As the summer garden season is winding down, it’s time to reflect a bit on what went well, and what didn’t go so well in the garden this year. For us at our Seed to Supper Farm, we had quite a few issues that we are going to be working on correcting for next year. Since you likely had some of the same issues, let’s talk about some of those.

First up, we had a problem with irrigation. Actually no, it wasn’t irrigation, we have that pretty much under control. The issue was poor drainage. One thing it seems like we can count on each spring is several weeks of heavy rains. Rain is good and we could sure use some now, but when we got rain, the water wasn’t draining well. In fact, we had our crops sitting in water for several days at a time which is not good.

All that water tends to push the oxygen out of the soil, leaving the roots waterlogged for several days, and that took its toll. And by toll, I mean that we lost our potatoes and tomatoes this year. So, over the winter we’ll be working on leveling out our field and adding a drainage ditch so that the rain during monsoon season has someplace to go rather than just staying in the field. Hopefully these efforts will provide some positive results next year. In addition to water, we also battled a fair amount of disease and pest problems.

In the insect problem category, squash bugs and squash vine borers were quite the nuisance. Fortunately, we’ve been able to control the squash bugs fairly well by doing our best to stay on top of the situation. While we try to stick to organic pesticides as much as possible, they just didn’t seem to have much effect of the squash bugs this year. So, we ramped up the toxicity a little bit by using Permethrin. While it is a synthetic pesticide, it has a pre-harvest interval of only one day. This is really good for a synthetic. The pre-harvest interval is the period of time between when you use the pesticide, and it is safe to harvest your crop. One day is a very short pre-harvest interval so we felt it didn’t violate our commitment to organics by too much. And the good thing is that permethrin seemed to do the trick. Granted it wasn’t a one-and-done situation. We had to use it several times to stay on top of the squash bug situation, but we lost very few plants to squash bugs this year.

The squash vine borer situation was a little bit different. One of the challenges with squash vine borers is that they deposit their eggs right at soil level so it’s difficult to monitor the plants for eggs. And then you don’t typically notice any damage from squash vine borers until it’s too late.

So next year, we are going to try injecting and organic pesticide called bacillus thuringiensis into the lower stem of the plant as a preemptive measure. Bacillus thuringiensis (bT for short) is an organic pesticide that only works on caterpillars. So when the squash vine borer’s eggs hatch and the caterpillar larvae enter the stem of the plant to eat, hopefully they will get a taste of a little bT which should eliminate the issue.

The alternative to trying to fight these pests is to stop growing squash, cucumbers, and other cucurbit plants which isn’t going to happen. So, we’ll keep you posted.

I guess this was the year of squash trouble, because we also had virus issues in our squash plants. One of the problems with viruses in plants is that once your plant contracts the virus, it’s pretty much done. You need to pull out the plant, hopefully removing the disease before it spreads.

Viruses are spread by insects who encounter the disease while feeding on an infected plant. Then as the feed on another plant, they transfer the disease. When you consider the chance of an infected insect only feeding on one plant and then no other insects feeding on that plant, it’s easy to see how plant viruses spread pretty easily in the garden.

Our solution to this issue next year will be to purchase seeds that come with a certain degree of protection against the virus. Now you might ask, how do I know if my plant has a virus and if so, how do I know which virus it is? Well, there are a couple of ways.

First up is, plants with a virus just don’t look right. In a squash plant, they typically have these giant leaves. But with the virus, the leaves are thinner, they don’t open wide, and the coloration is typically lighter…not that deep dark green. In addition, the fruits that are produced don’t look right either. The coloration on the squash isn’t right. They might appear splotchy in color while some have raised bumps. Technically, they are still edible, but they don’t look very appetizing.

If you want to be certain your plant has a disease, you can bring a portion of the plant to the Tulsa County OSU Extension office (4116 E. 15^th), and we’ll send it off to the OSU diagnostic lab in Stillwater for analysis. We did this with some cuttings from our squash plants and found out they had watermelon mosaic virus. So, they all got pulled.

As a result, next year we’ll be planting squash seeds that have a built-in resistance to watermelon mosaic virus. When shopping for seeds, the seed packet or the description in the catalog will have information on any disease resistance in that particular seed. And you can always do an internet search for squash seeds resistant to watermelon mosaic virus etc. To see what comes up.

Either way, gardening is always an adventure with many opportunities to learn. See you in the garden! Photo Tom Ingram