In May, everything happens with a rush, plants push out tender new foliage, and gardeners get the urge to sow seeds and to transplant.
But warm showers and balmy days also stir the uninvited guests in the garden to activity—the bugs with their voracious appetites and assorted blights.
What can you do about them?
Put your sprayer and fertilizer spreader into good working order, load them with the proper chemicals, and apply them when and where needed.
Before you plant, see if the soil pests can be licked. With the aid of some of the new pesticides, you may actually be able to kill four birds with one stone.
The stone is either Vapam (VPM) or Mylone. These chemicals work effectively on soil insects, nematode worms, soil diseases, and weeds. And what’s more, the chemicals are easy to apply.
Soil Preparation In Planting
Here is what you do. Prepare your soil for planting and let it settle for a few days. Check the temperature of the soil about 4” inches beneath the surface.
For best results, it should be 60° degrees Fahrenheit or above. If you use Vapam, put one quart in a garden hose sprayer and apply it to 100 sq. ft. of soil.
Watering Of Plants
Watering can also do if you use from 15 to 30 gallons of water with the chemical to soak it in. Keep the soil moist. After two weeks, the fumes will have done their work, and it is safe to plant.
If you prefer Mylone 50 D, get the granular grade, put it in your fertilizer spreader, and apply VA pounds per 100 square feet evenly.
Then water it in ‘vell with the hose at the rate of 15 to 20 gallons per 100 square feet, wait two weeks, rake the bed lightly, and seed or transplant.
One caution: do not apply either chemical over the roots of shrubs or trees. It may injure them.
Soil Treatments
These soil treatments eliminate all but one bad actor—fusarium wilt, a fungus that enters the roots of plants, travels up the stems, and causes both stems and leaves to turn yellow, wilt, and dry up.
Tomatoes and asters are special targets for this fungus in many of our light soil areas and home yard plantings.
Minalucie and Plum-Type Tomatoes
The best defense is to plant fusarium-resistant varieties. (They are listed in all seed catalogs.)
Highly recommended tomatoes are Minalucie and the plum type, Roma. They produce good crops despite the disease.
Lookout For Grubs
While you have your fertilizer spreader out, consider your lawn. If it hasn’t been grub proofed in the past 5 years, you may be in for trouble.
Dead sod areas that lift up easily are a symptom that should be viewed with suspicion. You may not find the grubs themselves since they winter over as deep as a foot or more in the soil.
Play safe and grubproof with dieldrin for up to 10 years or more or heptachlor for spans of one to two years.
Heptaclor: Grub Killer
Heptachlor is a rapid grub killer, excellent for protecting turf already under attack.
Use your spreader for granulated forms and water them in a well at the rate of 8 pounds per 1000 square feet of 15 dieldrin or 5 pounds per 1000 square feet of 15 heptachlor.
If you prefer, you can also use the liquid formulations, as directed, with your garden hose sprayer.
Good General-Purpose Mixture As Spray
May is also a time to consider above-ground bugs and blights. For the average home gardener, it is simpler to use a general-purpose spray than specific chemicals for specific troubles.
With this in mind, buy a good general-purpose mixture for both insects and diseases, or get the necessary ingredients and mix them together in the water when you are ready to spray.
A good formulation consists of malathion for aphids and mites; methoxychlor or DDT for leaf and fruit chewers; and either captan, ferbam, or maneb for most diseases.
Only ferbam or sulfur will take care of fruit rusts, and sulfur or mildex (karathane) may be added to control powdery mildews on roses in the spring.
Make a tour of the garden with the general-purpose mixture in the sprayer. Consider fruits first.
Spraying on Dry Foliage
All of them need spraying from all angles as soon as the foliage is almost fully out. This spray will get aphids, mites, tent caterpillars, cankerworms, apple scabs, and rust. One application is not enough.
Follow up weekly during May to keep the diseases at bay and to kill off late-comers among the insects like apple sawfly, plum curculio, apple redbug, coddling moth, and Oriental fruit moth.
In the vegetable garden, newly-set-out tomatoes and eggplants need one or more sprays weekly to keep the flea beetles from peppering the leaves with holes.
The same goes for cucumber beetles later in the month on cucumbers, squash, and melons.
Outworms on Plants
Watch out for cutworms that snip off ground-level plants and cabbage maggots that chew up the roots of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes.
A heavy dusting with 5 chlordane or 1 at the bases of the plants when they are first set out or come up takes care of these marauders.
Perennial beds will need some attention, too. Peony buds attract ants which go for the sweet sap that oozes from them.
The ants do no harm to the peonies, but they are unattractive. A spray application will help discourage them.
Spraying Iris
Iris requires weekly sprayings to prevent the iris borer from ruining the plants. This will also help control the iris leaf spot, a fungus disease.
Delphiniums, too, need special treatment because the cyclamen mite that curls up the foliage is not susceptible to the usual all-purpose sprays. Instead, Endrin at 1 teaspoon per gallon of water weekly will do the trick.
The unsightly ramblings of the leaf miner in columbine leaves can be avoided by dusting the soil around the plants with a 5$ chlordane dust just as the plants come up.
Trees and Shrubs
Next, consider your trees and shrubs, deciduous and evergreen.
Practically all of them will benefit from two general-purpose sprays in May, first when the new foliage is almost fully out and second about two weeks later.
Your targets at this time are aphids, mites, cankerworms, sawfly larvae, various caterpillars, and leaf diseases.
Special Attention on Leafminers
Leafminers on birches warrant special attention, as do those on boxwood and holly, but delay spraying the last two until about the middle of May when the new foliage begins to open.
Watch out for the following:
- You pine for sawfly larvae and aphids
- Spruces for aphids and mites
- Junipers, arbor-vitae, and hemlocks for mites
- Pieris, azaleas, and rhododendrons for lace bugs
Crabgrass
Finally, let’s get the jump on crabgrass. A control new to us on Long Island (N. Y.) but already quite widely used in the West shows great promise.
It is an arsenical that goes by the name of Pax. Applied before the crabgrass seed germinates, it is 85% or more percent effective and, at the same time, kills ants, earwigs, and grubs.
Any crabgrass that is missed can be finished off with the mercury compounds in dry or liquid form or potassium cyanate preparation available at any garden shop.
44659 by Louis Pyenson