The Garden in the Second Part: Broccoli, and Garlic, and Greens, Oh, My!

What is a garden to you?

Having just walked through my vigorously blooming front flower bed on the way to the front door, a visitor last summer asked me sincerely, "Are you still gardening?"

I have to admit that I was taken aback.  Ah, yes, what else would you call that array of flowers and plumed grasses that you just traversed between the car and the house?  It took me a minute to realize that she meant, "Are you still growing vegetables?"

Yes, I was still growing vegetables, although I was having significantly more luck and fun with the flowers!

Gardening is different things to different people.  Indeed, the entire point of this series of posts is that sometimes gardening is even different things to the same person!  Almost everybody, though, considers growing foodstuffs to be gardening.

Over the last 7 years, our vegetable garden success has swung, year to year, from wildly successful to wildly unsuccessful.  Too much rain, not enough rain, not enough heat, too much heat, grasshoppers (oh, lord, the grasshoppers), blister beetles, late freezes, time constraints, voles, Bermuda grass, bindweed and vacations - the list of challenges varies from year to year, but I can guarantee there will be a multiplicity of challenges to getting a good crop of anything every single year.

Most of our vegetables are grown in a series of raised beds that Greg has constructed out of wide cedar boards.  We are up to 9 raised beds now, all 8' long, varying in width from 3' to 4' and varying in depth from 6" to 10".  This photo, taken on March 12th after we'd done our spring clean-out, shows our basic bed layout in all its winter starkness.  There is a large cedar to the south, casting the deep shade you see in this picture, but during the summer that's not really an issue. 

One thing we didn't do when we built the beds was to put hardware screen in the bottom of each one to keep out the voles.  THAT was a mistake and it is an issue that is going to have to be remedied, slowly, bed by bed.   Two beds in particular need to be reworked:  sweet potatoes and strawberries.  Voles are a real problem when we try to grow sweet potatoes - we've lost entire crops to the voles.  They like the strawberries, too.  Voles take some of the berries, which is bearable (berry-able?!), but their tunnels introduce a lot of air around the roots, drying them out faster, which is not good in our climate.  Interestingly, the voles don't seem to bother regular potatoes, of any variety that we've grown.

Late last fall, Greg decided to add a couple cold frames to see if he could grow greens over the winter.  We went to the Habitat ReStore to see what we could find, bringing home several discarded double-paned windows for $5 each and a couple large glass light shades.

Surrounding one of our raised beds with straw bales, Greg dug out one end and left the other end at its normal soil level.  In the deeper end, he placed kale and broccoli plants; in the shallower end, he added spinach and lettuce.  Then he laid the double pane windows across the bales. (If you look at the photo above, you can see this arrangement on the far left bed.)  Under the various sized glass light shades, he put in individual broccoli plants.  He also used some plastic caps that we had to try to shelter four chard plants that we already had growing, putting one cap over each plant.  It didn't look pretty (that's an understatement - it looked really trashy), but it was an experiment.  In this view, taken shortly after we put everything up on November 11th, you can see the glass globes with broccoli under them and the individual plastic caps over the chard in the far bed.

Being "blessed" by several bouts with polar vortexes (vortices?) this winter, the individual forms of protection simply didn't provide enough warmth to keep the plants from freezing and dying.  BUT, the plants that Greg managed to establish in the straw-encircled raised bed struggled through the cold spells and started growing luxuriantly in late winter.   He's been harvesting enough kale, spinach, and lettuce for green smoothies every day now for weeks, and we've had some broccoli to liven up salads, too.

Good friends Flip & Shelley heard about our experiments with cold frames and gave us a real, honest-to-goodness, official, cold frame as a gift at Christmas.  Greg got it put up and, as soon as broccoli and cauliflower starts became available this spring, he planted them.  THAT coldframe is a real winner - the broccoli has nice heads forming already and the cauliflower is starting to form baby heads too.  The photo below is of the broccoli and cauliflower that grew under the official cold frame (which we took off last weekend).  I suspect more of these cold frames are in our future, even if they do cost more than discarded double-paned windows....

