pests

Mealybugs are here! Look on the tips, stems, and undersides of the leaves for these white insects clustered together. If they go unnoticed for a short period of time , they will produce a protective cottony barrier over their bodies to protect themselves. Many times we hear “I have a white fungus on my plants.” Safer’s Insecticidal Soap and Natural Guard Neem Oil can be used to kill these pests. Multiple applications may be needed. Thorough coverage is a must, and I usually recommend spraying once a week for 2-3 weeks to make sure you have killed them all. If you only have a few clusters of them at the tips of your plants you could smash them with your fingers and rinse, or cut off the affected tips and throw away the bugs in a sealed bag. Be a bug scout. Keep your eyes open and search. These pests usually last most of the summer.

Photo: tamu.edu

-DeAnna

Having backyard chickens in urban neighborhoods is becoming more of a trend with each changing of (gardening) seasons. While many may think that having some hens running amuck in their gardens sounds like a lot of work or perhaps that they may not have enough room to keep them happy, the truth is that having some feathered ladies in the garden may take a lot of work off of your hands – and only about five square feet of space per chicken is required to keep everyone happy territorially.

Gills’ employees from Left to Right: Kady, Emily, Josh, all have backyard chickens of their own

The three main benefits of keeping backyard chickens, in my opinion, are as follows:

Natural Pest Control – Chickens absolutely love finding and eating bugs! When allowed to free range in your yard, you will find chickens scratching the ground to look for worms (and a lot of happy squawking if they find a chunky little grub worm!), and you will see your chickens sprinting around chasing mosquitos to grab out of the air. Not only is it eternally entertaining to watch the girls on bug-duty, it is extremely beneficial to your garden and to the peacefulness in your yard. I have watched chickens eat grasshoppers, worms, moths, fleas, snakes, ticks, aphids, scorpions, mosquitos, grubs, spiders, ants and termites. The girls will eat pests of any life-cycle including egg, larval stage and adults. This helps to keep the garden pest populations down which means less spraying that you have to do. The key is to allow your girls to have access to your gardens during the right times of the year. For example, you should not let your chickens in your garden if you have small seedlings growing as they may scratch them or sit on them accidentally. Keep your garden protected until the plants are established. And again, if you are growing fruit or vegetables, do not allow your chickens to reap the benefits of fresh food before you can! Do allow your chickens to roam through your freshly tilled garden as they will scout out the weed seeds to eat before they have a chance to sprout.
Natural Fertilizer – Chicken fertilizer is very beneficial if used responsibly. It is naturally extremely high in Nitrogen which could cause it to burn your plants if you do not allow it to sit for an amount of time. The easiest way to apply chicken fertilizer is to keep it mixed with your chicken’s bedding such as straw, hay or shavings. These are compostable materials and can be added to your garden in the way you would add any other compost or amendment. You have to clean their coops anyway so you might as well put it to good use in your garden! Another great assistance is the egg shells from your chicken’s bounty being used in your garden can add calcium and enrich the soil. When you crack the eggs, wash out the egg shells and allow them to dry. Then simply break them up and add them to your already-dug planting holes in your garden.
Urban Composting – I understand all of the benefits of having a compost bin but simply cannot keep one as A) I cannot stand the smell (and I don’t think my neighbors would appreciate it either and B) the bugs that are so attracted to the compost bin are a major turn off for me. I have always felt guilty throwing away table scraps and fruit/veggies that have gone off before having the chance to eat them. The chickens are living compost bins willing and able to take all of this guilt off of your hands! They are omnivorous so they can eat meat (although I do not condone feeding them chicken for obvious reasons) and they will eat just about anything else that you have had for dinner – with the exceptions of a few foods being unhealthy and poisonous for them to eat such as: candy, chocolate, sugar, raw potato peels, avocado skins and pits, raw or undercooked beans, salt and citrus along with a few various other items. Of course it is always a good idea to do a quick google search before feeding an animal anything that you are unsure of what the effect will be.

Enjoying the girls in the lower gardens at Emily’s house.

Raising your backyard chickens from day old chicks, in my opinion, is the most rewarding way to keep chickens. This gives you a chance to handle them from the time they are very young which makes them used to you, giving you a pet-like relationship with your backyard flock.

