The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  The supposed earth-friendly sticky traps were obviously not the way to go. And the Quarter-Acre Farm was quickly being bitten and chewed and swallowed by insects. The fruit trees were thick with scale, the vegetables were flocked by aphids. There were ornate patterns eaten through the cabbage and the artichoke leaves. I was edging closer to breaking out the chemicals when I saw a lazy flight of beetles around a young cherry tree. The tree’s branches were flocked with scale insects.

  Upon closer inspection, and a quick trip to my Guide to North American Insects, I ascertained the bugs were assassin beetles, which sounded promising. I expected the things to dispatch scale with the finesse of a six-legged Jackie Chan. Instead, they landed with the grace of an albatross then bumbled around the branches of the cherry tree like dozens of Mr. Magoos. I watched one small assassin stumble up and down a twig, repeatedly missing a clump of scale by half a centimeter. I finally gave up my vigil in disgust, thinking the naming of the bug was some gardener’s bitter joke.

  The next day, however, the small tree had been virtually cleared of scale. It turns out that while an Assassin bug does indeed fly slowly and seem absurdly clumsy, it has lightning fast front legs, which they use to snatch their victims (with such a struggle to stumble into its prey, I’d hope they’d at least be brilliant at catching it once they did). They then inject their prey with paralyzing venom and use a straw-like mouth characteristic of true bugs, called a stylet, to devour their meal.

  If assassin beetles could clear my tree of scale with such ease, could I get them to take care of the aphids too? What other insect carnivores could take care of my gardening woes? I need only find the right appetite to match my garden’s destructive insect entrees. It wasn’t a new idea. In ancient China, predaceous ants were used to protect citrus crops. Though I didn’t think I had any ants in my garden that were able to do much of anything helpful, I knew that there were other bugs that could. The first step was to identify the insects that were doing damage. Problem pests included scale, aphids, tomato hornworms, cabbage moths, mosquitoes, and whitefly.

  Next, I looked up what ate these creatures and made a wish list for the beneficials I needed. I figured if I could host assassin bugs (soldiers), ladybugs, lacewings, dragonflies, and praying mantises in my garden, I would be in good shape.

  But then came the hard part. How could I get these hungry insects into my garden and keep them there? I was told that ladybugs released into your garden most often flew right out of it again. Further, it is the ladybug larvae (spiky alligator-like creatures) that are the true insecteating machines. Praying mantises and lacewing eggs had to be sent through the mail, which seemed a bit iffy, and it didn’t seem possible at all to import dragonflies. It seemed if I really wanted insect helpers in my garden, I would have to invite them, and futher, make my garden a place they wanted to remain.

  The most compelling invitation is flowers. It seemed strange to be planting flowers to attract carnivorous insects, but a mere smorgasbord of scale, aphids, and cabbage worms is not going to get your insect pals to leave their metaphorical toothbrushes in your medicine cabinet. They don’t know about the insect smorgasbord in the first place because the smorgasbord doesn’t want to get eaten, so it hides.

  Flowers signal to a carnivorous insect that there is a place it is likely to get a meal because their prey is attracted to flowers. In addition, many carnivorous insects also eat nectar, and even fruit or pollen, in addition to meat. Though flowers might seem an obvious sign of nectar availability, many plants have “extrafloral nectaries”—often a modified plant margin, plant hair, or leaf margin that produces nectar to not only attract beneficial insects but to also keep them around during the lull between spikes in the plant’s pest population.

  And I couldn’t forget that even if an insect was a predator, it was also likely prey to some other bug and therefore needed hiding places if it was going to call my yard home. Further, insects were ever on the lookout for a good nursery for their future progeny. Flowers, shrubs, and even mulch provide cover for eggs and larvae as well as the adult insects.

  Some of the plants that are best for wooing insects are angelica, bee balm, buckwheat, calendula, carrot (let a few bolt and flower), ceanothus, cilantro, clover, daisy, loveage, parsley, queen ann’s lace, snowberry sunflower, alyssum, thyme, and yarrow. These are but a few possibilities.

