Cool-Season Vegetable Garden Pests

August is an interesting and busy time in a vegetable garden, as many readers will no doubt be well aware. Most of your attention is likely to be on harvesting and tending the summer crops.

Slugs are acclaimed agricultural pests, but it’s a little known fact that there exists another, more controversial theory. It claims that the sluggish unwanted dwellers attack plants with rotting spots, caused by pathogen sponges, whereas the snails happen to be the surgical doctors, removing the sick matter. A revolution in the traditional concept?

Evil Weevils do everything but ride motor bikes.

Sometimes we don’t see the pest, but we definitely see their work.

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A potager in a Devon garden by Dan Pearson

There is an old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” We can apply this saying to gardening as just about every insect pest that plagues our gardens has one or more natural enemies that prey on or parasitize it. These enemies (or friends to us) include ladybugs, praying mantids, assassin bugs, ground beetles, robber flies, parasitic wasps, syrphid flies, and many others. Though often overlooked, these beneficial species can help significantly in managing insect pests in our vegetable gardens.

As you drink your recommended 6 to 8, 8-ounce glasses of water per day, don’t forget that your vegetable garden should also never be short of water this summer.  Did you know that water makes up 80 to 90 % of vegetable and fruit weight? Water affects yield, fruit size, and quality.  It also prevents a variety of disorders such as toughness, off-flavor, cracking, blossom-end rot, and misshapen fruit.

When I started this series of K.I.S.S. gardening advice, I hoped to inspire those who didn’t know where to begin gardening and those who may have lost joy in their gardening pursuits. After all, there are plenty of things to worry about these days, and gardening should not be one of them. Gardening should provide a respite and an escape from our screen technology culture. So let’s take the advice of Willie Nelson’s boy, Lukas, and “Turn off the news and build a garden.”

Proper soil preparation when growing vegetables is the key to successful and bountiful harvest but if you neglect to do this, it can greatly hinder the cultivation of demanding plants.

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My mathematical equation starts on paper around June, like this:1. Make a list of what you want more of (or a first crop of, if it’s a warm-season thing or if you simply didn’t plant an earlier crop).2. Make a list of things that have gone by or will soon, to assess real estate that you can utilize. In early to mid-June my lists looked like the one below; yours may be very different. My July and August list–for my latest s