The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming.Shaw, Ellen Eddy
General
The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming.
Shaw, Ellen Eddy
Gardening -- Juvenile literature
"A beetle, the striped beetle, attacks young melons and squash leaves.
It eats the leaf by riddling out holes in it. This beetle, as its name
implies, is striped. The back is black with yellow stripes running
lengthwise. White hellebore powder kills these pests. Ask the druggist
for five cents' worth and you will have a great plenty for any of your
gardens. It, too, is a poison. This poison is also good to use for the
caterpillars that eat many of our garden plants. Make a circle four
inches from the stalk of an infested plant and sprinkle the powder in
this. Evening time is good for this, because the dew moistens the powder
just enough to make it a nuisance to the insect.
"Then there are the slugs, which are garden pests. The slug will devour
almost any garden plant, whether it be a flower or a vegetable. They lay
lots of eggs in old rubbish heaps. Do you see the good of cleaning up
rubbish? The slugs do more harm in the garden than almost any other
single insect pest. You can discover them in the following way. There
is a trick for bringing them to the surface of the ground in the day
time. You see they rest during the day below ground. So just water the
soil in which the slugs are supposed to be. How are you to know where
they are? They are quite likely to hide near the plants they are feeding
on. So water the ground with some nice clean lime water. This will
disturb them, and up they'll poke to see what the matter is.
"Beside these most common of pests already mentioned, pests which attack
many kinds of plants, there are special pests for special plants.
Discouraging, is it not? Beans have pests of their own; so have potatoes
and cabbages, as George well knows. In fact, the vegetable garden has
many inhabitants. In the flower garden lice are very bothersome, the
cutworm and the slug have a good time there, too, and ants often get
very numerous as the season advances. But for real discouraging insect
troubles the vegetable garden takes the prize. If we were going into
fruit to any extent, perhaps the vegetable garden would have to resign
in favour of the fruit garden.
"A common pest in the vegetable garden is the tomato worm. This is a
large yellowish or greenish striped worm. Its work is to eat into the
young fruit.
"A great, light green caterpillar is found on celery. This caterpillar
may be told by the black bands, one on each ring or segment of its body.
"The squash bug may be told by its brown body, which is long and
slender, and by the disagreeable odour from it when killed. The potato
bug is another fellow to look out for. It is a beetle with yellow and
black stripes down its crusty back. The little green cabbage worm is a
perfect nuisance. It is a small caterpillar and smaller than the tomato
worm. These are perhaps the most common of garden pests by name. It
might be well to take up the common vegetables and flowers mentioning
the pests which prey on each one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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