  Water is part of the invitation as well. While some carnivorous insects get most of their moisture from the blood of their victims (bwa ha ha ha) many drink from dew, puddles, and the edge of ponds. If the weather is particularly dry you could put some water in a saucer of pebbles for your insect guests. At the Quarter-Acre Farm, we have a fishpond and water buckets for the chickens and geese that insects can also partake of.

  A year after making a concerted effort to make our yard an attractive environment to beneficials, I would say natural predators take care of most of the insect problems on the Quarter-Acre Farm. Most—but not all. Ants, for example, were protecting some of the scale and aphids from the predatory insects. Ants and aphids enjoy an intriguing relationship called mutualism. A “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” kind of thing. But rather than scratching, there’s a lot of sucking, excreting, and petting going on instead. Aphids are doing the sucking, siphoning the sap of phloem vessels in plants with specialized mouthparts called stylets from their plant of choice. These fluids are rather weak in the nitrogen department, however, and the insects have to suck down a lot of it to get enough nutritive value. All of that sap and there’s going to be a lot of waste product as well. This waste product is called honeydew and it practically rains from the recta of the aphids.

  You might be saying Ewww! right now, but ants are saying, Mmmmm! Ants love honeydew so much that they will risk their lives to protect the aphids from predators and parasites in order to maintain a steady stream of this recta manna.

  Once I saw this sordid partnership going on, I spread a rather icky petroleum jelly-meets-super glue substance called Tanglefoot around the circumference of the base of the tree, creating a barrier that ants could not cross.

  The unguarded aphids were soon dispatched by ladybugs. Sometimes the volume of scale or aphids seemed just too much to believe that even an army of ladybugs could take care of the problem. Aphids can reproduce without having sex in a process called parthenogenesis. A newly born aphid becomes a reproducing adult within a week. It then produces up to five offspring per day for up to fifty days.

  The eighteenth-century French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur estimated that if all the descendants from a single aphid survived and were arranged in a line four abreast, that line would exceed the length of the circumference of the globe. I believe it because most of them were on my broccoli.

  When the beneficials seemed to need a little help, I sprayed the aphid-riddled plants with a blast of water to knock the bugs off. Apparently aphids are pretty weak; even those that fly don’t fly much and most can’t even do that. Climbing back up the stems for them would be like me taking on Kilimanjaro. The unmoored insects quickly die.

  Though spraying plants is helpful in some ways, in others it can be costly. Ladybugs lay their eggs on protected leaves and stems close to their prey, and while you’re jetting off a few hundred aphids, you might also be destroying a few hundred future ladybug larvae who would have wolfed the fallen aphids down in an hour and moved on to eat another bucketful. I try to check for the yellow to orange spindle-shaped eggs before I turn on the force.

  The cabbageworms were another problem that took longer to solve than I would have liked. They are the exact color of broccoli and have a grip like limpets. The combination of these characteristics pretty much ensured that I would be steaming them up with the broccoli and serving them to my grossed-out family. (What’s worse than finding a boiled caterpillar on your pasta? Finding half of one.) They also, as their name would imply, were chomping the heck out of the cabbage.

  I found a folk remedy online that said I co
uld protect my cruciferous vegetables by sprinkling them with cornmeal. The caterpillars would eat the cornmeal, which—to put it delicately—they are unable to expel, and would die of the ensuing blockage. Not only did that seem a horrific way to kill something (what’s worse than finding half a cabbageworm on your pasta? Finding an exploded one), for several reasons, it didn’t make sense.

  Didn’t cabbageworms prefer cabbage to cornmeal? So wouldn’t they just eat around it? And if they could digest cabbage, why would they have such problems with corn?

