That's a great article. I'm beginning to understand these types of methods take experience - trial and error. I have a problem with pill bugs on beans and legume (if not the rabbits). And also on weaker plants. I'm stopping before dousing with spinosad and wondering what it is in my climate that requires so many pill bugs. They clean up some toxins and a lot of metals. I'm thinking I've too much wood and not enough nitrogen. I've noticed a reduction in pill bugs in areas where I used legume as cover crops, but I'm not certain.

I've planted a trap crop in or around a couple of the beds. Seems to be working so far. Or I've just been lucky, lol!

My experience with trap crops is that some of them work and some of them don't, and some of them work in some years and then not in others.

One thing that is important to note is that some trap plants are so highly attractive to insects that, if used as a trap crop, they are likely to attract more insects to your garden than you would have without them. Sunflowers are that way. They are highly attractive to stink bugs and to some pesky caterpillars (that will eat every leaf on the sunflower and make it the ugliest plant in your garden quickly), but I stopped growing them within the garden for that reason----they were a stink bug attractant. Now, my preferred method of using a trap crop is to grow it outside of and away from the garden to attract the target bugs away from the garden, not to attract them to it. Trap plants can help with some pest populations, but my experience with most of them is that once the pests have chewed them up or gotten tired of them, they move right on to the rest of the plants in the garden. So, what works best with me is to use the trap plants to attract the pests and then kill them while they are on that plant. Otherwise the pest plants happily munch away and multiply.

Cucumber beetles are an awful pest and are very prolific. They will eat virtually anything else you have in the garden and not just exclusively eat the cucumber plants. Because they carry bacterial wilt and can infect the plants when they chew on them, I don't want cucumber beetles around at all. The method I've used that has worked best to control cucumber beetles is to plant a handful of cucumber beetle seeds in a small, disposable flower pot or pots very early in the season (as early as possible without having them freeze). (Do not use County Fair because they are not overly attracted to it.) When the first cucumber beetles of the year appear in springtime, they make a beeline right for that pot of early cucumber plants. I watch for them there and kill everyone of them I see. If there are a lot of cucumber beetles early, I start more seeds. Now, here's the important part. They will lay their eggs in the soil at the base of the cucumber plant. So, when they've been around a week or so and are clustering heavily on those plants, I bag them up, disposable container, soil-less mix, plant and all, tie the bag closed and put it inside a big black trash bag and tie it closed. Then, I put a new cucumber plant or two in disposable cups in the same spot to continue serving as a trap plant. Using this method, I usually can knock out the first generation that shows up over a period of a couple of weeks. Then, my garden often will remain almost entirely free of cucumber beetles for another month or two. As soon as I have disposed of my trap cucumber plants, I plant my actual crop of cucumbers. By the time a new bunch of cucumber beetles show up, my cuke plants are large enough to tolerate the damage they do. Because cucumber beetles eat any plant they choose, I still have them around all summer, but the key to having cucumber and other cucurbits survive them is to knock down the first ones that show up. They are much more damaging to small plants than to older and more well-established ones.

Bon, Pill bugs are decomposers of organic matter so you always will have them in and around a garden whose soil contains organic matter and/or mulch. In general, they are considered garden helpers, but I find that in large numbers they hurt as much as they help. I didn't have all that many of them the first few years here, but as the soil improved, their numbers grew. If they'd happily decompose only organic matter, I'd leave them alone, but they will eat pretty much any plant in the garden, including the fruit on tomato plants, and muskmelons (will eat right through the rind). In wet years, their population explodes and they go from being a minor problem to being a major one. Legumes are a particular favorite of theirs, and some years they will eat every single bean plant as it emerges from the soil....leaving the gardener wondering why the beans didn't sprout.

The only thing that ever has worked for me with the sow bugs and pill bugs is to scatter an organic bait that contains one or both of these active ingredients: iron phosphate and spinosad. I most often use Slug-Go or Slug-Go Plus, but sometimes I just use an organic fire ant bait whose active ingredient is Spinosad. While I avoid any sort of liquid spray that contains Spinosad (because it will kill many beneficial insects, including bees), I don't mind using the baits because they only will harm the pests, like pill bugs and sow bugs, that consume the baits. Beneficial insects do not consume those baits. Both iron phosphate and spinosad break down quickly in the soil.

