Soft vegetation, fruit attract roly polies
Q: I was cleaning my raised-bed garden today, getting ready for spring planting, and I saw lots of worms. I know worms are good, and I was happy to see them. But, I also saw a lot of roly polies. These were mostly under some newspapers that I had put down near the base of some plants as a mulch. Are the roly polies beneficial to my garden or should I try to get rid of them?
A: Roly polies are a real menace to things we eat that are soft bodied; particularly bothered are things such as strawberries.
The roly polies, sometimes we call them pill bugs or sow bugs, can be a common pest of soft fruits and vegetables. These crustaceans (they are not insects but are more closely linked to lobsters) usually feed and abound in rotting or decaying plant matter, which we usually call organic matter.
Stuff from plants that collects on the soil’s surface where it is wet will begin to decay. This decaying organic matter is a usual source of food for these common pests. They can be good guys since they feed on decaying plant matter and convert it to something that can be recycled and benefit the plants.
Once they get established, however, they can get a little overzealous and start to consume other plants or plant parts that are soft and succulent. Even new, small transplants. If strawberries come in contact with the soil surface where these creatures are feeding, they don’t distinguish between soft decaying organic matter and soft succulent strawberries.
So control measures usually focus on keeping strawberries from touching the surface of the soil or decaying plant matter. This would require that the fruit be kept elevated off of the soil surface.
Other people may recommend using diatomaceous earth, but I am not convinced that this will work with your roly polies. It is better suited for soft-bodied pests that crawl along the surface of the soil.
These sharp diatoms, at least this is the thought process, cuts or lacerates the pest and they succumb to the lacerations. You also can use traps in the beds and remove them from the traps as they accumulate.
This does not exterminate them but it does help reduce their numbers and hopefully the damage . These traps can be something that lies on top of the soil surface, just like you noticed with your newspaper, such as strips of carpet, cardboard or wood.
Removing the pests from these traps is simple. Since they like their social gatherings in darkness they tend to gather in shady spots. Remove the shade and remove them by hand.
You also can put out semirotten tomatoes or other vegetables, which will act like magnets and attract these varmints. Then you can scoop up these rotting fruits and vegetables along with the pill bugs and dispose of them. That won’t get rid of them permanently but it will take the numbers down.
Q: What vegetables can we plant now in the garden?
A: All of the cold-weather vegetables, such as spinach, peas, leaf lettuces and radishes, are still a safe bet. Vegetable seeds have temperature germination requirements and they should be followed closely. I will post a chart on these temperatures on my blog.
If you plant vegetable seeds that require warmer soil temperatures, there is a good chance that the seed will not germinate or it will succumb to disease problems such as damping off. Beans are a good example. If planted too early, they struggle and frequently die shortly after germination.
Don’t forget to start your warm-season vegetables as transplants now. These are the tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. They need to go out in mid-March in warm locations. When growing seeds as transplants in the house, you can grow them in a bright window but you will have to keep the temperatures low or they will be weak and spindly.
Most warm-season vegetables require warm soils for germination but can be moved to a cool location as soon as you see the first two leaves emerge.
If you want to try something unique, try planting these warm-season vegetables in small peat pots in a soil trench in the garden covered with plastic. Warm up the trench with plastic before you put them in the trench. I will post some pictures.
Bob Morris is a horticulture expert living in Las Vegas; he is on special assignment in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, for the University of California, Davis. Visit his blog at xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com.
