Help! with weeds and bugs for next year. pics included.

PcRider

Member
I am thinking about next year, and can I do anything now to avoid having weed/bug problems next year.

Here are some pics of the weeds/bugs that seem to love my garden.
Can you guys suggest anything that will kill off the weeds before they grow next year?
Without the weeds I shouldn't have as many bugs, but I want to attack them as well if I can before I get the crop in next year.

This bug:
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Likes this weed the best, and it is the most destructive bug I have.
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Here are most of the bugs and weeds, I couldn't get pics of them all.
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I am a newbie to this gardening thing, and this is a big garden for one person.

This year after all the rain dried up I had such bad weeds that it took me weeks to get them pulled out by hand. Once I got them pulled out all the bugs that were happy eating the weeds started eating my veggies. With all the time spent on weeds I wasn't able to spend any time on anything else. The tomatos never got thinned out, or staked up, and the beans are overgrown to the point that I don't know if I can get the now dried out beans off the vine.

I would be greatfull for any help, Thanks Mike B.
 
Are you organic only, or are you ok with using herbicides and
insecticides?

With weeds, you have to be killing them about before you see
them, if you want to hoe them out, get busy with the hoe
before you really see anything green. Once they get to 1/2 the
size you show, the game is already lost.

Hoe - or till - early and often, long before you think you need
to.

About the 3rd time through, the weeds start to give up a little,
after that spring early summer push.

Paul
 

this is what I've had recommended to me and it's worked well this summer.

for the weeds never turn the soil over from too deep because old weed seeds will get activated. hoe or otherwise disturb the surface about once a week. your weed problems will get less and less as you continue, and do this while your plants are getting established some plants like carrots need more attention because their foliage takes more time to develop and won't shade out weeds below so they get overwhelmed easily

Use mulch to keep light from the weeds. cut grass works well if you haven't been using poison on it. leaves from trees... whatever you can get your hands on that will rot down over time. wood chips tend to rob nutrients from you plants though, or so I was told.

Black Plastic can also work just poke a hole for your veggies. to grow though and everything thats covered will die off

the trick is to either deprive the weeds of light or keep them so disturbed they spend all their energy trying to get a foothold.

For quicker growing veggies that have good foliage and can shade the ground on their own you could plant something like buckwheat and till it in when you vegies are leafed out.

for the bugs I don't know. around here some gardeners plant some seed a little earlier away from the main crop then till it under once the bugs attack it and get established. it disturbs their life cycle and they become less of a problem for when the real crop come along. mainly because you wiped out a whole generation of them. they also just clean the leaves off and squash as many as they can see while they are weeding or cultivating.

One guy i spoke to will plant a few rows of one thing then a few rows of something else before more rows of the first thing, he says rarely does a bug infestation affect everything when he does this.
 

this is what I've had recommended to me and it's worked well this summer.

for the weeds never turn the soil over from too deep because old weed seeds will get activated. hoe or otherwise disturb the surface about once a week. your weed problems will get less and less as you continue, and do this while your plants are getting established some plants like carrots need more attention because their foliage takes more time to develop and won't shade out weeds below so they get overwhelmed easily

Use mulch to keep light from the weeds. cut grass works well if you haven't been using poison on it. leaves from trees... whatever you can get your hands on that will rot down over time. wood chips tend to rob nutrients from you plants though, or so I was told.

Black Plastic can also work just poke a hole for your veggies. to grow though and everything thats covered will die off

the trick is to either deprive the weeds of light or keep them so disturbed they spend all their energy trying to get a foothold.

For quicker growing veggies that have good foliage and can shade the ground on their own you could plant something like buckwheat and till it in when you vegies are leafed out.

for the bugs I don't know. around here some gardeners plant some seed a little earlier away from the main crop then till it under once the bugs attack it and get established. it disturbs their life cycle and they become less of a problem for when the real crop come along. mainly because you wiped out a whole generation of them. they also just clean the leaves off and squash as many as they can see while they are weeding or cultivating.