  My entomologist friend, Diane, said that she’d never heard of caterpillar murder by corn stoppage, but if I wanted to get rid of cabbageworms, I should use the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). It sounded like something Monsanto would have come up with, but Diane said it was a naturally occurring biologic agent found in soil worldwide and its insecticidal activity was discovered about a hundred years ago. After the bacterium infects the insect larvae, she explained, the bacteria begin to produce an endotoxin. The infection spreads and the endotoxins rise, which quickly proves fatal to the caterpillar. Not only does Bt do-in the dastardly brassica eaters, but it is extremely narrow in its effects, only putting caterpillars out of transmission. If a bird, a ladybug, a dog, or Louis happened to accidentally eat, say, half of a treated worm, there would be no ill effects whatsoever.

  I hurried off to the garden center and bought a bottle, then hurried home and sprayed my cabbage plants. Soon I was caterpillar free. The bacillus worked like a charm. And I’m not the only one to have noticed its charm-working skills. Companies have now engineered plants that express the endotoxin directly without the help of the bacteria. Unfortunately, insects are now quickly building resistance to the plant-expressed endotoxin, something that didn’t happen quickly with the natural bacterium. Turns out, the endotoxin worked in concert with an entire infection process initiated by the bacterium, one that is difficult for insects to protect against, and one that ultimately kills. Oops.

  Sometimes it seems that science is the environment’s brilliant little sister, watching, learning, growing, and is mostly incredibly cool and much loved. Yet, though brilliant, she’s also sometimes a sophomoric, bratty, and irresponsible little sister, so that Environment keeps shouting to Mother Nature, “Mo-ther! Tell Science to keep out of my stuff! She keeps messing everything up!” In fact, I often feel that Environment is screaming that until I can grow up, to keep out of her stuff as well.

  And so it is not surprising to me, as I ponder my waxing and waning garden skills, that all the insect-wrangling methods I found that worked in my garden—planting insect-friendly plants, utilizing barrier methods, spraying insects with water, hand picking pests from the plants, and employing the biologic agency of bacillus—are not chemically (or otherwise) one-upping nature, but utilizing the already set functions of flora and fauna (of which I try to consider myself a part).

  What is surprising is that most of those methods likely hearken from the time man and bug first went head to head over the same piece of fruit in the garden. It makes me laugh (bitterly, oh so bitterly) that, except for hand picking the bugs from my crops, which reflects a pretty basic “Ack! There’s a bug on my bean!” reaction, which might well be genetic, I learned about these things with the same astonishment I would have felt had Steven Hawking just invented them.

  It reminds me of the old joke, “When I was fourteen my parents were so ignorant I could hardly stand them, but when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much they had learned in seven years.”

  Some of us take a bit longer than others.

  Recipe

  Figs and Goat Cheese

  What better way to enjoy figs (pollinated by wasps) than with goat cheese, honey (made by bees), wrapped in prosciutto, and broiled . . .

  Ingredients: • As many figs as you’d like

  For each fig: • 1 TB goat cheese

  • drizzle of honey

  • a thin slice of prosciutto

  1. Wash the figs.

  2. Score an X in the top of each fig and take a sphere of goat cheese (one of those little melon ballers works perfectly for this) and tamp it into the scored fig.

  3. If you like, dress your fig in a cape of transparently thin prosciutto. If not, leave the plump girls unabashedly naked.

  4. Put your stuffed, dressed figs, now looking like dowagers going to the opera, on a cookie sheet and warm them up under the broiler.

  5. When the cheese is soft and the cape is crisping along the edges, take the figs out and soothe them with a drizzle of wildflower honey. Serve warm.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  POLE DANCING

  “The pumpkins were growing so fast they dragged themselves to death.”

  —SPIKE HAIGLER

  By the time I had the weeds and bugs sorted out, weather was turning, and thoughts were turning as well—to the holidays. Halloween and Thanksgiving were coming up and pumpkins were everywhere. Giant pumpkins.

  Christy Harp, an Ohio math teacher, grew the 2009 world record pumpkin weighing in at 1,725 pounds. At our house, we began guessing at the math problems Christy might formulate for her students. “If a pumpkin grew in girth eastward from Findley at a speed of 200 mph and another grew westward from Canton at a third of that speed, which pumpkin would arrive in Mansfield first?”

