June Week 3

Organic Gardening Calendar
19 Weeks to first frost date in zone 6

With June comes the dead heading of all the May flowers. And ticks.

By: Kathi

Things you will need:
Scissors
Bucket to haul dead plants to the compost pile
Dry Ice
Sticky paper
Cardboard tubes
Cotton
permethrin
Guineafowl

Dead heading (removing spent blossoms) your flowers will encourage reblooming if they are annuals or perennials that set seed. If you cut the seed producing pod off before seeds are formed, most plants in an effort to procreate will shoot up more blooms and again try to make seed.

Not only does the dead heading encourage blooming, but on plants that will not rebloom, the energy that would have been spent making seeds is redirected to strengthening the root system. Another benefit of dead heading is two fold, 1) it makes the yard/garden look tended and well manicured, and 2) it eliminates frequently taller plant material that will harbor insects, particularly ticks.

Ticks carry lime disease and reproduce at astounding rates. There are two types of ticks, soft ticks and hard ticks. Both kinds of these ticks transmit a wider variety of pathogens than bacteria, protozoa, and viruses.


Soft tick on left. Hard tick on the right.

Hard ticks seek hosts by a behavior called "questing." Questing ticks like to climb up plants to a height of 24-36 inches and wait for the signal that there is a host passing by so they can drop off the plant onto you or your kids or pets. Some soft ticks seek hosts by questing on low-lying vegetation, but the vast majority are nest parasites, residing in sheltered environments such as burrows, caves, or nests. The presence of higher levels of carbon dioxide as well as heat and movement serve as stimuli for questing behavior. The feeding behavior of many soft ticks can be compared to that of fleas or bedbugs, as once established, they reside in the nest of the host, feeding rapidly when the host returns and disturbs the contents.

People pick up the vast majority of ticks when in the woods, or come in contact with weeds, shrubbery, brush, or pets that have roamed off into taller vegetation... Well-kept lawns are pretty safe, unless you have moles, mice, rabbits or other critters that nest in your yard.

So how do you control ticks?

Organic tick control is not the easiest thing to do. Integrated pest management…one of those corporate buzz terms…is what you need, unfortunately.

Most important: Keep your yard clean and your lawn mowed. Staying away from taller grasses and shrubbery is not happening in my yard. I like my zebra grass and my forsythias.

Since ticks are attracted by carbon dioxide, you can set a block of dry ice out near where you have found a nest, and the ticks will be drawn to it. I suggest you place a paper under the dry ice to keep from freezing the ground and use the paper as a tick trap by putting something sticky on it. The sticky can be anything that will hold them in. Honey or syrup works pretty well. Or use a commercially available sticky paper of some kind.

Because so many ticks live in burrows with their blood host, you can reduce deer ticks by placing paper towel or toilet paper cardboard tubes stuffed with, a synthetic chemical permethrin-treated cotton. Mice will collect the cotton to line their nests. The pesticide on the cotton kills immature ticks feeding on the mice. You must of course put the tubes where the mice hang out, like under dense shrubs. Do it twice a year; early spring and late summer. You should notice reduction in the tick population the following year. For some reason, this does not work on the West Coast. Permethrin is OK to use this way, but NOT in a lawn spray, where it is seriously or fatally toxic to cats, and fish. It’s not good for you either.

There is also a parasitic wasp Ichneumon wasp Ixodiphagus hookeri that will lay it’s eggs into the ticks. When the eggs hatch the emerging wasp attack and kill their host. Parasitic wasps can be ordered online.


If you live where you are allowed to do it, and your yard is fenced, 2 Guineafowl will clean your yard of ticks, fleas, and all manner of insect pests. This is by far the best and most effective treatment of all listed, and is certainly the laziest way to control ticks I know of. Not to mention you get eggs.

June Week 1

Organic Gardening Calendar
21 Weeks to first frost date in zone 6

It’s June. Let’s talk about Japanese Beetles. These pests arrived in the United States around 1916 as visitors from Japan. They enjoyed New Jersey so much they decided to stay and raise families. These Japanese bugs were successful in spreading their kind to all parts of the eastern United States. It is now our solemn duty to kill them. If you are not doing your part to eradicate these pests, then you are failing your fellow countrymen.


By: Kathi

Things you will need:
Bug bags
Milky Spore

What to do?

