Emma, do you need any grasshoppers??

I have had pretty good luck of tilling the soil often. The birds and UV rays kill a lot of things, good and bad. I also like adding a lot of compost. I am not sure any of that helps, but it keeps me busy till I can find something else to get into.

I am sorry you are having so much trouble. I have a feeling that its going to hit the fan around here soon also.

Larry

Larry, Don't you dare send all your extra grasshoppers to Emma. I was planning to send all my extra ones to her and I don't want you to beat me to it.

Emma, All kidding with Larry aside, I am sorry you're having such a bad year. Remember that a healthy garden is an ecosystem and, as such, it always will be filled with life forms of all kinds, including insects and arachnids. It would take a whole lot of very strong pesticide to keep any garden completely pest-free (and I doubt such a thing even is possible because pests develop a tolerance of or resistance to pesticides anyhow), and I would not want to eat anything raised with such heavy-duty pesticides sprayed on it, whether the pesticides were synthetic or organic in nature. So, the alternative is to tolerate as many insects as possible and expect they will get some of the harvest.

It would take a book to cover what to do for each individual pest you mentioned,and there are not many viable pest control options available to home gardeners for some of them (like spider mites), so my best suggestion is to do what Larry said and to repeatedly rototill the garden plot in winter to expose overwintering pests to the sun, to cold temperatures and to birds. That alone will help reduce a lot of the ones that overwinter in the soil.

Once the temperatures are right, applying beneficial nematodes to the soil will help a lot too. Go to the website of someone who sells beneficial nematodes and read about the various ones available in order to choose the ones that sound right for your garden. They work best when applied when the air and soil temperatures are in the right range for them, and that varies depending on which ones you decide to use.

Sometimes when a person has a big pest problem in the garden, the problem is not that you have too many insects, bugs, arachnids, etc. in your garden. It is that you do not have enough. What I mean by that is that you have too many of the bad guys (pest insects that largely are herbivores and either eat plants or that feed on plants by using their mouthparts to suck fluid out of the plants) and not enough of the good guys (beneficial insects that largely are carnivores or omnivores and feed on the pest insects). For example, I have a huge garden and rarely see aphids at all. Do I think that aphids just magically do not visit my garden? Of course not. I think that plenty of aphids likely pop up in my garden but that beneficial insects (largely the lady bugs, but others as well) eat the aphids for me. Often, when folks have a pest problem it is because they previously engaged in some practice (often they have sprayed a broad-spectrum pesticide that killed off all the beneficial insects) that has lowered their population of beneficial insects and, in the absence of carnivores feeding on them, the herbivores have grown to huge numbers that do a lot of damage. Now, are you wondering why the pesticides might not kill off all the herbivores? Sometimes they do, but the two different kinds of insects bounce back differently. Herbivores rebound pretty easily and repopulate quickly because they eat plants and there's plenty of plants around for them to eat. On the other hand, carnivores (the beneficial insects) do not start increasing in population until there is a large supply of pest insects for them to eat, so they never rebuild their population to a decent level until your garden already is full of pest insects. I saw this first hand as a child. My dad's tomato plants would get spider mites. He'd spray the plants, alternating with Kelthane and Sevin, and it would kill off all the mites at first. Then, all of a sudden they'd be back and there would be more than ever. Two things were happening that he didn't know about back then. First, whether he knew it or not, there likely were some beneficial predatory mites present that were, in fact, eating some of the spider mites on his plants and helping keep the population smaller. After he sprayed a miticide (Kelthane), all the mites died, but then the spider mites rebounded first because they fed off plants. Eventually, the beneficial predatory mites would rebound as well, but by the time their population was large enough to start controlling the two-spotted or red spider mites, the population was so huge that they could not keep up, and his plants were dead or near death. With the Sevin, it was a different sort of thing. We now know that you get more mites after using Sevin than you had before using it. How frustrating is that? I observed it first-hand as a kid, but it took researchers exposing spider mites to Sevin in a lab situation for the scientists to be able to tell us why---spider mites apparently speed up their reproductive cycle after being exposed to Sevin. Also, some pesticides cause pest population increases in other ways, which are explained in the paragraphs about "chemical controls" in the document I linked below.

It might not be that you've ever sprayed a broad-spectrum pesticide, but maybe a close neighbor has or maybe the city or county is broadcast-spraying for mosquitoes at night, and it has affected your pest population as well.

Also, many pest insects speed up their reproductive cycles in hot weather, so that pests that might take three weeks to produce a new generation in cooler weather eventually are producing a new generation in just a few days, leading to an explosion in the pest levels in your garden.

I don't normally think of ants as a pest in the garden (though sometimes they can become pests) as they normally are beneficial. We have a bed of red harvester ants in the gravel driveway just outside the garden and they spend their time hauling dead insect carcasses out of the garden, presumably so they can put up those dead insects somewhere in their underground chambers to use them as food later on. I think I'd be knee-deep in dead insect bodies in my garden without the ants harvesting them and carrying them away. Ants can become a problem if they begin feeding on something in your garden, or if they are farming aphids, or if they are fire ants. In those cases, I use a granular fire ant product (Concern) whose active ingredient is spinosad. I sprinkle it on the fire ant mounds in the garden and that pretty much takes care of the fire ants, although it isn't a quick kill. Sometimes I have to reapply it several times before they are all gone.

Be sure you clean up all garden debris at the end of the garden season because overwintering insects hide in stuff like that.

