Welcome to the Thayer Nursery Blog
August 1st, 2010
Wanted For: an invasive species that dines on & destroys ornamental lilies, also exhibits an interesting habit of personal hygiene – covering themselves with their own excrement
Description: beetle has bright scarlet body & black legs, head, & antennae and the Larvae resemble slugs with swollen orange, brown, yellowish or even greenish bodies and black heads
Hangout: asiatic lilies
Kryptonite: Neem, Spinosad, Pyrethrins
The adult beetles stay alive throughout the winter and emerge early in the spring, when they begin looking for food and a mate. The adult females lay their eggs on the underside of lily leaves and the females produce between 250 and 450 eggs. The eggs appear in April or May and hatch within eight days.
The young larvae feed on the underside and the upper surface of lily leaves and sometimes on lily buds. This feeding period, which lasts 16 to 24 days, is the most destructive. From there, the beetles drop to the soil and pupate, emerging as adults about 16 to 22 days later & feed throughout the rest of the growing season.
And their personal hygiene leaves something to be desired: they secrete and carry their excrement on their backs. While they feed, the lily leaf beetles cover their bodies with their own excrement, giving them a grotesque appearance. It is some sort of defensive mechanism – it makes them look like a bird dropping, warding off predators and parasites.
If you only have a few plants in your garden, hand-picking adults and eggs can be effective (we prefer not to handle larvae, although there is no danger in doing so). Neem is most effective – it will repel beetles and kill young larvae, but must be applied every 5 to 7 days after the eggs hatch. Spinosad will kill the larvae.
planting for the future.
-By Maggie Oldfield Thayer Nursery
July 26th, 2010
Blossom End Rot
Blossom end rot looks like the bottom of the tomato is rotting away. The bottom is shrunken and black.
Blossom-end rot is a physiologic disorder associated with calcium. Calcium is required for normal cell growth. When a rapidly growing fruit is deprived of necessary calcium, the tissues break down, leaving sunken lesion at the blossom end. Blossom-end rot is induced when demand for calcium exceeds supply. This may result from low calcium levels, drought stress, excessive soil moisture fluctuations as well as rapid, vegetative growth due to excessive nitrogen. This reduces uptake and movement of calcium into the plant.
Simply, it is a lack of calcium & a watering problem. The plant needed calcium at some point in its development of the fruit and there wasn’t enough water to transport the calcium up to the fruit. So this condition develops.
The solution is to fertilize with Calcium (FOLI-CAL) and be consistent with your watering.
Monterey FOLI-CAL
Tomato Cracking
Cracking of the skins is mostly a problem of inconsistent watering or water availability. The plants take it up and grow too quickly for the skins to expand. It mostly seems to happen when you water after a dry spell.
The solution is to water more thoroughly and more consistently. You will get more consistency and far fewer cracks.
-By Maggie Oldfield Thayer Nursery
July 19th, 2010
At this time of year, there are three kinds of “tomato blight” that you’re likely to see in your garden.
Blight One: Septoria Leaf Spot
Septoria Leaf Spot is the most common blight, and it appears roughly around the end of July and starts out as small round black or brown rotting marks on the lowest leaves. It works its way up the plant to hit all the leaves but it starts from the bottom first. You will still get fruit if you have this problem.
Blight Two: Early Blight
Early Blight is the second most regularly seen tomato blight. It usually appears about the same time as the Septoria but it has concentric target-shaped marks, the spots on the leaves look like targets with circles within circles. This tomato blight spreads all over the plant and you will still get fruit but the crop will be reduced.
Blight Three: Late Blight
Late Blight is the least common of these tomato blights. It appears later than the previous two and the first symptoms you will see are watery type lesions on the lower leaves. If you get this one, you won’t have to ask what you have because the elapsed time from the time you first see it to the time the plant wilts and dies is about a week. If your tomato plants simply shrivel up and die with big brown spots on the leaves and it seems to happen overnight, your plants are suffering from Late Blight.
What Can Be Done
Generally if you’ve already seen the problem, there’s not a lot you can do. A preventative organic spray of Lime-Sulphur or Serenade mix will slow down the spread of Septoria and Early Blight but the real key is in the prevention of the problem. The cure rests in good gardening techniques rather than any kind of magic spray.
Mulch
Mulching will reduce the stress on the plant and it will prevent “splash-back” from the ground to lower leaves during rainstorms. The lower leaves on tomato plants tend to be dirt splashed because rain or irrigation tends to splash dirt up. This dirt can contain the spores for blight.
Rotate Crop
Do not plant any crop in the same place more than one year. Planting in the same spot from year to year is simply an invitation to problems. Spores build up in the soil and there’s little you can do to prevent them from using your tomatoes as a food source.
Don’t Water At Night
Do not water in the evening. You want your leaves to be dry going into the evening. Damp leaves & dark conditions are ideal for spore starting and keeping those leaves dry is the way to keep them healthy.
Do Not Crowd
You really do need to space tomato plants apart. Staking the plants and giving them at least two square feet each is the best way to keep the leaves dry. Also prune off the lower leaves. This lets the air and sunlight into the fruit and it also reduces watersplash.
Don’t Compost
The average composter does not get hot enough to kill the overwintering spores so the best thing you can do is bag up the waste.
If you see a branch with a problem, prune it out immediately. Do not let it sit on the plant to infect all other parts of the plant. Also, pull out any weeds from around your plants – they reduce air circulation, suck up nutrients and can act as a host for tomato blight.
Select Disease Resistant Plants
If you have a problem with tomato blight, plant cultivars with disease resistance. Look for letters after the name of the plant that might say “V” for verticillium resistant, or “F” for fusarium resistant. While not specifically blight resistant, they do have better overall resistance to tomato blight problems than those without those initials.
