Barbara Murphy holds a piece of landscaping material used to keep grass and weeds down in a garden. The University of Maine Cooperative Extension educator is teaching a six-week class on gardening. It is being held at Mountain Valley High school in Rumford.
Barbara Murphy, educator with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, shows an electric Fizzat bug zapper during her gardening class at Mountain Valley High School in Rumford.
RUMFORD — Destroying insect eggs regularly is the best way to ensure that plants won’t be devoured, particularly with the increasingly warm winters.
That was a major message given by University of Maine Cooperative Extension educator Barbara Murphy at last week’s class on growing community and school gardens at Mountain Valley High School.
Attending were teachers involved in school gardens, community garden organizers, including one from Wilson Grange in Wilton, and a middle school student from Jay-Livermore Falls who is heading up a school garden project.
As if tomato hornworms, a variety of beetles, cabbage loopers and squash vine borers weren’t enough, she warned that a serious threat to berries may hit Maine this year in the form of an Asian fruit fly. It entered through California just a few years ago and was discovered in Massachusetts last fall.
“Everyone is in a panic about the blueberry crop,” she said.
Warm Maine winters the past few years are also wreaking havoc on gardens because many insects, such as the potato beetle, don’t die in the numbers they usually do. And to make matters worse, the growing season is becoming longer every year, enabling these and other insects to produce several generations.
“I can’t think of a harder crop to grow organically than potatoes. These beetles can wipe out a crop in no time,” Murphy said.
To try to prevent that, she suggested planting eggplants either between or very near potato plants, if the gardener is willing to sacrifice the eggplants. The potato beetles like eggplants as much as potato plants, so many of the beetles will flock to them.
Keeping the potato patch small is also a help, she said.
But above all, and for every crop, she said, keep a very close watch on all plants every day so that eggs and larvae can be spotted and destroyed. Insects generally lay eggs on the back side of leaves.
“Insects continue to lay eggs that used to have just one generation. Now there are two or more and they don’t die over the winter,” Murphy said.
Some insects destroy from the inside, like the squash vine borer. Again, keeping a close watch is required. She advised checking the squash, pumpkin, cucumber or melon stem where it meets the soil because that’s where the eggs are.
Other suggestions for finding and destroying insects and larvae include using yellow sticky cards to trap cucumber beetles, and a Fizzat, which looks like a plastic tennis racket, to manually swat insects.
Some insects, such as Japanese beetles, winter as grubs, so they should be destroyed as they are found, she said.
“Gardening is about being on your knees and squishing things,” she said. “All it takes is one day without a visit to the garden and we’ll never catch up,” she said.
Murphy also recommended ways to keep weeds down, and to rototill just twice a year: spring and after the fall cleanup.
Cover all areas that are not in growth, she said. Nearly anything will work, from carpet remnants to newspapers, mulch and special fabric materials found in gardening shops made for that purpose.
It’s particularly important to cover the perimeter of the garden, to keep grass and weeds down and less likely to seed in the garden itself, she said.
“Get weeds when they are small. Using a stirrup hoe works,” she said.
And keep at it. Soil nutrients will go into the weeds and grass rather than the vegetable plant, resulting in smaller harvests.
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