Meanwhile, sometime in mid March, Greg seeded spinach into the biggest two of the individual glass light globes.  The spinach germinated well and is now producing excellently.  We took all the cold frames off last weekend and I don't expect to have to put them back on again until fall.

In the photo below, the back bed has garlic on the left end, the two patches of spinach from the glass globes in the middle, and masses of (leftover) garlic on the right side.  The front bed is the remnant of the strawberry bed, with new plants added in to fill it back up.  We'll be mulching that soon, just right after we get a decent rain.  (We WILL be getting a decent rain soon, won't we?!  Please?)  The big plants in the path in front of the strawberries are Brown-Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia triloba) that I just enjoy leaving and walking around, benefiting from the pollinators they draw in once they start blooming.  Greg and I don't always agree on the appropriateness of my leaving them in the path to grow up, but so far he's been indulgent in letting them be.

Next to the big plants of cauliflower and broccoli that grew in the cold frame, we've recently added a few plants of specialty cauliflower varieties from Johnson's:  Graffiti (1), Cheddar (2) and Veronica (2).  Those went in earlier this week.  Greg is out planting small onion plants, more broccoli, and more cauliflower this morning.  We have a small patch of multiplier onions in the end of one bed, which I received as a start from Sid Wise several years ago, just as the big drought was beginning.  Despite less than stellar care on my part (as in, during the worst of the drought and heat, I just gave up even walking out to the vegetable garden), the patch has survived and seems to be thriving.  The onions have a delicious bite to them!

In the same raised bed as the multiplier onions, we've planted just a few potatoes - Yukon Gold and Red Viking.  We put them in late and they are just now putting up leaves, but that's okay.  We usually don't eat many potatoes.  It's nice to have a few, though, now and then.

One thing we have PLENTY of this year is garlic.  Last fall, we bought a couple cloves from Hillside Feed & Seed to plant, but the majority of our garlic is from leftover bulbs that were missed when I harvested last summer.  I've taken the time to space out a couple of those clumps, which resprouted and grew over the winter, but there were too many for me to replant all of them.  So the rest remain growing in huge, vibrant jumbles of garlicky chaos.  I doubt we'll get any useable garlic out of the leftover clumps, but it will be interesting to see what we do get.  Surely some of it can be used for sauteing or in salads.

We put in 9 tomato plants last weekend, knowing that we were gambling a bit as we did so.  And we put in one jalapeno pepper, too.  Greg added another 6 jalapenos this morning, but we'll wait to plant the majority of the summer stuff for another week or two...or three...or four.

With the exception of the multiplier onions, everything I've mentioned so far is an annual, but we have 4 different perennial patches going on now in our vegetable garden, too.

First is the asparagus.  There are officially 3 patches of asparagus around the yard.   Patch #1 is a single, large., wild asparagus plant by the front driveway gate that seeded in on its own as far as I know.  Probably a bird plant.  It never gets watered, gets weeded only sporadically, competes against both big bluestem and a pretty little creamy yellow iris patch...and comes up faithfully (and strongly) year after year.  We usually take at least one harvest of spears from it each year - and they taste great. 

Asparagus Patch #2 is the bed I put in a year or two after we moved in, next to the lagoon fence.  Its location was a fatal error, as the Bermuda grass that runs rampant through the lawn is also rampant around the lagoon and has moved thuggishly into this asparagus patch.   Combined with bindweed, which also grows in the lagoon area and which has joined the Bermuda in the bed, it has made dealing with this small bed a nightmare. The weeds have officially won.  I abandoned the patch this spring.  I'm tired of messing with it.

Which brings me to Asparagus Patch #3....  This spring I decided to start a new asparagus bed in one of our raised garden beds.  I dug the bed out to below the bottom of the cedar boards, carefully searching out every stray root I could find.  This is one of our original 4 raised beds, which were placed directly on the old "lawn" when we built them, right after we moved in.  We've fought a bit of Bermuda and bindweed in these beds, too, but after many years of religiously weeding it out, we're finally winning the battle.  I did my best to make sure that I stacked the odds in our favor for the new asparagus patch.   Then I got new asparagus crowns from Johnson's and planted them as directed.  I'm in the process of backfilling the bed as the new spears start shooting up.

