 Hi everyone, good afternoon. Welcome to our gardening webinar for the month of May. Thank you for leaving your garden this afternoon and joining us on such a spectacular day. So I'm hosting this webinar from the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Swelotooth and Musqueam nations and recognize and respect their historic connection to the lands and waters around us. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to let you know about a couple of upcoming programs at the library. One is a screening of the documentary, Kiss the Ground. It's about regenerative agriculture and that's on Thursday, June 3rd. And then following that on Saturday, June the 5th, we have a soil workshop with a couple of soil scientists from UBC. And they're gonna talk about the differences between dirt and soil, how to improve your own soil in your garden and you can bring samples if you'd like. So what I will do is I will put those links in the chat. So if you wanted to go to our website and register, you'd be able to do that there. I'm also just gonna put up a poll which will give me a sense of how many people are out there. So if you wouldn't mind filling that out, that would be great, thank you. So today we have Linda Gill-Conson and Linda's been with us before and just such a wealth of knowledge about gardening we're just thrilled to have her come back. Today she's going to show us how to identify common pests and diseases affecting your vegetable garden and when to use organic and non-toxic controls and methods that are available to home gardeners. So Linda has a PhD in entomology and has co-authored pest management training manuals for the provincial government and published several books on gardening, including the comprehensive and best-selling Backyard Bounty, the complete guide to year-round organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest. So I'll just ask Linda to come on. There we go, got my video on. Good, okay, good, good to see you, thank you so much. So Linda's going to do a presentation and then she will answer questions at the end. So if you do have any questions, please put them in the Q&A at the bottom of the screen. Great, thank you. So I'll just going to turn my video off and let you go. Thank you, Lynn. Well, it's great to be back again this year and I know there's a lot of people out there. I wish I could see you all in a room but I'm sure you're there. So this is one of my favorite topics. You heard Lynn say that I'm actually an entomologist by training. So I love it when I get to talk about bugs and there's so many good bugs that I will also be mentioning today as well. So this is kind of right up my alley and it's also a really good time a year to talk about this because people are starting to see a little damage or be concerned about discolored leaves or the gardens are growing and people are worrying, I think, about pest problems. And I think my message to you right now is don't panic. So I'm just going to go on and the first thing I would like is I've got a set of four principles to think about whether it's a yard or landscape or your food garden or anything is that most of the insects you are going to see in your garden are not pests. In fact, if it's something flying around during the day if it's actually flying in your garden and it's big enough to see, I can tell you that it is not a pest. None of them are pests except that white butterfly which unfortunately people keep calling a moth but it's not a moth, it's a butterfly. But the white cabbage butterfly is literally the only saying that I can think of that you could see flying during the day in a garden. So what we have here is a lot of miscellaneous looking creatures but this is a fly that parasitizes caterpillars and these are bee and this is a little predator of aphids and these are lady beetles and hoverflies and this is a European paper wasp that eats caterpillars. I mean, there's all kinds of insects that you're going to see that you don't have to worry about. And there's something else to know is that whether it comes to insect pests or diseases pathogens most of them have a very specific host range. So if something attacked your apple tree it wouldn't go on your beans or maybe on your roses or your carrots or whatever. So even if it's something like aphids, aphids can there are a lot of different species of aphids but most of them are very host specific. So the rose aphids won't go on the beans and the bean aphids that's not what's on your cabbage. And the same goes for pathogens. I mean, here's two really similar diseases very closely related. One is causes scabs on apples one causes scabs on pears but even those don't go onto the other host and they certainly don't infect other kinds of trees. So if you get a problem on one plant you do not have to worry most of the time. It's very rare. There's a few things that might move to something else but generally unrelated plants are safe. In fact, most of the problems that do the most damage especially in food gardens are what are called disorders and they're not pests and they're not diseases. They're problems that are like nutrient deficiencies that cause weird symptoms. Physical injury, irregular watering these potatoes over here, how gross is that picture? That is irregular watering. Temperature extremes do a lot of strange things to there's direct injury from heat, extreme heat or cold but there are also imbalances in how plants grow due to weird weather at a particular time of year. And then of course there's chemical damage and people you may feel that you're an organic gardener but if you've ever mixed up soap and gone out and sprayed it on something soap is a chemical that can be very damaging. Any kind of soap can be very damaging to leaves. So you may think you're not using chemicals but you might be. And then there's all these interactions between them. This terrible looking thing on apples is a calcium deficiency in the fruit and extreme hot weather and not watering the trees can make this really a problem because the trees can't get calcium from the soil if the soil is dry because that's where the calcium is. But if you are over fertilizing your trees with nitrogen so the fruit grew really fast on the tree it would also actually have a calcium deficiency in the fruit because the tree couldn't deliver enough calcium to the fruit cells fast enough. So you can see how it could interact with the way you're taking care of your plants. And there's another thing to remember is no matter what's going on despite the damage there may be no reason to take action. There may be no