VEGETABLE Self-Sufficiency

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Onions, with their very slender leaves, need full sunlight. Keep an eye on them and pull weeds as needed. This will not be much of a job. The other crop is lettuce. It just doesn't like crowded places. Weed it and thin it to about four inches apart. When these plants start to crowd each other, take out every other one for a tender salad.

One Month Later, You Start Eating

Come the third to fourth week, you can start eating radishes. When they are at their peak pull them all. Take off the tops, wash them, and put them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator. They will last a couple of weeks. If you like radishes the way I do, throw a few seeds in some corner that looks possible.

While pulling the radishes you might have come across some weeds that you felt like pulling while you were there. The carrots might benefit from some thinning, too. Get rid of the extra zucchini and cucumber plants by pulling all but the two strongest.

Visiting the garden at least once a week is an excellent plan. All of the "jobs" I have mentioned since planting can easily be handled in an evening or two a week. While you are visiting the garden you should be checking the plants to see how they are doing. The potatoes may have attracted Colorado potato beetles. The beetles don't eat much themselves, but they lay clusters of yellow-orange eggs on the underside of the leaves of potato plants and sometimes tomato plants. These eggs will hatch in four to seven days, depending on the air temperature. The brick-red grubs are pretty hungry and can defoliate the plants. Until recently I controlled these fellows by hand. I went down each row at least weekly, checking the underside of the leaves for egg clusters and crushing the clusters twixt finger and thumb. Inevitably a hot, humid spell would keep me out of the garden and they would get ahead of me. When that happened I usually quit harassing the bugs and let them do their worst, which may have resulted in a diminished crop, but still more than satisfactory results. Some years I have had very little damage without any hand picking. 1, of course, attribute that to my soil and the poor years I blame myself for not getting the fertility right.

A recent breakthrough in biological controls has given me an option that I find acceptable. Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) is a bacteria that only affects insects that eat it as opposed to most insecticides which kill everything they touch. One variety is Colorado Potato Beetle Beater, available from Johnny's Select Seeds, Albion, Maine 04910-9731.

The only other insect that has done substantial damage to any of these crops as I have grown them over the past 24 years is the tomato horn worm. You are likely to spot the damage first and then the droppings. This is a large (about the size of a finger), green worm with-you guessed it-a horn on its tail. It takes some patience to locate it. My control has always been to find them, pick them off, and stomp on them. The more squeamish might want to wear gloves or get tongs or pliers. They can't hurt you, but they will squirm around a lot when plucked from the plant. There is a widely available BT spray that works on all moth and butterfly larvae. Dipel is the one I am most familiar with, but there are some other brands. This stuff will kill the larvae of any moth or butterfly that eats it but don't worry about destroying the butterfly population. Most butterflies don't lay their eggs on plants in your garden. In its adult stage the tomato horn worm is a moth. It can be mistaken for a humming bird as it is approximately the same size and moves the same way.

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