Often, I have found it more effective to repel insects than to wait for them to show up and to then try to deal with them. In my garden, where I routinely plant 100-150 tomato plants every spring, I rarely see a single hornworm. Why? I cannot be positive, but I believe it is because I interplant my tomatoes with lots of the plants said to repel hornworms, like basil, borage and four o'clocks. Usually the four o-clocks are outside the fenced garden (in great profusion) but sometimes they do infiltrate the fenceline and I let them stay (mostly because by the time I notice them, their roots are too big to remove). I plant either borage, basil or some other herb or flower in between every 2 tomato plants so if my row of tomatoes was a checkerboard, all the red squares are tomatoes and all the black squares are hornworm-repelling companion plants. I also grow plants the hornworms like to eat (mostly daturas and nicotianas) inside of and outside of the garden so they have something other than my tomatoes and peppers to prey upon. If you plant tomato plants with nothing nearby either to repel the hornworms or to provide an alternate food source, then of course you'll have hornworms. They aren't trying to ruin your tomato plants but they've got to have something to eat. Everything has to eat. I think in my worse summer ever here, I found 8 hornworms, but that was in a year when I was trialing lots of tomato varieties that were new to me, and I had 300 plants. Having hornworms is not really the problem. Having hornworms with nothing to repel them, prey upon them (predatory wasps) or draw them away from the tomato plants is the problem. Predatory wasps are a great help in the garden, preying upon many pests. If you do not have them naturally, you can buy some types of them and release them. They are available from insectaries that sell beneficial insects to farmers, ranchers and gardeners.

I have a huge garden with a huge insect, bug and arachnid population and I bet that all the damage done in the garden is done by 2-5% of the insects in there. The rest of them aren't doing enough damage (if they are doing any at all) to be noticeable, or they are beneficial in some way, whether the way they benefit the garden is by preying upon pests, conducting pollination, etc.

I cannot give any first-hand experience with controlling white flies because I don't have them, and never have had them in the garden, and I give my huge insect population credit for that. I don't even know what sort of garden pest green flies are. I know you'll think I am rambling on like a crazy woman, but you need more insects OF THE RIGHT TYPE, not fewer insects overall. A healthy ecosystem will have enough of the beneficial insects to help keep the damaging insects at a low enough level that you succeed in getting a crop most years. For me, I have found that by planting insectary seed mixes that help attract beneficials, and by never using anything in my garden that might harm them, I generally have a big enough population of beneficials to help keep the pest insects at a manageable level. If you don't have beneficial insects around, in our climate I cannot imagine you'd be able to battle the onslaught of insects successfully.

With the spider mites, one study showed they existed at rates up to 90 million per acre, so I do not fool myself into thinking we aren't going to have them on our acreage, or even in our garden, which is just a tiny bit of our property. We stand no chance of having a spider mite-free garden, so what we do is to avoid using pesticides because there are many mites that feed upon other mites and help control the ones that damage our plants. You even can buy and release predatory mites or a special type of lady bug called spider mite predators in an effort to control the damaging spider mites. In springtime when you first see spider mites, if the weather is sufficiently cool you can spray the plants (especially the undersides of the leaves) with neem oil or horticultural oil and it will kill them and smother their eggs. I am not sure if it harms the predatory mites, but if it is early enough in the year, the predatory mites, which only show up once there's lot of two-spotted and other mites to eat, likely aren't active yet. Sometimes spraying the plants with Garlic Barrier or Hot Pepper Wax will repel spider mites, but not always.

Often, when I see insects in my garden that are present but not doing any damage that I can see, if I take them time to research and figure out what they are, I learn that they are beneficial insects, so I am happy to see them there.

Insect populations in our garden (whether beneficial insects or pest insects) seem like they peak in July and drop thereafter. That is true of almost everything, although I don't think it is true about blister beetles or leaf-footed bugs, which seem to only get worse as July rolls on. Those tend to peak here at our house in early August and then decrease. Grasshoppers peak in July or August most years, but some years I don't see a real drop in their population until late August.

I just try to go with the flow. Often, if the presence of some pest insect is bothering me, I just hit them with a sharp spray of water from the hose and knock the off the plants. Sometimes I have to do it daily for a few days, but eventually they get tired of it and move on.

I am sorry you are having such a rough year, but try to analyze why it is happening----whether is is that your beneficials have been killed off somehow or never showed up, or the weather has somehow favored the breeding of herbivore insects but not carnivore insects, or the use of a pesticide (not necessarily on your place----it could have been on land nearby and driven insects onto your property), there has got to be some reason the insects are so bad this year. Be sure you aren't using a quick-release form of nitrogen in the garden. Quick-release forms of nitrogen can attract more insects because they cause the plants to put on a growth spurt that includes a lot more carbs than usual, and the pests are attracted to the carb-rich growth.

I know you're gonna hate me because I keep insisting you don't need fewer insects---you need more, but it is the truth in many situations.

It isn't just insects that you need in your garden. Its ecosystem will be healthier and you'll have less pest damage if it is full of all kinds of life---in our garden we have a multitude of songbirds that also eat tons of pests, turtles, frogs, toads, small non-venomous snakes, big venomous ones (we do shoot them), lizards, newts, skinks, etc. All of that "wildlife" helps control smaller things that prey upon pets. I keep pans of water in the garden so all these little creatures are drawn there for the water and then stay around to eat pests.

One of the biggest garden mistakes we made, that we cannot undo for obvious reasons, is that we put up an 8' tall fence to keep out the deer. It was, in one way, the best pest control method ever. However, it had an unintended result. Back when we had a 3' or 4' tall garden fence, we often had bobcats in the garden, and sometimes foxes as well.They just hopped over or climbed over the fence. Their presence made me nervous since we have free-ranging chickens and pet cats, but I knew they likely were eating field mice or something. Only after we excluded them from the garden by putting up the taller garden fence did we develop a major problem with voles. So, I think that the voles were always around, but the bobcats and/or foxes kept the population small enough that I never saw damage from the voles. So, now, the battle is with the voles....it's always something, isn't it?

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Effect of Chemical Controls on Spider Miters