Strawberries are the second perennial patch in our food gardens.  They have a raised bed of their own, too.  We had a great strawberry harvest last spring, but between the voles and the drought over the summer, we lost over half of the strawberry plants.  The bed had only been in for about 2 years, so I decided to backfill it with new plants this spring...and pledged to myself to be better about watering this summer.  Next time I start an entirely new strawberry bed, I plan to have hardware cloth underneath it to keep the voles out.

The third perennial patch is a crossover between vegetables and natives:  a patch of Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) that I planted last spring.  Actually I planted 2 patches last spring - one behind the back garage and one by the compost pile.  Both were doing really well until Greg decided that the ones behind the back garage were weeds and sprayed them with Roundup.  As soon as I said something about how strange it was that they were all yellow and dying, he looked guilty and confessed that he'd forgotten I'd planted them there.   I may try them there again - it still seems like an excellent spot for them to get a little wild!  This time I'll put a sign up....

The patch of Jerusalem artichokes by the compost pile did well last summer, but about the time I thought I'd dig up a few to eat, I noticed several vole holes.  Deciding that the voles were quite capable of eating all of the tubers on their own, I refrained from harvesting any for us and waited to see what was left for us this spring.  By the time I took this picture of the holes less than 2 weeks ago, new plants were germinating and I knew that I hadn't lost them all.

I'm happy to say that the Jerusalem artichokes were much hardier than the sweet potatoes, when faced with the same enemy!  Despite an obviously thriving vole colony that still seems to be happily  ensconced among the roots, the Jerusalem artichokes are coming up strongly this spring.  Next winter I'll harvest them without fear.  Meanwhile, if anyone finds a garter snake they want to rehome, I have the perfect location!

Note:  the wires across the Jerusalem artichoke patch are simply to keep the dogs from running through the young plants as they grow.  Huge German shepherd feet are not kind to tender plants.  The wire also helps to keep the lawn mower at bay....




Our last perennial patch is brand new this spring:  raspberries.  Greg built a trellis, based on a design he found on the internet, and we purchased/planted 5 'Royalty' raspberries at the Outdoor Landscape & Living Show last month.  Royalty is the variety that was most highly recommended for this area during the talk on small fruits that I attended 2 years ago during the Annual Master Gardener Conference in Manhattan.  All 5 plants were bare root;  3 have leafed out and are looking good.  Two have no signs of life yet (but the roots looked fine when I planted them).


So, enough again.  Next on the spring tour will be the native plants and flower beds.  It's a good thing I'm getting these garden over-views done now, because enough insects are coming in to the native flowers already that I can see I'm going to be quite busy this summer, photographing and identifying everything I find in the yard!

Three in One: Gardening for Different Purposes in One Landscape

I've been wanting to share posts of how great the garden is looking this spring, but I haven't been able to decide what to emphasize or what other gardeners might be interested in.  After starting several posts that fizzled from a severe lack of focus, I realized that I actually have 3 separate gardens, all combined into one overarching landscape.  It's easiest and most rational, then, to post about each garden separately.

However, I even get myself into trouble when I try to list the three separate types of gardens I have!  Which is the most important or the biggest - and therefore entitled to be showcased first and talked about the most?  Which is nearest and dearest to my heart?  Yikes!  I sure manage to create problematic mountains out of non-problematic molehills!

Okay, so here goes....

I'm going to start with my decorative/heirloom/memory gardens - these are plants that I inherited when we purchased our house, that I've rescued from gardens about to be lost, that I've chosen because they are heirloom varieties that appeal to me, that have been given to me, and so forth.  These are not native plants - they hail from Japan, Turkey, China, and many other parts of the world.  They are "traditional" garden plants.  (Yes, I DO grow non-natives!)

