Hi, I have lost majority of my seedlings due to some bugs. It is ironic, because I have planted so many seeds to have enough and to share with people. I was telling people that I will give them all my extras and here I am, not having enough for myself. :(( I would like to do quick trade so I can transplant them into my garden ASAP. Also, prefer to do the trade with two or three people to save on shipping cost. Would love to get 10-15 beefsteak type heirloom tomato's seedlings (indetermined), 5 cherry(black, yellow, red), 1 grape, 3 plum type (all indetermined). Peppers I prefer bell, meaty and sweet. Need around 10. Few hot peppers, too. I also need 6 heirloom eggplants. Look on my trade list and see if there are any seeds you would like to have for your seedlings. I can also trade different mint, lemon balm, catnip, and rosemary cuttings. Also, raspberry Heritage small plants. I grow my seedlings organically and prefer to get the same, but it is not the must. Please, do not send sick seedlings. Thanks

I have experienced very severe damage from flea beetles, to the point that they destroyed half of the leaves, which gave the plants little energy to produce fruits. Neighbors and friends recommended diatomaceous earth, and it did absolutely nothing. I generally don't use any pesticides and what I do use are organic. So, I was out of luck that year. The picture in the initial post is nowhere near that point. However, if it gets worse I recommend row cover. For in-ground gardening, it's the best way. I've also found that if I'm growing eggplants in containers, if I put them up on cinder blocks or whatever I have handy to raise them off the ground, that works like a charm. I did that last year. Got them about 2 feet off the ground, and the container was about a foot tall. The flea beetles couldn't jump that high, I guess.

I just wanted to update this thread for my own reference next year. The Fall peas I planted are doing great! In the same spot I planted the Spring ones. Nice nodules on the Spring ones. They are flowering and 4 feet tall, growing no slower than in the Spring. The Fall beets had poor survival. It looks like I will get at least a few smaller beets, in the sunny spot I planted them. The lettuce planted in the shady bed stopped growing about 3 weeks ago. It is baby greens. I will try some MG to give them a boost. The carrots planted in the shady bed are growing well, but probably not well enough, I will be surprised if I get any decent roots. The brussels sprouts are looking pretty nice despite all the mistreatment and I hope for some sprouts in November. The direct sow cabbage and broccoli was a total fail. The seedlings just wouldn't grow in the summer heat. They are growing now but too late. And for the summer stuff... The beans are pretty much done. A little bit of poor quality dribs and drabs left. The earlier planted beans did much better than the summer planted ones. The Alexandria zucchini is still hanging in there, all other squash is long dead from PM and pests. The Ace and Biscayne are rocking. I LOVE my peppers! They did just as well in the late september cold as the summer heat and sun. The eggplant is doing well. The Hansel has lost quality pretty bad now, but the Galine is still doing great and is plenty of eggplant. The later planted ones are doing better, but they are also getting much more sun. And, the tomatoes. The smaller plants, the Jet Star and Sweet Tangerine, are about 75% toasted from septoria. The Golden Rave are still producing but also looking really bad, and unsplit Sungolds are difficult to come by. All of the fruit is poor quality and honestly I wish they would just hurry up and die at this point, so I can clean up the mess. I have harvested enough tomatoes for the winter for sure. This is going to be a hard year to top!

Bon, I cannot think of any reason to not grow eggplant and summer squash together. Winter squash? Hmm. Most winter squash are vining and run rampantly so might be likely to swallow up the eggplant. If the winter squash you're growing is more bushy and refined in nature it might work. Otherwise, to make it work you need to keep an eye on the squash plant, and train any vines/runners away from the eggplant. Make sure your eggplant is a good distance away from the squash when planted too. Amy, I do a gazillion types of trap cropping, so to talk about it all would require writing a book and that's never going to happen. What I do varies from one type of plant to another and even from week to week, month to month, and season to season, so if there's some specific crop you want to know about, ask and I'll try to answer. With regards to the cucumber beetles, they are everywhere here where we are surrounded by many thousands of acres of pasture land that is largely untended, other than maybe being sprayed by a broadleaf weedkiller at some point each spring and then being grazed, cut and baled later on. The beetles often emerge from overwintering in late January or earliest February and are out flying around before I even have any new plants in the ground. Because they are so early, there's a well-established population of them milling around before I plant anything at all, and by the time I'm planting, the population is overwhelmingly huge. So, to catch and kill those little buggers, I start sacrificial cucumber seeds early and set the young plants out on the patio table or in the garden or both when the plants have 4 to 5 leaves. I have them in disposable containers, usually paper or plastic cups. Cucumber beetles flock to them. I then kill the beetles on the plants, or if the plants have dozens of beetles on them, I bag up the infested plants in zip-lock bags, zip them shut, and put them in a black trash bag to be hauled away with the household trash. Then I move another cucumber plant or two from the light shelf or greenhouse to the outdoors to be the new trap plant. If you start a whole flat of cucumber plants early (and choose a variety not touted for pest tolerance) you can trap and kill oodles and oodles of cucumber beetles before you ever put any kind of cucurbit in the ground. Every cucumber beetle you kill is one less beetle that will be reproducing and causing issues later on. Cucumber beetles do not feed only on cucumber plants because they can attack virtually any and all plants in the garden, so by killing the earliest generations, I hopefully am keeping the overall population down. And, for anyone wondering, one of the major issues with cucumber beetles is that they carry and spread disease, so the fewer of them you have around, the better. Usually by the time I'm planting cucumbers, squash and melons in the ground, our cucumber beetle population is fairly small. It eventually will grow as the general popuation is highly mobile and flies around searching for their preferred plants, but usually by then at least my main pickling cucumber (County Fair, chosen expressly for superb disease tolerance) is well-established and the cuke beetles don't damage them much. On a warm, spring day, I see cucumber beetles everywhere on everything, so trapping them early and killing them can only help. Trap plants work great when they are the only available cucurbits. Once you have cucurbits in the ground, the trap plants in containers aren't all that helpful since the cucumber beetles have many more options at that poing. You can use Blue Hubbard squash as a trap plant for squash bugs and SVBs in the same way. Grow them a short distance from your actual preferred squash plants, and plant the Blue Hubbard earlier so it can start trapping pests. Then, try to catch and kill all the squash bugs and SVBs that flock to it. This works really well if you have your main squash crop under floating row cover so that the Blue Hubbard isn't just the best option for the pests---it is the only option at that point. Dawn