The Day I Learned About Garden Pests

Green abounds at Greenwich Community
Gardens' Bible Street branch

Hi, community gardeners! It's Saturday, June 23, and the Bible Street Community Garden, part of Greenwich Community Gardens, is lush and green. Lettuces flourish, tomato plants grow taller, sunflowers reach for their zenith and spring veggies head for salad bowls and dinner plates. Tonight we have a community garden potluck dinner. I arrive at 4:30pm, and other community gardeners trickle in over the next hour. Potluck at the community garden means more than buying food, it means making or baking dishes others can enjoy, preferably with organic vegetables.

Terri Browne Kutzen (right) welcomes
Steve Conaway from Greenwich Land Trust

Terri Brown Kutzen, co-director of the Bible Street Garden, welcomes our guest speaker, Steve Conaway, a conservationist at Greenwich Land Trust. Steve walks through the garden, pointing out good bugs (ladybugs), bad bugs (miner beetles) and other pests. All of them want to eat our veggies as much as we do. In some plots, the bugs have done serious damage to chard, broccoli and eggplant. Miner beetles burrow through the leaves of chard, aphids appear on tomato leaves, wasps lay eggs inside other aphids (can you say Alien), and ladybug larvae make their appearance. Ladybugs are good insects. They eat the bad insects. 

Steve Conaway finds aphids on tomatoes
as Jay and Gary look on

Steve walks from bed to bed, examining what's working, what needs thinning, what's being eaten and what's kaput. One gardener has a giant broccoli plant that has been shredded by bugs. The verdict? Get rid of the plant at the roots. Another gardener has a bed filled with luscious pea vines, but when you look at the pods, they all have been scalloped with bite marks from chipmunks.

Steve graciously agrees to visit my garden. Healthy and dense, he says. He suggests that my tomatoes (growing profusely, thank you) may be stealing sun from the bell peppers and jalapeño peppers. I reorient the tomatoes to open up  sunlight over the peppers. As for tomatoes, I thin out lower branches and leaves so the plant's energy goes to the fruit.

This week I plan to bring my husband, PJ Morello, to see the community garden. He hasn't seen it since mid-April. What a transformation he will see!