Thank for for your reply. Very helpful.

Gee whiz. I didn't even know about this particular pest until recently.

You're welcom, webuser.

OkieTexan, Well, I might have gardened here about 6 or 8 years before I had a problem with them. Some years they're awful, some years they are not nearly so bad. Since I grow tons of tomatoes, though, there's usually a lot of them around in late summer. Generally they don't bother my peaches and plums, which are harvested in May or June depending on how early they bloom.

This past autumn, I found tons of them on my lima bean and southern pea plants in roughly October. It might even have been November. I snipped in half each one I found, and hope I killed enough that they don't get an early start on feeding and breeding this Spring. I had seen them on cucumber plants in June and killed every single one that I saw but some flew away before I could get them. Subsequently I didn't have much trouble with them on the tomato plants. Early killing of each one you see is the best control as it prevents a lot of their breeding. They don't come into my garden in large quantities until the green fields around me turn brown in the summer, and they're always a lot worse in drought years.

Dawn

Dawn,

I'll keep an eye out for them. With scissors handy.

Speaking of plums and peaches: how often do you get an actual harvest? 1 out 3 years? More frequently?

Charles

I've never seen them around like the last two years! I dislike them worse than SVBs or squash bugs. At least those two demons generally restrict their path of destruction to cucurbits. The leaf footed/legged suckers work on about everything!

If any garden pest has the ability to make me resort to harsh chemicals, these guys will be the ones. In the meantime, I'll hit them early and stay on them all the way through growing season.

Wow. Worse than SVBs or squash bugs? I know the fellow that wrote the original question, and encouraged him to ask his question here. He said they were very bad pests, were eating various things, and I couldn't help him at all. As mentioned, I'd never heard of them. I hope they're not on the rise in our area. Maybe temporary phenomenon -- let's hope.

Charles, For a long time it was 1 out of 3 years. The last few years have been pretty good and I'd say 2 out of 3 in recent years. However, the kind of heat we've had this month (we hit 79 degrees a few days ago) probably means they'll bloom early and the flowers or young fruit will freeze. Bees are out every day, but on that 79 degree day the wasps also were swarming. In my experience here, any time the wasps swarm in January, the stone fruit trees bloom too early and we lose the crop, or we lose some of it. We'll see if that happens this year.

Bruce, I agree that they're more of a PITA since they are generalists who'll eat almost anything.

There are days that I say to myself exactly the thought that you expressed that if every there was a pest that would make be resort to using a chemical pesticide, leaf-footed bugs probably would be it. So far, grasshoppers are the only pest that has pushed me to that point, and I could have tolerated all the other damage if only they hadn't started stripping my tomato plants down to bare stems.

Sometimes we walk a fine line.....while I'd prefer to kill every leaf-footed bug I see, if we are having a wickedly bad grasshopper year, I try not to kill them because I want them around to eat all the eggs the grasshoppers lay.

Charles, Sometimes they just find a place and hit it hard and then they might not even find or visit another garden that's just a tiny bit further up the road. Who knows what they're thinking....or even if they think at all.

I hope your friend is able to win the Leaf-Footed Bug War of 2017.

Dawn

I do too. He seems like a pretty serious gardener. I met him at church. He offered me the use of his tiller. I'm going to shred those leaves we all discussed a little while ago and till then into some new beds. I don't mind letting those beds just sit and stew till next year

My brother has not gotten peaches or plums in the last four years. I think he's down in a frost pocket. But we've seen peaches on the tree before.

One year had a great set of plums but even though the baby plums were about .75 inches (I suppose) a freeze cane and it still destroyed then all. We thought the time for danger had passed once they got that size.

We are in a frost pocket, and it is hard to raise fruit in it. In the years we get fruit, I'm just happy to get fruit at all. In the years we don't get fruit, there's always the Farmer's Market for great fruit. Strawberries and blackberries produce more consistently for me than tree fruit.

It is not uncommon for us to get late killing freezes sporadically through the first week in May here in my section of the Red River Valley. I think the latest this ever has happened is around May 5th. Usually it hits on May 3rd or 4th. My average last frost date is March 28th, but here in the real world, we rarely have our last frost or our last freeze that early.

I also cannot trust the weather forecast, not even the NWS point forecast for my exact location because we routinely drop 8-10 degrees lower than forecast. That is just one of the perils of living in a low-lying, cold microclimate. Some years are worse than others. My worst busted forecast (and the reason I now have all those frost blankets) was for an overnight low of 51 degrees. Instead we dropped down below freezing and had a hard freeze that killed virtually my entire garden, including tomato plants that were knee-to-waist high and covered in half-grown fruit. That was in the first week of May. Only 4 or 5 tomato plants that were in the highest part of the garden, right next to the driveway, survived.