5 day old Silkie chicks

When you bring your new chicks home, you must keep them very warm at 95* F for the first week of their life and drop 5* F each week until they are maintained at regular daytime temperatures. The best way to do this is to keep a bulb and a thermometer in their coop. Of course it is important to practice proper safety methods with this such as not allowing the bulb to touch any surface in the coop and turning it off frequently to let it cool down.

Your new chicks will require a special type of feed called chick starter. You can purchase this medicated or unmedicated. The choice is yours, however, if you choose unmedicated you must diligently pay attention to the cleanliness of your coop and the distinct signs of health of your new chicks. Any unusual activity from one of your girls should be investigated immediately. Any symptoms can be found through a beginner chicken guide book or an online google search. www.backyardchickens.com is an excellent source of information and a great place to post questions/pictures of what’s going on in your flock. A trick that I have found helpful is to add a capful of organic apple cider vinegar to each gallon of water that your chicks drink. This helps to keep them drinking regularly as they like the taste and it also helps to keep them flushed out. Hens begin laying eggs between five and six months old. After three years of age, their laying rate begins to drop to one less egg per week.

The safety of your chickens should be your biggest concern when keeping backyard chickens. You must have a fenced-in yard if you want your chickens to free range, and even then they can take flight high enough to get over your fence. Fortunately, your chickens will not try to leave unless they are missing something that they need in your yard. If you have plenty of food and water, this should not happen. Next, you want to be sure that no outside predators can get into your yard, or your coop. In Corpus Christi, other than maintaining a safe coop, the concerns of predators are typically raccoons, opossums, coyotes, wild dogs, hawks and migratory birds. Be sure that your chickens have plenty of options to run to safety in a covered, hard to reach area to hide from predators that might have set their sights on your birds. The last safety concern is one that you may not immediately think of: your pet dogs and cats. If your pets go outside to roam around in your yard, you must remember that their first instinct is to hunt. You absolutely cannot leave your chickens out unprotected in your yard with your dogs. You must have an area to keep them safe and separated.

Some chicken fun facts:

Chickens do not have teeth. They have a gizzard that has tiny stones which grinds up the food that they swallow whole.
Chickens lay between 100 and 300 eggs per year, at a rate of one per day. The eggs are only fertilized if there is a rooster around.
Chickens begin communicating before they are born. The Momma Hen makes a purring sound to her unhatched eggs and the chicks can begin peeping back to her while they are still inside the eggs.
Chickens know who you are – they can learn up to 100 different faces.
Chickens have prehistoric roots. They are believed to be the closest living ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Three Silkies enjoying the nasturtiums.

-Emily Capule

Starting your first cutting garden may be much easier than you would think. Planning your garden is the best way to start: a 3 foot x 10 foot garden bed will produce more than enough flowers to make a bouquet for yourself and a friend each week. Your garden plot must be in a place that receives at least 6-8 hours of sunlight every day. If you are unsure about the amount of full sun a certain spot receives each day, dedicate a day to checking the same spot hourly: from 8am until 5pm. Take notes each hour on what the sun conditions in that spot are. This may sound menial, but when planting near trees, the sunlight can be tricky! The next thing to consider is the location of your garden in reference to a viable water source. Keep it simple for yourself rather than having to constantly drag a garden hose. The final thought in choosing a location for your cutting garden is to place it out of sight. This may sound crazy to you, but will you be able to cut the beautiful flowers if you can see them from your favorite spot in the house or on the porch?

Creating your garden bed is the most important part of starting to grow any plants, especially cut flowers. You will need enough compost to add 6 inches to your 3’ x 10’ bed and enough mulch to cover 3-4 inches to cover your 3’ x 10’ bed. Feeding your plants with fertilizer is not the same thing as feeding your soil, you must plan to continuously add compost to be feeding your soil. You should be mindful of the hundreds of thousands beneficial microbes in the top 6 inches of your soil and your goal should be to constantly feed them and keep them in your garden as they are helping to keep the bad bugs away and to keep your garden soil aerated and stronger. By continuously adding organic matter, you are setting your garden up to become more self-sustainable each season.

