Maximizing Garden Harvests: Pest Management Tips and Commonly Overlooked Delectables

• Check the fronts and backs of all of your brassicas! Look closely: cabbage loopers are just the right shade of green to escape a cursory glance. They will chew holes in your broccoli, kale, cabbage, and cauliflower. In the larval stage, a cabbage looper will eat three times its body weight every single day. That means your spinach, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes will look like a tasty dessert if you let the loopers persist. Pluck off caterpillars and scrape off any eggs you find on the backs of the leaves.
• Leaf miners are another voracious consumer of your precious vegetables. You will find them mining into the leaves of your swiss chard, beet greens and spinach. Remove any damaged leaves that already show evidence of their tunneling, and check the backs of each leaf for their small clusters of eggs.
• Encourage beneficial insects (and natural predators) to frequent your garden by planting herbs like parsley, dill, fennel, coriander and thyme. Marigolds, sweet alyssum and nasturtiums are also great plants to include in your garden to invite garden friends/looper predators such as parasitic wasps to help you manage the pests.

Don’t forget that one reason you are growing your garden is to eat it yourself! If you are struggling to get a significant harvest from your swiss chard or kale because of an upswing in the pests’ resistance, fortify yourself with often overlooked delicacies that you might otherwise have sent to the compost pile, including:

• arugula flowers - peppery and delicate, a beautiful addition to a salad
• kale and cabbage bolts - the buds before the flowers burst out are delightful raw, sautéd and roasted (think along the lines of broccolini)
• chive flowers - feature the purplish fuzzy-looking flowers in a flavored vinegar
• carrot tops - thinnings from your carrots can make an incredible pesto

Happy Harvesting!