-By Maggie Oldfield Thayer Nursery
July 12th, 2010
July 9, 2010
Milton on Lookout for Asian Beetles
Milton’s tree caretakers are taking extra precautions after the discovery earlier this week of an infestation in Jamaica Plain of the same Asian longhorned beetles that have destroyed thousands of trees in Worcester County.
Worcester and several surrounding towns have lost 25,000 hardwoods to the insect menace. Earlier this week, in the first Massachusetts sighting outside of Worcester’s 74-square-mile quaratine zone, an infestation felled six trees across from the world-class Arnold Arboretum nature sanctuary in Jamaica Plain.
This latest discovery of the white-spotted Asian longhorned beetle and the subsequent removal and chipping of the infected trees only five miles from Milton on the grounds of Faulkner Hospital has stirred extra vigilance among local hardwood caretakers.
Thayer Nursery, on Hillside Street at the foot of the Blue Hills Reservation, grows many species of hardwood trees in its fields, including elm, ash, birch, maple and willow. Up until now, the nursery had little concern for the Asian beetle, instead focusing on other common insects like aphids, mites and leaf miners.
“Because we are a Massachusetts farm, we do get inspected yearly by the Department of Agricultural Resources,” Maggie Oldfield, managing partner of the nursery’s garden center, said in an email. “They walk around our farm inspecting for diseases and insects.”
Recently the department added the longhorned beetle to its inspection list. The latest DAR check was in early June, Oldfield said, and it found Thayer Nursey “very neat and clean.”
At the end of May, a coordinated search by federal and state forestry agencies failed to turn up any of the beetles at more than 200 vacation homes and campgrounds from Pennsylvania to Maine.
But now, with the insects found just a few miles away, the nursery is boosting its tree observation.
“There really is not anything we can do except to monitor our farm,” Oldfield said. “We try to be as organic as possible and as of now, there is not any organic preventative for [the Asian longhorned beetle].”
The beetle, barely an inch and a half long, has devastated Worcester County residents since 2008 by boring into and killing thousands of hardwood trees. Only recently have the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture gotten a handle on the situation by way of the quarantine, keeping vigorous watch and spraying insecticides.
DCR spokeswoman Wendy Fox said the agency is encouraging keepers of hardwoods to watch for perfectly-round, pencil-sized holes that can indicate infestation in a tree. The beetles, thought to have come to the United States from China in shipping crates, kill trees by digging into their heartwood, which transfers water and nutrients to other parts of the plant.
“It’s something everybody can keep an eye on,” Fox said.
She also said that so far there have been no sightings of the beetle outside of Faulkner Hospital and Worcester County.
Meanwhile, the DCR has cordoned off a 1.5-mile area around the Boston infection where the transportation of firewood or other woody material is banned. Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles said the state is “working as quickly as possible to determine the extent of the issue.”
Joe Lynch, director of the Milton Department of Public Works, said the town’s tree crews have been following state protocols for identifying invasive insects and disease for the past five years. The regulations include looking out for Asian longhorned beetles. Following this week’s new sighting, identification guidelines were rebroadcast to crews, who are watching for egg masses, holes and the beetles themselves.
If infected trees are found, Lynch said, they will be removed and destroyed and the area will be quarantined.
“We went from a warning level yellow to a warning level orange,” Lynch said. “We haven’t gone to red because there have been no confirmed sightings [in Milton].”
Forestry officials working in Worcester have found some success fighting the beetle, which has no known predators, by removing infected trees and spraying healthy specimens with a pesticide called Imidacloprid that prevents infestation.
Anyone who thinks they’ve spotted a beetle can compare the insect they’ve found with similar-looking species at the website of the Massachusetts Introduced Pests Outreach Project. The project is a collaboration between the state DAR and the UMass Extension Agriculture and Landscape Program, funded by the USDA. The site also includes a form for reporting pests.
Oldfield said Thayer Nursery can help by staying sharp-eyed and quickly notifying officials if beetles are spotted to ensure rapid eradication.
“And probably the most important thing we can do is to replant our own landscapes with non-susceptible trees thus creating a more diverse landscape.”
June 27th, 2010
Wanted For: sucking the life out of innocent rose bushes with their needle-like mouth
Description: pinkish, greenish white; 1/16″ long & soft-bodied
Hangout: rose bushes; especially on stems, buds and young leaves
Kryptonite: Saf-t-Side Horticultural Oil, Bt & Lady Bugs
So Long, Suckers!
There are almost as many kinds of aphids as there are kinds of plants –rose aphid is just one example. Rose aphids prepare for next spring’s assault by laying hundreds of eggs on the branches of the rose bush. After the young aphids hatch, they spend their entire lives gorging on their victim’s life juices and producing more criminals. Too many on one bush can force some aphids to move and begin attacking another rose bush. Unless winters are mild, adults will die and only the eggs will survive until the next spring.
Not only should you learn about aphids, but you should also get to know the squadron of beneficial insects covering the area. Many hunt down aphids, restoring law and order.
However, aphids aren’t just sitting ducks-they have ants for bodyguards. Ants will tend aphids for their honeydew and protect them from aphid-eaters, so look for ways to deter ants, too.
Aphids reproduce quickly, actually giving birth to females that are already pregnant, so keep good records of changes in population size and tactics you used to control them.
CAUTION
aphids let diseases hitch a ride on their backs to new plants & then puncture plants for them so watch out for a fungus popping up at the same time as an aphid infestation
Planting for the future.
-By Maggie Oldfield Thayer Nursery
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