Right now the heirloom garden plants are the showiest, probably because native prairie plants tend to green up late, knowing that the weather is likely to be fickle well through April.

Here, for example, is a portion of my back courtyard bed from about two weeks ago.....

The flowers that are making a splash in this photo are a beautiful hellebore, as well as heirloom daffodils and hyacinths.  More on the specifics in the next post.

Next on my list is the vegetable garden.  This is pretty straight-forward, although I do mix it up a bit by utilizing raised beds to raise some perennials and natives in until I know where I want to put them in the flower beds.  Doing this not only helps me place things more rationally in the garden, but also brings in pollinators for the vegetables when the flowers bloom.  Greg experimented with different kinds of cold frames over the winter this year, which makes the vegetable garden look significantly messier.  The messy look has been well worth it, though because we've been reaping rewards as far as early greens and a head start on broccoli and cauliflower this spring.

Finally I end up at my beloved native plants.  Yes, these are the plants I hold closest to my heart.  Not only do they bring a lot of botanical beauty into the landscape, but they provide food and shelter for a myriad of animals that enliven the landscape with their presence and their activities.

I speak of the native plants as separate from the heirloom gardens and vegetable gardens, but in reality, I have all 3 combined throughout most of the garden.  It just seems easier to talk about them separately, since I grow them for such different reasons.

So now I've set the framework - in my own mind at least - for a quick look at 3 different "gardens" around our yard this spring.  Rather than make one exhaustively long post, I'm going to summarize what's been happening in 3 separate posts.   It will be interesting to see which different "gardens" appeal to more people and why!

The Curious Gardener

Winter is traditionally the time for gardeners to cocoon, reading seed catalogs and gardening books, but after the last 2 years of heat and drought, I had precious little interest in either this winter...

...until The Snow.  The Snow occurred in late February and rejuvenated much more than my flickering gardening spirit.  With a little moisture and the beginning of spring's warmer temperatures, daffodils and other bulbs started pushing their way up through the soil, chorus frogs soon started singing, and it seemed like there was some hope for a growing season after all.

The Snow revived my interest in gardening-type publications, as well.  For some unknown reason, I was compelled to pick up a book I'd never heard of but had purchased, on a whim, at the Half Price Book Store in San Antonio, Texas, several years ago.  It had aged appropriately on one of my many (book) piles and seemed to be calling my name.

The Curious Gardener is by Jurgen Dahl, a German bookseller turned garden writer.  He received several journalistic awards during his life and was the author of a dozen books.  Dahl passed away in 2001, but this translation of 3 of his books was published by Timber Press in 2004.

I have not, to my knowledge, read any other books by German gardeners and it was interesting to see that gardening in Germany gave him a slightly different outlook than gardening in England or in the U.S. would have done.  The cultural myths surrounding plants varied from the myths I've been accustomed to reading, for example.

Particularly striking, for me, were Dahl's passages on our native plants, which were, of course, not native for him.  For example, on page 157 he talks about eating the flower buds of sunflower (Helianthus annuus), saying that they taste rather like artichokes when properly prepared.  In fact, some people apparently prefer them to artichokes.

Dahl gives a lot of information on culinary and medicinal uses for plants of all types.  He is an adventurous eater, trying many things that seem a little "on the edge" to my more American palate.

Here are just a sampling of the tidbits I found interesting in this book....

If you cover dandelions with a clay cloche, their leaves blanch and are less bitter when you eat them.  Apparently, this is very popular to do in England.

Turkey tail shelf fungus, dried, used to be worn as a decoration on ladies' black velvet hats.

Sweet potatoes, sliced and panfried, then served with oil and vinegar, are said to strengthen the body...and the libido!

There is a plant called opium lettuce, in the lettuce genus, whose sap can be dried and then supposedly used as a painkiller and sleep aid.  It apparently is not addictive and has no side effects.  (Please note:  I am in no way advocating this!  I am just reporting what someone else has written.)

