WALKING THE ROWS

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I also like to take a hoe with me. Unfortunately for my pants it was real easy to grab a hoe on my most direct path to the garden. The hoe was not for any purpose, you understand, other than to lean on and maybe to scratch at a few weeds and, since my garden is in sight of the road, to impress passersby.

The Virtues of Fresh Clues

One spring day while visiting I noticed that the high-priced-seed hybrid broccoli that I had planted in a short row for transplanting later was up—tiny seedlings with two baby leaves each, each leaf smaller than the head of a tack. Lovely, I thought, with their dark blue-green color. On my next visit there were just stems, a row of quarter-inch-high stems no bigger than toothpicks. What happened to them? I looked carefully at the soil and could detect no footprints, no evidence of rabbits or woodchucks at work. My first visit had been three or four days earlier. The trail had grown cold. As any detective or reader of detective mysteries knows, the fresher the evidence the easier it is to solve the mystery.

I decided that flea beetles were the culprit. These small black beetles do have a decided fondness for this crop. In subsequent years I have been able to shoo the beetles away and cover the plants with a gauze net that protects them. After years of being too lazy to start these seedlings in flats indoors, I have come to the conclusion that it is actually easier to coddle them indoors, which really only requires watering. The first planting of broccoli was one of several failures due to neglect. Neglect is a pretty harsh term for just not visiting the garden every day which I seldom do unless there is a specific reason like keeping a close eye on newly emerged broccoli seedlings.

I have a specific reason to visit the spinach patch regularly after the seedlings start developing true leaves. I have had considerable trouble growing spinach. It just seems to disappear plant by plant in patches leaving me to harvest about one fourth of the area planted. The plants look fine and then one day several will be wilted and some lying on the ground, cut off. Cut worm is the first thought, but when cutworms are the culprit I can usually find the grub by scratching around near plants they have cut off. Not so in the spinach patch. Then I began to be able to detect slight wilting of upstanding plants. On further investigation I found that these plants would just lift out of the ground having little or no root structure. Some would look as though the root had been cut off about a quarter of an inch below the soil line leading me to suspect cut worm again, but I don't know of any cutworm that works on roots. Then others would come up with a shriveled root leading me to believe damping off or root maggots. It took years of casual observation to get to the point of really wanting to know. Now I have gathered a lot more evidence but I still don't know what is causing the problem.

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