CUCUMBER BEETLES:

The little yellow beetles are probably cucumber beetles.

There are two types of cucumber beetles: striped and spotted.

The striped cucumber beetles are Acalymma vittatum. The adults are yellow and are about 1/4" long, although I see plenty that don't seem to get quite that long. They have black heads and 3 wide black stipes that run down their backs--actually the stripes are on their wing covers. The larvae, which you seldom see, are tiny white, skinny grubs.
The striped cucumber beetle larvae often feed on the roots of your squash family plants.

The spotted cucumber beetles are Diabrotica undecimpunctata howardi. They are more of a yellowish-green and are about the same size as the striped beetles. They have 11 black spots on their wing covers. Their larvae are small white grubs with brown heads and brown patches on their first and last body segments. The spotted cucumber beetle larvae eat the roots of corn, so they are often referred to as southern corn rootworms.

Both types of beetles will feed on many plants, including ornamental flowers, but they prefer all members of the squash family (cucurbits). They will eat both the flowers and the leaves of all cucurbits. Sometimes they attack young plants so vigorously that they kill them. On the older plants they may even gnaw holes in the stems and fruit.

The spotted cucumber beetle adults overwinter in crop residue from the previous year or in mulch, leaves, etc. They generally hatch out as grubs in April and feed for 2 or 3 weeks before they pupate. With our long summers we often have multiple generations of them.

The striped cucumber beetles overwinter in grass or under leaves. They are generally a little later to show up in my garden. I usually start seeing them in May. When they hatch, they live on weed pollen for 2 or 3 weeks before moving on to crop plants. They lay their eggs in the soil at the base of your plants. At least at our house they seem less prolific than the spotted ones and I think I only see a couple of generations of them every year.

These are evil bugs. Not only do they eat your plants, they carry diseases like cucumber mosaic virus which they spread from plant to plant as they feed.

They are incredibly hard to eradicate, especially if you garden organically. If you don't have cats, you can spray them with a pyrethrin product. Pyrethrin is toxic to cats, though. To eliminate the grubs in the ground, you can spray your soil with beneficial nematodes, but they are expensive.

The best defense is a good offense with these bugs. Cover your plants with floating row cover material. (Sheer curtains can be used instead of floating row coves.) You will have to hand-pollinate, though, if you leave the plants underneath the row covers.

Some people believe that having a heavy cover of straw mulch underneath the cucurbits makes it difficult for the larvae to move from plant to plant.

I prefer to garden organically, but some people do choose to use chemical pesticides so I'll tell you which one is most effective in case it is an option which you wish to pursue. There is a chemical pesticide called Adios that combines a small amount of Sevin with cucurbitacins (to encourage the bugs to eat the pesticide). If you choose to use Adios or something similar, I would avoid applying it during pollination as it could kill your pollinators.

TOMATOES: I hope your tomatoes will pull through and survive the wet soil. Sometimes tomatoes can be surprisingly resilient.

Last year we received 9.25" of rain in one day in our part of Love County, and 8" of that fell in a 4 hour period. Because our property sits downhill from our neighbors' property, we had water draining underground for at least a month. I was sure I would lose my tomato plants. The soil had that mucky, sour smell of soil that has been too wet for too long.

My tomato plants just sat there. They yellowed. They didn't grow. I was sure they would die. Finally they began growing again after maybe 3 or 4 weeks of struggling just to survive. I lost only 1 plant. I had an excellent crop. So, don't lose hope.

Also, you can plant paste tomatoes anytime and still get a good crop for planting. They seem to bloom and produce well despite our heat. I have planted them as late as June or July and still had plenty of paste tomatoes.

Dawn,

What are "paste" tomatoes and how are they different than other tomatoes. Are they used to make paste or can? What varieties would you recommend?

Mark

Hi Mark,

Paste tomatoes, as they are commonly called (or more correctly plum tomatoes) are commonly used for sauce making, for canning and for salsa. The reason they are preferred by many for those uses is that they are meatier and have less water, so they boil down much faster for making tomato sauce or for canning and make a less watery salsa. However, you can make sauce or salsa from any tomato you choose, and you can use any tomato you choose for canning purposes.

A second reason that paste tomatoes are great for processing is that they usually grow on determinate plants so they produce all their fruit in a couple of big flushes which makes it easier to do your canning all at one time.

If you are going to buy your paste tomatoes at a retailer, you are pretty much limited to whatever they offer. Some of the ones I commonly see around here are Roma, LaRoma, LaRoma II, Roma, Viva Italia, San Marzano and Roma, Roma, Roma. Why so many Romas? I guess because they are the easiest to grow. Oh, and sometimes I see VeeRoma or Roma Improved.

If you are going to grow your own from seed, there are many, many splendid varieties. I like Opalka, Martino's Roma, Polish Linguisa, San Marzano Redorta, Super Marzano VFNT, Black Plum and Principe Borghese (although Principe is best, I think, for sun-dried tomatoes). Seeds for all of these should be available from Tomato Grower's Supply Company, which I have linked below.

Because I have a huge garden and spend a great amount of time during the summer harvesting and putting up vegetables for the 'off season', I try to time most of my paste tomatoes so they WON'T be ripe at the same time I am processing lots of other veggies. So, I like to start them from seed in mid to late-May and set them out in the garden in late June. They will produce fruit in the late August to October timeframe when most of the summer veggie garden has been harvested and I have more time available for canning.

If you were to buy paste tomato transplants at a store in the next week or two, and get them into the ground fairly promptly (rain permitting!), you would probably be getting ripe paste tomatoes by mid-July, and perhaps even earlier.

Paste tomatoes benefit from being staked. I use a 3' tall wooden stake which I buy in bundles of 25 or 50 at Lowe's or Home Depot. I put the stake in the ground FIRST and then plant the tomato several inches in front of it. I let the plant grow for a while. When it is a foot or so tall I use a zip tie or two to loosely fasten the plant to the stake. Because the paste tomatoes put on so much fruit at one time, staking helps keep the plants from falling over when they are loaded down with ripening fruit. You can cage them if you want to or trellis them on a short cattle panel but it really isn't necessary. The exception is Martino's Roma. I cage it because it becomes so covered in fruit it breaks the stakes or pulls them over out of the ground.

If you have more questions, let me know.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: TGSC Paste Tomato Page