I'll leave you with Dahl's description of sassafras, a native-to-the-U.S. tree that is rarely glorified here in our own country,

Perhaps [our new tree] will be a sassafras, an Appalachian fever tree, a miracle in scents and colors.  Its timber and bark and roots smell of cloves and camphor with a whiff of fennel.  An oil distilled from it can be used to add that tempting scent to soaps and tobaccos.  And the magnificent orange and red of its leaves are said to be among the most beautiful fall colors to exist anywhere.  Finally, its leaves have differing oval and lobed shapes, so it is just the right thing to commemorate unique people.

Dahl's description of sassafras is rather different from the normal description heard here, where it's native, isn't it?!

Hard Choices: Heat, Drought, Grasshoppers and Blister Beetles

Last summer was difficult here.  53 days above 100.  No rain for weeks on end.  Hordes of grasshoppers devouring asparagus, blueberries, perennials and more.  No tomatoes because the temperatures were too high for them to set fruit.  Many plants dying because they couldn't handle the combined stress of the heat, drought, and grasshoppers.  No matter how much water we soaked plants with, it never seemed to be enough.

The photo to the right shows one of our althea shrubs last July, complete with its decoration of hungry 'hoppers.

We were hoping for better this year.  In one way, it will be better - the spring was so warm, so early, that we have a wonderful crop of tomatoes ripening, beating the normal July 4th deadline by weeks.

However, the temperatures this last week of June have been 103-105-107-106....  Today is scheduled to be 106, and the next 10 days are all forecast to be above 100, with no rain in sight.  The grasshoppers are even worse this year than last, too.  The asparagus is brown, the stems eaten by grasshoppers and then dessicated by heat and lack of rain.  Perennials are beginning to wilt. In this heat, there will be no new tomatoes being set on. 

Speaking of tomatoes, the blister beetles have begun ganging up on the tomato plants, eating the foliage steadily and inexorably.  Normally I would handpick them off each morning, drowning them in soapy water, to keep the tomatoes as healthy as possible, but it's been 2 years since we had significant numbers of blister beetles.  Two years in which the grasshopper populations have built up to ridiculous numbers, thanks in great part to the drought.

So here's the summary of our current situation:

1.  Blister beetles lay their eggs on grasshopper egg masses.  For every adult blister beetle you see, you aren't seeing about 25 grasshoppers that were eaten by that beetle as a larva.

2.  On the other hand, adult blister beetles eat plants.  Right now, they are beginning to enjoy our tomatoes, seemingly munching away with great gusto.

3.  The heat and the drought mean that the grasshoppers will continue to do amazingly well this year, while the tomatoes will not be setting fruit until the heat eases significantly.  The blister beetles represent one of the only natural checks on the grasshopper populations during these weather conditions.

4.  Conclusion:  If we want to have a chance of decreasing grasshopper populations around here (and since we won't have new tomatoes setting on in this heat anyway), I need to leave the blister beetles alone and let them munch away at the tomatoes.

But, oh, that is such a hard decision to make!  Our tomatoes are looking so wonderful this year - full and lush and green and loaded with fruit....

Sometimes letting nature take its course is truly painful.

A Time to Look Both Ways, Backward and Forward, As We Cross Into 2012

It's the time of year when it seems necessary to look back over the past year, and then right to look ahead towards the year to come.  After reading multiple such posts on other blogs over the past few days, last night I gave into temptation and looked back in my own journal to remember 2011 in our yard and gardens in SW Sedgwick County, Kansas....

The first day over 100 degrees was....(drum roll, please!)...May 9th, when it reached 101 on our sheltered breezeway.  (The average high temperature for that date in Wichita is 74 degrees.)  This was definitely a harbinger of things to come.

We had 53 days over 100 during the year, breaking the all-time record here in the Wichita area.

In my journal, I started whining about unseasonable heat and the lack of rain back in April.  Little did I realize what was in store for us over the next several months!  By August, I'd quit complaining (for the most part) and start cheering on the 100 degree days.  Heck, if we were going to suffer through the horrible heat, we might as well set a record!  And we did.  Several, in fact.