One guy i spoke to will plant a few rows of one thing then a few rows of something else before more rows of the first thing, he says rarely does a bug infestation affect everything when he does this.
 
No I"m not organic only at this point I can"t afford to be.

I just don"t know what to spray or when. Should I spray this fall after the veggies are all picked, and again in the spring before planting?

I already planned to turn it over and disc it up every couple weeks when there are no veggies in there.
 
The garden is 100feet by 50feet, (I think), maybe 150), but it keeps getting bigger all the time.

Right now I have green beans, cabbage, onions, carrots, radishes, lettuce, tomatos, corn, cantalope, cucumber, and watermelon. Actually the onions came up, then drowned in all the rain.

I will be changing it around next year, but about the same stuff plus some spinich, mustard, egg plant, etc...
 
Several garden plants are very susceptible to sprays, so a person has to be careful. It would be easy to kill the grasses (Select or a generic version, like Arrow work well and are labeled for many many garden crops) but killing the board leaves is difficult.

roundup or the generics will kill most all without staying in your soil, so it is the safest, but it will not harm any weed seeds either so the weeds will start sprouting again the following day after you spray.

Preen and other companies have a corn protein that can help keep small weed seeds from sprouting, once your garden plants are growing, I don't think it is perfectly wonderful but it does help a lot, and happens to be pretty close to organic even....
you can carefully spray or wipe with a rubber gloved hand Roundup onto the weeds, if you are careful not to hit your crops with any overspray or drips. That works well.

Roundup is slow to act, you won't see much for a couple of days, it needs to travel down the plant into the root, then it shrivels up the root and then first the plant itself starts to die, so can be a week before you notice much, and don't spray or soak a plant and then hoe it a day later, it needs time to work.

A lot of other chemicals will be pretty hard on the garden, tomatoes are real sensitive, and might linger in the soil a few weeks or months and be tough.

Kinda a short version of so so info.

Control the weeds before they go to seed, so you get less in following years. You ever get no weeds, but you can get less.

And hit then early, like I said, kill them before they really get green, early and often, means much less work later in the year.

Paul
 
The ph is off due to the weed coming up and the plant marigolds around the garden to help keep the bugs away. One can mix 2tbs of lemon dish soap (cheap stuff), 1 tbs of ammonia, can of beer and put in a sprayer and cover everything ever two weeks. Lemon is good to keep bugs away.
 
supposedly you can sterilize the soil of weeds and insects by covering the ground with a sheet of black plastic for a few sunny days so that the soil temps rise above 140 degrees for a few hours or so. dont know if it works or not I tried it one year and placed the plastic on the ground late in the day and during the night a moose and its calf walked right across the plastic turned around and walked back across in another spot punching holes all over the plastic, and it stayed overcast for the entire week that I left the plastic out there :(
 
Your garden will not become weed and insect free by accident.
If you have a hoe then use it. Never let grass and weeds go to
seed in your garden.
 
Dirt sure looks like it could stand a few dozen loads of manure. Find some horse people with a pile and shrink it for them.

If you are tractorish (don't know, but you are posting here) you might want to try growing a heavy crop of buckwheat on any "new expansion area" and then plowing/tilling it in before it sets seed. If you can move areas around so that can be done to the "old area" in sections, also good.

Purely as a management technique, I have found that well-defined smaller beds are easier for ME to keep clear of weeds, because I can "completely do" a bed, or a couple of beds, where my older "less paths, more growing space" model lead to huge beds that were never "done." That might just be me.
 
the striped bug is a blister beetle, first weed is pig weed, second weed I don't know the name, third weed is bind weed, lady bugs are good bugs they eat aphids.

the caterpillar is easily controlled with Bt.
 
To kill the weeds, you might parking a car for a month or two. I moved a car out of my yard a month ago that had been sitting for about three months, It killed the grass underneath it and it hasn't grown back yet! Oh, just remembered, weeds don't abide by the same rules that lawn grass does!
Sorry, I just had to throw that in.
 

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