There are basically three methods of dealing with Japanese Beetles; Milky Spore, traps, and spraying.

There are lots of opinions out there, and well, here is one more. I disagree with a few things which have been written about these pests, including the directions on placement of the traps. I advocate using both the milky spore and traps. Forget using chemical sprays.

I found the following text online that is a widely accepted notion about placement of beetle traps.

"Don't use them close to plants which the beetles
are attracted to. Place traps as far away from your
plant life as you can. In fact, if a neighbor wants to
use traps, try to locate your traps as close to theirs
as you can. The big problem with traps is they lure
many beetles to your property which may have never
come there in the first place. Japanese beetles are
not the best flyers and tests show they will actually
miss a trap by several yards about half the time they
are following the scent from the trap. If your trap
is placed away from plants you want to protect, the
beetles that miss the trap will probably go to some
wild plant or a neighbors yard and miss yours all
together. If your trap is close to beneficial plants
you want to protect, the beetles are likely to miss
the trap and find their way to what you are trying to
protect!"

It was written by people who make chemical sprays for Japanese Beetles.

It doesn’t make sense. I started out using these guidelines and had no success at all. I know of no other trap that is placed away from the plant it is trying to protect. When placed away from the plant that needs protection, the random bug that flies near the bag gets caught. And the protected plant gets eaten.

Place the bags next to the plant you want to protect. Don’t worry too much about upwind or downwind, wind directions change. Bags should be placed in the sun, anywhere from 3-5 feet up. Plant hangars work nicely as bag supports.

As the article says “Japanese beetles are not the best flyers and tests show they will actually miss a trap by several yards”….Yes, and they will miss a plant by several yards to hit the trap.

Actually I’d keep it as close to the plant needing the protection as possible. Once I moved my traps, I collected the first year, enough bugs to require changing the traps twice a day. My plants did not get eaten. Each year I have repeated this process. And every year the number of beetles caught have been fewer and fewer. Last year, I set out traps and barely caught a handful of the beetles in each trap. No Japanese Beetle pest problem any more.

There are some options for traps. I found this description of how to make your own…never tried it, but putting water in a jug with mashed fruit sounds stinky and nasty to me. Not just because of what it is, but because of what it will become.

Japanese Beetles are nasty. They ooze dark fluid that will collect in the bags. It stinks. It stinks a lot. You must change the bags if they get nasty or the bad odor will overwhelm the pheromone scent that is the lure. The beetles will then go to your nice smelling roses.



As a second option there are the hard bottled type that are washable and reusable. Very green to use…but for me…see paragraph above. These bugs are nasty. I don’t want to be handling that weird fluid if I can avoid it. Then there is the problem of when you go to empty the trap that the beetles on top are still alive and they fly away as soon as you take the lure off.

This brings me to the third option; the replaceable and disposable plastic bag type. These are my preference. Get the ones at the big box stores. Traps are traps. Make sure they have a good supply of replacement bags or buy several replacements so you have them handy.


As soon as the bag fills to the narrow point, or gets nasty, whichever comes first…replace the bag. I like these because I can usually avoid the drippings and the top of the bag acts as a quickly closeable lid keeping all those not dead yet beetles trapped inside. I fold the top over and lay the bag in a hot sunny location. This quickly kills the remaining live beetles.

Timing: Place traps as beetles emerge in mid-May to early June in Georgia and South Carolina; early June to mid-June in North Carolina and Tennessee; mid-June to early July in Kentucky, Delaware, Washington, DC, Virginia and West Virginia; early July to mid-July in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey; mid-July in New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Maine.

The other way to deal with Japanese beetles, (and for best and quickest results use with the traps) is milky spore. Milky Spore is a naturally occurring microscopic bacteria (Bacillus popilliae) that kills Japanese beetle in their grub phase; while in the ground, before they can grow wings and fly out of tiny holes in the ground that are about 3/16th inch in diameter. It is a strange thing to witness. Beetles emerge from a single hole at about one every 2 seconds or so. They all fly off in the same direction, in a nice undulating formation. Off to eat your goodies.


The product is easy to use, just sprinkle on the ground. Milky spore is a long-term solution because it survives winter temperatures. The Milky Spore population increases each year, reaching peak effectiveness about three years after application, and lasts ten years or more. Nice for lazy gardeners, but use the traps too.