(According to The Wichita Eagle yesterday, Wichita also set a record this year for the widest range between high and low temperatures recorded here for any single year so far:  128 degrees.)

As far as the garden itself went....  We started cleaning and preparing the vegetable garden in February, then did our first seed planting in early March.  Despite my weather whining in April, we had our best spring garden ever.  We're still feasting on the broccoli and cauliflower that I harvested and froze from that spring bonanza.

The summer garden, though, was another story.  I put in some ridiculously large number of tomato seedlings for the two of us (at least 16) and they all took hold nicely and looked great as of May 31st.  I should have had tomatoes falling off the counter and rolling out the kitchen door.  However, out of all of those plants, I got one regular size tomato and 3 cherry (grape) tomatoes in early July.  The plants just didn't set fruit in the scorching heat that never seemed to quit.  Despite the fact that I stopped watering sometime in mid July, most of the tomato plants survived the summer and started to set fruit again in the fall, but a fairly early frost literally froze our hopes on the vine.  We just weren't meant to have tomatoes this year.

So most of our "gardening" this summer ended up being focused on plugging buffalo grass in an attempt to get some sort of decent lawn growing.  (Just for the record, growing lawn grass is NOT really gardening in my book.) The plugs we put in during early July look like they've taken hold pretty well.  The plugs we put in later look...pluggy, even now.  We'll have to see how they look in April or May, as the buffalo grass greens up and starts growing again.

By the time fall got here, I didn't want to step outside to do more than push a camera shutter button.  The thought of a fall garden was simply disgusting.

But it's been a couple months now.  We've had a bit of rain.  The heat of the summer is simply an unpleasant memory.  I can finally start thinking about what I want to do as the weather warms up in a couple months.  Hope, after all, springs eternal in a gardener's breast.

So, for next year???

1)  I'm going to start lettuce seeds indoors, sometime in January, since I learned last year that if young lettuce seedlings experience temperatures below 50 degrees F., it encourages early bolting when hotter weather comes.  Once the young seedlings have more than 3 or 4 leaves, low temperatures apparently don't have the same effect.

2)  I AM going to be home in early April, when the asparagus starts coming up, and again in early June, when the peas start bearing, so they won't all go to waste in the compost pile like they did this year.

3)  Any time now, we are going to put up the bluebird nest boxes that have been ripening quietly in the garage for over a year now.  They'll do a lot more good out on fenceposts where the birds can actually use them!

4)  If the weather gods are good to us and we have decent harvests, I am going to work harder at finding new recipes to utilize our home-grown produce.  Then I'm going to actually try them out!  The recipes I've got are good, but limited, and I know there are many more, wonderful ways to tantalize our taste buds as well as nourish our bodies.

5)  I am going to do a better job of getting our beds well mulched, so that we're ready for the summer baking season ahead of time and don't, hopefully, have to try to play catch-up as much as we did this year.  (I've already got the chopped leaf mulch piled and ready for deployment - its lack was our limiting factor this last spring.)

6) And I am going to continue keeping the garden journal that I started last spring and abandoned in June, when the weather was so discouraging that I didn't have the heart to go on.  I used it to note tidbits from magazine articles, timing for plantings and harvestings, wish lists for purchases and projects, and all sorts of other fun stuff.  While I only kept the journal up for 4 months, I'm finding lots of little notes in it that are getting my blood stirring as I think about getting started this spring! 


And that's enough for now.   The catalogs are coming in and the winter season of dreaming is upon us.  Here's wishing all of us a healthy and happy year in 2012!

Black Blister Beetle Season

It's black blister beetle season again. When I watered last Friday, I saw 2, then I noticed a couple more this morning. So, I went back inside for my trusty peanut butter jar filled with soapy water and started looking seriously.

Wow. The potatoes are just covered. Using a conservative estimate, I picked off around 50 this morning and saw at least a dozen more that escaped my predatory grasp by dropping to the ground and scurrying into the mulch. (For insects who theoretically don't get eaten much because of their "blister" potential, they sure do have good predator-escape instincts. I have to assume that they taste better to some sort of animal than would otherwise be suspected.)