My sweet boy, Baylor, always loves to inspect my freshly prepped garden beds. Photo courtesy of The Honey Bee & the Hound

To start making your 3’ x 10’ garden bed, first you must clear the designated area of any vegetation. Burn Out and Horticultural Vinegar are great organic herbicides. Once your bed area is free and clear of grass and weeds, you will start turning the soil in your bed simply by using a shovel. You will dig down as far as you can and place the shovel-full of dirt and make a pile of the dirt you have dug out. You should be digging out 3”-6” of soil. Next you will need a fork to put in the very bottom of the bed you have dug out to aerate and open the sub-soil. Your goal should be to make as many little holes in the very bottom of the bed as possible. Now you will need to get some compost, such as Cotton Burr Compost, to add about 3” of compost to the bottom of the newly dug-out bed. After you have added some compost, you will now add back in the soil that you have dug out to begin with. To top off your bed, you will add another 2”-3” of compost. Your end result should be a 3’ x 10’ bed that is raised about 6” above the ground. While this method of “double-digging” is much more labor-intensive than using a piece of machinery such as a tiller, but it more beneficial for your garden in many ways: it protects the beneficial insects and tiny microbes living in the top six inches of your soil that protect your plants from harmful pests and keeps the soil a healthy, living, necessary part of your healthy, happy flowers. It also helps to keep you accountable for your care of your garden – when you put that much work into starting a garden, you are bound to keep it up and to love and care for it often!

My favorite activity these days is riding around to find someone to share my flowers with! Photo courtesy of The Honey Bee & the Hound Cut Flower Farm

Next is the fun part: picking out the seeds to plant in your brand new garden bed! My three recommendations would be a Zinnia (Pumila Cut & Come Again), a Basil (such as Petra), and a
Sunflower. You will plant all of your seeds on a 6” x 6” grid. This will give the plants enough room to fully grow in while utilizing every bit of your space. With this combination of flowers you will easily have flowers for a bouquet that smells good and will come back week after week in your garden.

Fresh bouquets of zinnia and basil – photo courtesy of The Honey Bee & the Hound Cut Flower Farm

In order to maintain your new cut flower garden, you must stay on top of the weeds! The easiest way to get ahead of the weeds is to begin mulching your garden when your seedlings have grown 6” tall. Add 3” of mulch at a time using grass cuttings and old leaves that you have collected. This should allow you to have a whole season of no weeding necessary!

Enlisting your feathered ladies to help keep the weeds and pests down is always a good idea as long as they do not try to sit on your seedlings! – Photo courtesy of The Honey Bee & the Hound Cut Flower Farm

Lastly, when you go to cut your flowers be sure to do it in the cool part of the early mornings or late evenings. If you cut during the high noon sun, your flowers will likely wilt. Allow your flowers to sit in a bucket of water for at least six hours before beginning to arrange them in a bouquet. This allows them to get maximum hydration. Once you have gone through a season with your first cutting garden, I encourage you to begin looking for the seeds of the flowers that your mother and grandmother grew. This is what helps to make me feel so connected with my cutting gardens – I can cut the same bouquet that my late grandmother used to put on her dining room table and it makes me connect with her in a very special way. Enjoy!

To learn more, be sure to come to Gill’s on Airline this Saturday (September 10, 2016) for Emily’s Garden Talk:

”From Beginning to Bouquets – Cultivating Cut Flowers”

If you would like to connect with a local cut flower farm, visit

www.thehoneybeeandthehound.com

-Emily Capule, Flower Farmer and Gill’s Landscape Design Assistant

There are so many different problems that homeowners may face in their yard. Most recently, chinch bugs, followed by armyworms, in lawns, and now caterpillars chewing the leaves off live oak trees. And by the time this is published later this week, it will be on to something new!

My first point would be, since things are constantly changing from season to season, and from year to year, don’t accept as a diagnosis your neighbor telling you what problem they had last month. Yours might be the same, but probably not. Please accept our invitation to bring in a sample (live foliage but showing symptoms) and maybe a few photos, close up showing just a few leaves and farther away showing the whole plant and pattern of damage. You can also post on our Facebook page, and other folks with the same problem will benefit from your example.

Second point would be that you need a correct diagnosis to apply the appropriate action, which could very well be to stand off and observe. I was looking at a well-chewed palm leaf this morning, but thorough examination showed no insects present, and so I advised him that no treatment was necessary. And if you were to see brown patches appearing in your lawn next month, a neighbor might comment ” I just killed my armyworms with XXX”, but if you were to apply XXX, it would be money wasted as your problem would more likely be Rhizoctonia fungus, requiring a completely different treatment.