  I couldn’t find any proof that Christy had made up gourd-specific math problems, but she did say that at the height of her prize-winning pumpkin’s growing period it was putting on thirty-three pounds a day. I was amazed; not even during the chocolate season between Halloween and Easter have I managed that. I was also amazed at the sheer size of the “finished” pumpkin and began to fantasize over the pumpkin pies, the pumpkin ravioli, and the soups that such a pumpkin could make. I do love pumpkin. Unfortunately, the trouble I faced with growing pumpkins on the Quarter-Acre Farm was the room a pumpkin—indeed all of the winter squashes—needed in order to grow that put them on the bottom of the vegetable efficiency chart.

  Why do the winter squashes, which include delicious types such as spaghetti squash, butternut, acorn, pink banana, kabocha, and of course pumpkin, require so much space?

  Since most pumpkins do not attain the girth of elephant seals, the size of the produce itself is not the problem. The actual rub is that pumpkins grow their fruit along vines, and the vines can get as much as thirty feet long. The vines love to ramble and their leaves tend to be huge.

  Certainly, the times I had attempted to grow squashes I ended up with an area of my yard that we referred to as the “squash jungle” because it quickly became so overgrown it was impenetrable. Squash grew and died there before I even knew they’d flowered. I would often discover the fruit lying on the ground like disfigured limbs after mildew or frost had killed off the leaves.

  Worse, the rampaging plants would usually overrun the less mobile vegetables I had planted. Watching the garden become overtaken by a full-depth green avalanche made me think of my great-great-Uncle Spike’s tall-tale letter to my father when he was a boy reporting that the pumpkins were growing so fast they’d dragged themselves to death.

  I thought maybe I would skip growing pumpkins on the Quarter-Acre Farm and stick to the better-behaved vegetables, like beans. Then again, beans grew on vines, long messy ones, as well. They didn’t have as large of leaves, but still . . . it got me thinking. Why not grow squash on a trellis or a pole?

  I pounded some eight-foot tree stakes into the dirt, screwed some deck screws into the stakes for the vines to hold on to, and planted several pumpkin seeds at their base. I also planted some seeds on a length of chicken wire stretched across an old swing set we had never managed to remove from the backyard (crafted and set in concrete circa 1950 when they apparently made swing sets to last through an atomic blast for the children to play on when they emerged from the shelter). The little plants poked their tender heads through the soil a week later, and soon after that the first problem presented itself.

  It wasn’t one vine
that grew from each plant, but two. Then from the two vines grew even more vines. No wonder a jungle grew from the ovoid seeds. I managed to drape the many vines along the chicken wire, but it was way too bushy to manage on the pole.

  So I pruned. I twined the primary and secondary vines around the pole, but I promptly snipped any vine that grew off of those. It didn’t seem to harm the plant at all. Problem solved!

  But as weeks passed, I saw that none of the plants on the trellis or on the pole seemed as vigorous as the plants I had allowed to meander on the ground in the past. The problem was, pumpkins are what are referred to as “heavy feeders.” Imagine the football player in high school who answers the incredulous question, “How can you eat so much?” with, “I’m a big boy, I need big food.”

  Pumpkins are the linebackers of the vegetable world. They need lots of food to nourish them, and since they are also about 80 percent water, they also need to take in volumes of that as well. Because of this, pumpkins grow roots along their vines, rather than just beneath the base of the plant, to take in extra food and water. By growing my plants in the air, I was depriving them of the means to supply themselves with extra nutrition. I was starving my pumpkins.

  This could not stand. If I had put my squash on a diet worthy of an upcoming 20th high school reunion, I could yet turn it around and provide a pumpkin smorgasbord to chub those big boys up. I stepped up the water and ground-dressed the soil around the pumpkins with extra compost and rabbit manure, scratching it in carefully so as to not disturb the roots. I repeated the top dressing every couple of weeks and also provided a “vegetable big gulp” every week—this one made of compost tea. I kept up their special linebacker feeding and watering regimen as they produced their fruit.