For veggies, I keep frost blanket weight row cover handy. I have several different kinds/weights, and the heaviest one gives up to 10 degrees of protection. Thus, I can cover veggies, herbs and flowers pretty easily. Fruit trees are a different story though as they are just too big to properly cover. I have covered the fruit trees before and they didn't lose the fruit, but trying to put heavy row covers over stone fruit trees that are good-sized takes hours and hours and there's no guarantee of success. I doubt I'll ever spend the time doing that again.

We have some native wild plums. They bloom early in the same years that the cultivated varieties do, but don't lose all their fruit quite as often, so at least I generally get those and can make plum jelly from them.

"Hog" plums, or "sand" plums? Or are those the same? I heard for decades and decades now the the rural Okies that have these in their area turn out to pick 'em for jelly. Supposedly they make incredibly good jelly.

I think we have a few on the ranch. We have tons of wild blackberries on the ranch, and they are especially tasty. I bought some certified organic blackberries not long ago in Denton, TX and seriously they were almost tasteless. I was very surprised.

I'm starting to the think whatever disadvantages the wild varieties have they're often superior overall. Pest- and disease-resistant. Already established. Great taste. No labor involved really besides picking them and avoiding the thorns.

Not that I like crabapples better than supermarket apples, but the berries sure are good.

The native plums we have on our property are Prunus angustifolia, commonly called by several different names by the locals, though sand plum seems to be the name used most often. They mature to either red or yellow, and you can have trees with yellow ones right next to trees with red ones. It can be confusing because the red ones do have a stage at which they are yellow while still unripe before they eventually mature to red. The yellow ones go from green to yellow to a deeper yellow when ripe.

The native plums do make an awesome jelly. I make it every year, unless the whole plum crop freezes.

We also have some Mexican plum trees on the west end of our property, but that area is filled with copperheads in great profusion so I just leave those Mexican plums alone for the wildlife to eat.

You may have other native fruit on your property. We have several kinds of wild grapes, but all are bitter and better used, if used at all, for wine or something like that as they are bitter and not sweet like cultivated table grapes. You might be able to add enough sugar to make a palatable jelly, but I've never tried it. I leave those for the wildlife.

We have two kinds of native bramble berries. The ones that grow upright down by the old farm pond are native blackberries. Sometimes I gather them (pretreating yourself with something to repel the chiggers that thrive around them is important) and sometimes (especially in drought years) I leave them for the birds. The berry brambles that crawl and sprawl across the ground at the NW edge of the garden are dewberries, planted in the garden by birds, and left there by me. Since they are more in shade than sun at this point, I tend to randomly pick them and eat them while working in the garden.

We have the native persimmons in several locations, and the fruit really isn't edible (highly astringent) until it has been frosted enough to turn black. Once blackened you can harvest them and use them in cooking. They make a good persimmon cake or pudding.

Finally, although we lost most of our native cacti to the 2011 drought, some are slowly making a comeback. The prickly pear cacti produce lovely flowers followed by fruit (called tuna) that make a nice jelly too.

And, of course, there's the native pecans. We have tons and tons of them scattered around in our woodland.One large native pecan tree sits at the western edge of the garden and shades the western half of the garden for a large portion of the day in the hottest summer months, which I consider a good thing.

When you have acreage that hasn't been clear-cut and cleared of all the native plants, you can find a lot of native fruit plants scattered all over.

We have tons of pecans and persimmons too. Haven't seen any prickly pear, but we're a good hour E of you, so might be out of its range. I haven't seen any near Durant, at all.

It is possible you're too far east. I didn't think we'd have them here, but we do. The ones we have that do the best appear in odd little places....like in fence lines (I guess because no one mows the fence lines down short) or on the edge of the woods or in dappled shade a few feet into the woodland. The one that did survive 2011 sits midway between my garden and the adjacent woodland about 10' away. It is possible that the watering of the garden (until I gave up) until about mid-July might have kept that cacti alive via water that drained underground from the garden...or maybe the cacti sent roots up underneath the garden to 'steal' water.

There are places in our county where native yucca grow, but they are a few miles north and west of us. Every time we drive by someone's place that has native yucca growing along the fencelines like weeds I'm jealous and think to myself that I wish we had yucca weeds. Those places have very, very sandy soil and we have mostly clay, so that might be the difference too.