Good luck.

It's good to see your post. I haven't been posting much, but still check the board every couple of days. I only have peppers left.

Hi, Jo

I am having some of the same problems. I have had a few plants cut off, some just eaten high. I thing the ones cut off at ground level are due to cut worms, the others I believe are due to rats or mice.

I have a problem with moles but not much with gophers. I think voles and gophers will eat root crops. I think the moles had rather have grubs and worms.

I have inspected every plant I have pulled this year (always do) and found no sign of root knot nematodes. I planted the first area of Elbon Rye today, it should be up in 4 to 6 days in this weather. Its a good cover crop even if you dont need it for nematode control.

I still have a small area of buckwheat that is past the tilling in stage but the bees and butterflies are really after it. I may just leave it till it stops blooming.

You may want to get a game plan together on how to kill your rye next year if you plan on planting early. There will be a pretty good stool and root mass to deal with. My first plan will be mulch, then if needed I will use roundup, last result will be my tiller. The times I have used rye in the past I would just till the soup out of it to kill it, even then I would have a few plants wanting to take root and grow more.

Good luck with the task you have ahead of you.

Larry

Jo,

I've been wondering where you were!

If root knot nematodes are endemic in your soil, you'll likely have to plant Elbon rye every year to help keep their numbers low.

Friends I have here in Love County who have sandy soil infested with nematodes have a lot of trouble gardening because of the nematodes. Nematodes are very common in sandy soil and the sandier it is, the more of them you'll tend to see, especially in 'moist' sandy soil. I don't know if RNKs can survive in sand in very dry desert type conditions.

Two ways to fight nematodes are to add huge amounts of organic matter to the sandy soil and to add lots of clay. Don't add clay though unless you add lots of organic matter, though, because sand + clay = adobe, more or less.

If you have cutworms, Slug-Go Plus is the answer. Since I started using Slug-Go Plus for pill bug and sow bug control, I haven't had a single problem with cutworms. I think it is the spinosad in the Slug Go Plus, because when I used plain Slug-Go, I still had cutworms. Any granular form of Spinosad likely would work on cutworms. I use a fire ant killer with Spinosad when fire ant mounds pop up in garden beds so I generally have Spinosad around in one granular product or another.

Do you have a garden cat? We had lots of trouble with moles, voles and gophers when we moved here, but the cats wiped them out in a matter of months. Every now and then gophers or moles try to move into our yard from next door or across the street, and the cats continue to remove them just about the instant they appear. I'm seeing lots of squirrel activity here, and huge numbers of snakes are prowling around my yard and garden (undoubtedly because of the 12.3" of rain that's fallen here in Sept.). When snakes are in the garden at this time of year, I stay out of the garden, venturing into it only to harvest.

I don't think you have a black thumb at all! You grow lots of stuff and you have a beautiful garden. So what if you kill a few plants along the way? I never consider a plant "impossible" to grow here until I've tried to grow it and killed it a few times. Eventually, I can get most things to grow, but that doesn't mean I always succeed on the first try. Black thumns kill plants and give up....green thumbs keep trying! (That's how you turn your black thumb green...just keep planting relentlessly. lol)

Fall is a great time to grow things and to prepare soil for next spring, but the temps/heat index so far in my part of the state still feel like August.

Scott, I still have peppers too and I am sick of them. Can you believe that? I keep hoping the squirrels will eat them or something, but they don't seem inclined to.

Larry, That's the wonderful thing about buckwheat...it flowers so fast and the flying critters love it so much.

The big drawback to rye is all that root mass to deal with in late winter or early spring. Still, it is great for the soil.

Dawn

Jo, it could be rabbits getting to the base of you beans. Also, with the sweet potatoes, it sounds a lot like gophers. Every year, about now, I have problems with voles getting into my sweet potatoes. I use a small cube of rat poison, placed in a coffee can, on it's side, with the bottom end slightly elevated, to kill them. I'm tempted to get a garden cat. But our guard dogs might well make a snack out of it!

This has been a horrible year for beans. I still have a few varieties refusing to make pods.

George
Tahlequah, OK