I blogged about the blister beetles last summer, so I won't repeat that information again today, but suffice it to say that I find them much more interesting now than I did before I learned a little about their biology! In rereading what I wrote last summer, I noticed that I was still quite squeamish about handpicking them without gloves. Well, I can't promise that everyone will be this way, but I've found that I don't have any problem with "blisters" at all, whether I wear gloves or not. In fact, I now prefer gloveless picking because I can feel whether I have them in my fingers so much better. I just keep in mind that I don't want to squash them, so I handle them very gently, and I seem to do fine.

I did find at least one predator chowing down on the blister beetles - a wheel bug female who looked very well fed indeed.

Another interesting note: while I was searching high and low in the potatoes for skulking beetles, I noticed droppings that I recognized as being from a horn worm. It took me 10 minutes of looking, but I finally saw the thing - about 4" long and fat as could be, about 2" from where I'd been looking the longest and hardest. Camoflage is a wonderful thing. (No, I didn't remove him. He was about ready to pupate, there was only one of him...and I love sphinx moths!)

Blueberries!

Nothing fancy, but I just had to share that I picked almost 2 cups of big, fat, juicy, tasty blueberries from our bushes this morning. We've never gotten this many at one time before, so I am thrilled and excited. This still isn't enough to do more than eat them fresh, but I'm beginning to think that my dreams of growing enough to make fresh blueberry crisp (and even to freeze for use in blueberry muffins and pancakes during the winter) may not be so farfetched after all.

Typical Natural Paradox

After picking another 2 dozen or so black blister beetles off my tomatoes again this morning (the photo to the left has both black blister beetles and gray blister beetles on a "hot spot" on one of my tomato plants), I decided to do a little web research and find out more about their life cycle. What could I look for as far as their larval or pupal stage went? Was there something I could do to interrupt their life cycle at an earlier stage?

Well, I came away with yet more respect for the web of life.

It turns out that the larvae of black blister beetles feed on grasshopper eggs, specifically the eggs of short-horned grasshoppers (family Acrididae). Thus black blister beetles are more common during or after grasshopper outbreaks.

Just this afternoon, while I was at the Master Gardener office, we were discussing grasshoppers. Several people in the area are having major trouble with grasshopper outbreaks in their gardens. I was (rather smugly, I'm afraid) noting that I was seeing some, but not any more than usual. It would appear that I may very well owe my "normal" grasshopper population to those same black blister beetles that I've been cussing under my breath as I painstakingly examine my tomato plants to hunt for them.


Other rather interesting facts I learned about black blister beetles (Epicauta pennsylvanica):

* The eggs are laid in the ground or under stones, in clusters of 50-300. The females lay several clusters of eggs throughout their adult life.

* Blister beetles undergo "hypermetamorphosis" - a type of metamorphosis with several different larval forms, rather than the normal single larval form with several "instars" or growth stages. The first larval stage in blister beetles is quite mobile, while the later stages are much less mobile.

* Some of the other blister beetle genuses feed on bee larvae or stored food in bee nests during their larval stage. All blister beetle larvae appear to be predatory.

* Adult blister beetles live about 3 months.

* Blister beetles produce a toxic chemical, cantharidin, in their hemolymph ("blood"). This chemical causes blistering on human skin...so don't crush blister beetles if/when you handle them!

* Cantharidin is very stable and remains toxic even after the beetles die. Horses are particularly susceptible to cantharidin. One of the biggest problems that blister beetles cause is illness or death in horses who eat dead blister beetles in their alfalfa hay.

* The good news is that black blister beetles are one of the least toxic of the blister beetle family.
So now I'm left with the conundrum of "Do I want to minimize the black blister beetle adults that are eating my tomato plant leaves, or do I want to let their populations follow normal fluctuations as their larvae feed on grasshopper eggs in the soil?"

The more I learn, the harder this sort of decision becomes.