I had considered growing both millet and sorghum. I thought sorghum would be a good screen along the fence, and make some mulch maybe, seeds would be a plus. So if the dang tomato fruit worms went there, that would be fabulous. Millet, I was just looking for possible grains to grow. Trouble is it is a favorite of house sparrows. If it attracts squash bugs, don't know if I would want it.

Last year I grew a blue hubbard squash, hoping to trap squash pests. It may have been the first to go, but there was no noticable improvement in pests.

Dawn, maybe you should try a couple of amaranth plants with your early cukes and see what happens.

Nowyousedum, what trap plant?

My trap plants have always been hit or miss but I thought why not, so I plant that way just in case. My sister always plants amaranth with her cukes and swears by it??

My neighbor makes fun of me, but I plant bright yellow marigolds. He keeps telling me they will start to look buggy and nasty. I keep telling him that that is why I plant them. They attract the bugs away from my tomatoes. Besides, I get to enjoy them until then. I also plant them at either end of one of my flower beds. They draw the bugs to the ends and I yank them when they get too bad. I'm a novice veggie gardener, so I'm learning about trap crops for them. Regarding amaranth... I just saw some green hanging amaranth at Whole Foods. It was new to me. The next week, I was in Chicago for vacation. Went to their Botanical garden. I saw red hanging amaranth. Is this different than what you are talking about!

I planted Golden Giant Amaranth supposedly you can eat the leaves and the seeds. As you can see from the link, there are different colors. They have been grown as ornamentals. I found the leaves too tough for salads, maybe you could cook them. The seeds are high protien. So are the leaves, which is why I planted it. (Maybe the beetles like the protien).

I grow amaranth every single year and have ever since we moved here and it doesn't keep the cucumber beetles off the cukes unless I plant it a long way off. We have cucumber beetles here in huge numbers. Next to spider mites, they probably are the most prolific pest around, and they visit pretty much every wildflower in our fields. I love amaranth, but finally decided it attracted more bugs to the garden and once they were there, they'd visit it and everything else, so I've been happier with it by growing it further away from the actual fenced-in veggie garden. I used to grow the tall grain-type amaranths on the north end of the garden as a wind break, interplanting Golden Giant with Mercado (green flowers and seed heads) and any of the red-flowered ones and with lion's tail. Planted together they are a great windbreak, but also attract too many bugs. Maybe they'd work better in a less wild situation than ours. We have pest levels here in the grasslands that are a million times worse than anything I had when I lived in town. Last year I planted Lion's Tale and the red-flowered Thai Hibiscus together and they were a better windbreak than the amaranths, in the sense that they barely had any pests at all. This year I just planted hollyhocks for a spring/early summer wind break on the north side, and cannas in containers for wind-break on the east side. I liked them so much used in this manner that I may not plant the grain type amaranths in my big garden ever again. They reseed vigorously and I get tired of yanking out all the volunteer seedlings the following spring and summer. Nowadays, I tend to plant the grain amaranths near the garden shed, garage and chicken coop where they help give the free-range chickens a place to hide when hawks are out hunting them, and they also attract pests away from the garden.

I've never found the amaranth leaves to have an appealing taste or texture raw, and don't like them much better when cooked, so I don't bother harvesting them to eat. I do like the amaranth seeds as a grain. If you harvest the amaranth leaves very young and very small in spring, they're not nearly as tough, but it also is hard on the young plants if you keep stripping all the young leaves off them very early in the season and stunts their growth for a while.

I haven't planted the tall grain amaranths in the front garden on purpose in at least 5 years, but still get tons of volunteers every spring at the north end of the garden. Because I always used to cut the big seedheads in autumn and stick them in a tall milk can sitting by the garage door to serve as gorgeous autumn decorations, I have inadvertently scattered the seeds, over the years, from one end of our yard to the other. Than means that any time you disturb the soil for any reason during the growing season, new amaranth plants pop up. I stick with shorter, lower-growing non-grain types of amaranths and celosias in the cultivated garden these days, and a lot of those did not survive the flooding rains in May and June. The ones that did have been somewhat unhappy and are spider mite magnets this year.

