I can not begin to express how much I hate harlequin bugs. I have never had to deal with them before. I guess I was just really lucky to always be growing in an area that hadn’t been infested with them. Apparently they don’t like urban farms and the colder winters in central Pennsylvania. In any case, they DO like my vegetable plot here at Longwood.
I had control of them though with my super advanced technology…a dustbuster and a tupperware of soapy water. You may be laughing, but it worked! The damage was tolerable if I went out and sucked them up every day.
Then the weekend came and I went home to Philly.
Monday morning, I strolled down my garden path to discover utter destruction! The rutabaga was dead as a doorknob. The mustard was on its last breath and has since succumbed entirely. I’m so angry because rutabaga and mustard are two of my favorite vegetables to eat in the fall and now I’ll have neither. Actually, I’m hoping maybe I’ll have some rutabaga still. I haven’t dug it up just yet as I was working on prepping my ornamental beds for an evaluation today, but I hope there are some salvageable (no doubt small) rutabagas under those sad crispy stalks.
[...] summer hits its stride, so do the garden pests. I’ve had a few grand battles with some particularly pesky pests in the past. However, I wasn’t always the most proactive player in the pest management [...]