Up, up and not away!

I began by allowing one plain old Green Amranth volunteer to thrive last year, then this year - ZOWie - I have loads - everywhere. I like the green variety just fine, as others have said, cooking the larger leaves. Had a pasta last nite with *lots* of amaranth sauteed with fresh garden tomatoes, shallots, squash and balsamic vinegar. Yummy. I like it in eggs also, and that is my favorite way to enjoy young Poke (no need to parboil leave or stems under 8" tall - i would NOT eat any part of older plants!) I also use tender/smaller amaranth and poke leaves in mixed salads or burritos. I'm going to season and fry up a bunch of the stems tomorrow! Am gathering seed and drying it - as I heard it is excellent toasted and added to baked goods and pizza dough. Despite all effort to harvest, I know there will still be PLENTY for the birds, compost, and me next year! Having said that... Those living in rural areas may need to pull & eat ALL Green Amaranth when young - as they are on many invasive lists...and I think they are a problem for grazing livestock. Many websites talk as if it is an evil plant! One also recommended eating it with more flavorful things, however, and said it is: a remarkable source for the amino acid lysine. YAY! Cousin Poke, btw, is tall and VERY *beautiful* in the fall..and all parts are quite poisonous. Leaving just one to grow as an ornamental is what I like to do, and leave enuf space clear around it for lots of cooking greens to appear in spring. It will sow in place, and birds will share the seed in winter. Try to harvest and eat ALL POKE (but one) by the time it is 6' tall. NEVER eat the roots or berries. If you use the berries for ink or dyes, WEAR GLOVES. Enjoy!

Rose, Plain old Slug-Go has always taken care of my pillbugs and sow bugs, and we have literally thousands of them in/under the heavy mulch in late winter/early spring. When I plant seedlings, I put a little ring of a few granules of it around each seedling...it doesn't take much. This year I didn't lose a single vegetable seedling of any kind to pill bugs or sow bugs. However, I did lose about a dozen small marigold plants to the pill bugs during a rainy spell from the end of April to mid-May when it was raining daily and I did not keep reapplying the Slug-Go. I'll add that Slug-Go is supposed to remain effective even after rain, but my garden is on a fairly steep slope, so I think mine my wash away or at least leach out of the raised beds and wash dow into the paths, so I repply it often in rainy periods. There is an improved version of Slug-Go called Slug-Go Plus that is labeled for use on pillbugs and sowbugs. It has the iron phosphate that's found in the original plus Spinosad, which is a naturally occurring bioinsecticide. I've used it, too, and it has kept the numbers of pill bugs and sow bugs manageable. They never completely go away, but I seldom see damage from any of them. In general, they are only a pest in my garden and landscape during the rainy spring season. We are very dry here....generally in drought.....most of the summer months and their population probably mostly abandons our garden and landscape for the cooler, more moist woodlands that sit to our house's west, north and south. Pure food-grade diatomaceous earth is not easy to find in stores, and I think it is getting harder to find because some companies are now carrying a DE product that has a chemical insecticide added to it and some retailers carry that instead of the natural, organic version. I used to buy it in big tubs (the size of Tidy Cat buckets) when I lived in Texas, but can't find it here in OK. So, I mail order it from an online company. I order 5 or 10 lbs. at a time and it lasts forever. I've linked below the company from which I have purchased DE in the past. I've been very happy with this company. They ship quickly and their customer service is great. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Harvest Supply's DE Page

Bt 'kurstaki' is the best organic remedy I have found for any and all kinds of caterpillers, except maybe for cutworms and other caterpillars that spend some time underground as a part of their life cycle or their daily life. (With those, I've found Slug-Go Plus very effective.) If a product with Bt 'kurstaki' is not effective for you, you can step up to one of the other organic pesticides containing pyrethrin or spinosad. The problem with those two pesticides is that they will kill a lot of other insects, including your beneficial insects that help keep your pest insects under control. For that reason, I never spray them on my entire garden, although I might spray them directly on a specific plant or two that has a major insect problem. With any pest, I always start with the least invasive form of control, like hand-picking, and then step up to a narrow-spectrum pesticide that only affects the pest (like Bt 'kurstaki', for example). If the situation cannot be controlled with those, a person can use organic pesticides that cover a wider spectrum of pests, but I don't like using those because I depend a great deal on my beneficial insects to control my garden's pest insects. I try to garden for the butterflies and plant oodles of plants for them, not just for adult butterflies but also to nourish the caterpillars, so it is a rare occasion that I'll use Bt 'kurstaki' at all, and when I do, I use it only on the specific plants (usually broccoli and cabbage plants) that are being damaged and am extremely careful not to let it drift on to nearby butterfly flowers. One problem with loopers is that they do like lots of other plants and will devour those too. That includes spinach, lettuce and other leafy greens, potato and tomato plants, and cucumber plants. (I mean regular cucumber---I'm not sure I've ever seen them on Armenian cucumbers, but those are really melons and not cukes.) I try to control cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms by handpicking them every day and dropping them into a bowl of soapy water to drown. I used to take them and throw them to the chickens, but our chickens are either lazy or too well-fed, because when I toss caterpillars in their chicken run, they mostly look up at me with an expression that says "I am not gonna eat that" and then they walk away and I have to go into the chicken run and kill the loopers myself----so I save myself the trouble of trying to feed them to the chickens by drowning them. Then, I dump the dead loopers onto the compost pile where they can decompose into compost that someday will feed my garden plants. If hand-picking them is not an option and you'd rather not spray pesticides in the garden, your next best bet is to buy trichogramma wasps and release them in your garden. This is a good option only if you do not spray pesticides in your garden. There's not point in releasing beneficial insects if you're going to turn around and kill them. There are many other kinds of loopers, so it could be you have one of those and not that cabbage loopers. I'm pretty sure the loopers I have found devouring my cleome plants were cabbage loopers, but it could be they are just some other looper than looks similar. One of my favorite early-season ways to control them actually involves controlling the moths. When I first start seeing their moths, which in recent years has been in March or even in February, I put a few yellow Tidy Cat litter buckets filled with alfalfa tea in the garden and also near any lights that remain on all night long. You make alfalfa tea the same way you make compost tea only by soaking some alfalfa (instead of compost), like rabbit feed pellets made of compressed alfalfa, for example, in water for a few hours. Those moths flock to those buckets of alfalfa tea (and so do the June bugs which normally are April bugs here), and I have a lot of dead looper moths floating on the surface of the alfalfa tea every morning. I scoop them out so their dead bodies won't be some sort of warning to other looper moths, and have more floating in there the next day. This is not something I use long-term. I just use it for a few days when the moths first appear. If I leave it out later on as the weather warms up more, I tend to find bees and other beneficials in there, which just horrifies me. Then, I call it a year and pour the alfalfa tea on some plants that need a good feeding. Keeping tall grass mowed short helps keep the hopper population down right now. I try to keep the grass outside the garden mowed pretty short, but there's nothing I can do about adjacent pastures that do not belong to us. Later on, in July and August when huge hordes of hoppers migrate into the still-green areas from dried out pastures and grasslands, mowing isn't that effective. Grasshoppers are so mobile that no matter what you do, more just keep moving in. I got a huge education in grasshopper behavior and grasshopper control our first few years here when we had drought and the population was huge. Grasshopper control is difficult at best, but most easily done when they are young and small. Once they are big, you're only going to have luck with vacuuming them up. Been there. Done that. Hate doing it. I hate grasshoppers more, though.