Before you know it, you’ve got gobs of bug guts on your fingers.

But one thing that was mentioned in what I read yesterday was wearing gloves, and I was thinking thin rubber gloves would work quite well. Just so long as I don’t get the guts on my skin, I think the job will be a lot less unpleasant.

The other non-pesticide part of control is not planting potatoes in the same place two years in a row. That’s not an issue this year since all the potatoes are going on top of sod, but it’s something we’ll have to plan for after this year.

And speaking of planning, we haven’t planned out where we’re going to plant everything in the garden. I’m inclined to do that with some kind of software, although nothing leaps to mind as lending itself to that purpose. There’s probably something online…and no matter what I end up doing, I’ll post a copy of it here.

This entry was posted on 27 April 2009 at 6:37 am and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.