So let us be your IPM partner, integrated pest management is using the least toxic but still efficient method of controlling pest problems, with observation and identification being the most important steps.

James

Zika – slight fever and joint pain, but causing serious birth defects. Dengue – fever, headache, back and joint pain, some fatalities. Chikungunya – fever, back and joint pain, headache, vomiting. All these bad characters are on our doorstep, it is highly likely that we will be dealing with them here in South Texas soon. We South Texans like to travel to the Caribbean, to Mexico, and to Central America, for vacation or to visit family. And while the mosquito vector doesn’t typically travel fast or far, we do, and will likely be bringing the virus home with us sooner or later, as Miami already has. We have the known vector mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus here now, sneaky day and night biters, and they would be so happy to bite us and spread around these horrible diseases. So how shall we get ready? It’s fortunate that the diseases are not widespread here at this point, and so we can start now getting into new habits that will limit the spread once they show up.

The presence of both these mosquitoes is largely a result of our bad suburban habits. They reproduce in small amounts of water, such as old tires, neglected kiddie pools and toy trucks or wagons, any bucket or garden cart holding water, rain gutters, low areas in the yard, even a saucer under a pot. So throw away what you can, dump what you must, use Mosquito Bits (Bacillus thuringiensis israelinsis, non-toxic to all but mosquitoes) in small amounts of water like bird baths or saucers, Mosquito Dunks (also Bt) in low areas or ditches, put guppies (mosquito fish) in ornamental ponds. Clean or re-level rain gutters, cut grass frequently, apply Mosquito Beater granules (lemon grass, cedar, and other natural oils) under shrubs or in lawn or groundcover close to outdoor sitting areas, spray Mosquito Beater liquid (permethrin) in shaded entryways to kill and repel mosquitoes that might enter the house. These vectoring mosquitoes usually feed within a few hundred yards of where they hatch, so your own yard is most important to control hatching and biting, and your neighbors next most important.

Map courtesy of: cdc.gov

For further information, see: http://www.contagionlive.com/news/southern-texas-primed-for-an-outbreak-of-dengue-fever

James

With cooler months finally upon us, now is the time for planting some of my favorite winter annuals, one being the ever vibrant, versatile and easy to grow Nasturtium. Here are some things you may or may not know about this lovely little flower:

Nasturtiums are edible, flowers and leaves. The flowers make a beautiful addition to the top of any salad and add a peppery flavor. During the mid-twentieth century people used nasturtium seed pods as a replacement for pepper by drying out the seeds and grinding them. The bloom can be dusted with sugar and used to decorate a holiday cake.

Nasturtium Salad c/o Sunset Magazine

They’re not picky and grow well in any type of soil. They love sunshine and don’t like to stay wet.
They make a great companion plant. They help deter aphids, white fly, squash bugs and other pests. Plant alongside veggies like tomatoes, cabbage & broccoli.

Gill Garden Guide: Fall & Winter Annuals

-Whitney

Take a close look at the stems and leaves of your Jatropha. Do you see large white clumps of soft scale? This insect begins along the stems looking like a pale yellow goo. After a day or two the yellow soft scale produces a white cotton covering to protect itself from insecticides and predators.

Insecticidal Soap or Neem Oil can be used in the evening to kill these pests. Cyonara hose-end is also very effective. Many insects thrive in the summer, so be good bug scout. While watering or walking and admiring your landscape, take the time to get a closer look to see if any of these summer insects are attacking your favorite plants.

-DeAnna

Spring is upon us once again and with that comes the flush of new growth followed by the awakening of hungry insects! One good product to help keep your new young foliage beautiful this spring is All Seasons Horticultural & Dormant Spray Oil.

Dormant Oil is an easy and organic way of deterring pests by suffocating out anything that may have overwintered on your plants, including any eggs that may have also made it through the winter. January, February and March is the only time we’re cool enough to use it. Use it much later and you run the risk of burning your plants as it is an oil. It’s easy to use- just hook it up to your hose and spray to the point of dripping. It can be used on woody ornamentals, Crape Myrtles, Hibiscus, Allamandas, and many more. I have also found that it helps to soften up the black sooty mold that tends to stay around after an infestation of aphids, whitefly, etc. making it easier to wash/spray off. It also makes the plant sprayed all shiny and new looking again!

Note: Do not use on ferns or succulents!

-Whitney

pests

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