I always grow marigolds as a trap crop too. Some years they get really insect-infested and I yank them out, but this year they've stayed happy and healthy and I am getting to enjoy them in the garden all summer, so far.

Around the mid-2000s I grew tons of ornamental purple millet in the garden (and, oops, let it reseed a million babies) and all it seemed to do was attract brown stink bugs to the garden, so I stopped growing it.

I always leave a little pigweed (more attractive to pests than the grain amaranths are) and lambs quarters growing outside the garden about 10-12' away from it to attract pests away from the garden, and it works really well for that purpose.

I think growing early cukes and tossing them pests and all is a fabulous idea, i need to write that down for spring. If I grow amaranth again, it will be along the fence. I don't know what I expected, but the plants are getting too big for their space. That bed is this year's lesson for planting too close. My jungle is making DH crazy. Other beds might be jungles, but most everything is stunted this year.

Millet might need to join the early cukes. Or maybe just skip it. It is great for birds in winter, in wild areas. Wonder if they would eat the stink bugs in summer? I don't have any wild areas to test it on.

I have always planted marigolds with tomatoes. I thought they were supposed to prevent nematodes. Further reading suggests calendula might be better, or the Mexican marigolds everyone told me not to grow last year. I have the Mexicans in a pot this year, on the patio. I doubt they will bloom. But I grow calendula and marigolds just because I like them. I have never noticed them getting buggy.

What goes after lambs quarters? I have some under a tree, it gets mowed. And what are the little orangish brown butterlies/moths? Are their larva eating everything?

Usually Golden Orange amaranth gets 7-8' tall for me in all but the worst drought years so I am not surprised yours are getting too tall.

I generally do not see much of anything eating stink bugs. Unfortunately. Maybe they taste as bad as they smell.

There are some nematocidal marigolds but they are tall (5-7' tall, thin, lanky and must be planted as thick as grass) and ugly and highly invasive. I used them by growing them one year (spring thru fall), then plowing them into the ground in late fall, and then planting tomato plants there the following spring. I didn't feel like they were worth the trouble, but then I usually don't have root-knot nematodes.

Mexican marigold usually blooms in late summer or fall for me. I think it might do the same for you.

Calendulas grow okay for me but can't take the heat here in July and August of most years.

I don't know what brown moths you're seeing. What is their approximate size!

Dawn

They are little moths, at most dime size. SOMETHING decimated some chard plants left from spring. I planted some Tokyo Benkana starts a few days ago and one has been defoliated. I suspect army worms. But I rarely actually see pests. My eyes seem to be really bad this year. Sprayed some Bt tonight after the rain.

The amaranth is in one of the new beds with poor soil, so it is about 5' so far. But getting taller.

The moth is little. I have yet to see the caterpillars that may come from them. Maybe I need to look up corn earworms and see if those are the adult. Maybe they are in the grass, I seem to stir them up when I walk. There were snails and slugs in the straw I had for mulch. Also garter snakes. Hoping the snakes ate them. I haven't noticed damage on anything else.

Several different moths give you corn earworms/tomato fruitworms and that is why you can have both pests in various colors (generally green, brown or black). I saw a young hornworm crawling across the patio the other day. It was only about an inch long but was different in appearance from either tomato or tobacco hornworms, so I left it along. We get several other kinds of hornworms here---various ones that feed on trumpet creeper, cherry trees and Virginia creeper. Since the hornworm I saw was near trumpet creeper, I think that might be which type it is. I rarely see the hornworms that produce those three types of caterpillars, and I'm not sure if it is because they are out later at night than I am or if they are just more shy about coming up around the house and being seen. I saw a nickle-sized dark brown moth near the back porch light last night, but it isn't a type I'm familiar with so I don't know what sort of caterpillar it would come from.

I sprayed some Bt, but aside from leaf miners, I don't know what the leaf damage is from. I almost never see bugs. I'm sure they are there, I just don't see them unless they are buzzing around blooms. Last night a lacewing landed on my watering wand. I told it to get busy.