need. These little blister mites on great leaves of grapes look really weird. They do not go on the fruit at all and they're actually doing such a minimal effect to the leaves that there's basically no harm unless you were a person wanting to use these leaves for Domates in which case this is maybe unfortunate but you don't have to worry about these on your grapes. There may just be cosmetic damage in this case it doesn't reduce your harvest or it may be very expensive to control or we require a pesticide that you don't wanna use. Often when you see damage and you see the pests there's often the natural enemies are already present. So it's a matter of knowing what they look like they may be already there. But the most common thing actually is that you notice the damage too late to take action. You see leaves that are chewed up and with dry brown edges on them and whoever did that damage is long gone. So the only remedy there is to make a record of it make a note somewhere where you're gonna remember to look at the same time next year and maybe look earlier and maybe you can find the culprit. So prevention is key. It's key to a lovely garden, a happy life, successful pests control, good harvest. So just knowing what is common here and what methods you can use to prevent damage often you never get to the point where you have to control a problem because you've prevented the problem. So the first thing is don't bring home problems. If you're buying plants, look for white flies look for scale with a little tiny brown bumps on things like citrus trees. White flies can be on any kind of tomatoes and they can be on a lot of flowers. Mealy bug, spider mites these are really difficult to deal with and the only way you get them is by basically bringing them in from some other garden or greenhouse or supplier. You can get aphids and you can bring those home and they're so easy to deal with I wouldn't even worry about it but white flies, scale, mealy bug, spider mites are extremely difficult. So don't try and look, if you don't know what they look like, Google a picture or on my website there is a whole database of pictures labeled of these pest problems. See what they look like so that you know what to look for when you're buying plants. The other area that is really serious is diseases that stay in the soil for a really long time. Club root of cabbage is one and white rot on garlic and you know, once these two diseases get in your soil the pathogens live for decades. So you are, then you have a difficult problem. So it's always better not to get them. So make sure you're not taking soil from other people's gardens. You know, if they give you a plant make sure they actually know what these diseases are and that they don't have them. If you're buying plants from nurseries they're in soilless mixes and that's safe. If you're growing plants from seed, that's great. Grow them in soilless mix, that's great. The risk is getting it from someone else's garden and unfortunately community gardens get infected with both of these and white rots getting very common in community gardens. I'm sorry, club root is getting very common and it gets spread, you can't see it in the soil and it's very, you know, gardeners are so generous in giving each other plants that we can spread it around very easily. Okay, grow healthy plants. Well, that actually is a really important pest management method because plants that are weak can't recover from pest attack but they can't resist diseases. Plants actually have an immune system. It's not like ours, but it kind of from the outside acts like ours because once they're exposed to a problem then they can actually resist infection and they can only do that if they're healthy enough to have the energy to do that. So, you know, vegetables and fruit particularly need lots of sunshine. They need irrigation during our dry spell. They need only very slightly acid soil and getting the soil pH and that is a measure of a soil acidity which our native soils generally are quite acid. It depends where you are, but mostly they're acidic. So if you want to grow vegetables you'll need to be sure to add lime. So these are really important factors in the health of these crops. Another thing that we can't do anything about but we can, well, we can, we can mitigate some of the variable weather but we have to be on top of it. With climate change we are getting greater extremes of heat actually and greater extremes of weather in general. Whether it's heat waves or, you know, arctic outbreaks in the winter, drought, longer periods of drought in the summer, periods of heavy rainfall, periods of high wind, all of these are more extreme, they're amped up. And some of these physiological disorders that I was showing you a couple slides back in vegetables and also in fruit, I should add that to that slide, are caused, often caused by an interaction of variable weather with the growing conditions and the real problem is when the weather changes rapidly. We go along with a cool spring like we've had and we suddenly get a heat wave. It'll do a lot more damage than if the heat just kind of gradually got warmer and warmer and the plants would get used to it. So be on top of weather forecasts. You know, you can shade plants with shade cloth in the heat. You can put plastic over it in the cold. You can prop things up very, you know, brace them really well so wind doesn't break your plants. Make sure your soil is well drained. So there are things that gardener can do. But, you know, when the plants are stressed because of variable weather, they are also more susceptible to diseases and sucking insects. The effects of heat waves, you know, and at this point, you're probably thinking, what heat waves? We haven't had one yet. We have had heat waves in May that were so bad that they really did a lot of damage like the first week of May. So we could go along with this cool spring and suddenly have it flip to a heat wave. So always be aware of that. The plants that we grow in this region are temperate zone plants. Most of them really do best between, grow between five degrees Celsius and 30. And when you get above 30 to 32, the growth slows and photosynthesis can stop completely. So plants just sit there waiting for the heat of the day to pass. And they're not photosynthesizing, which means they're not growing. And if it gets really hot, you know, the cells of these tomatoes were killed in damage. It can be on leaves, it can be on fruit. Some plants like lettuce and arugula and things will just shoot up flowers very quickly when it gets hot. And when you're trying to grow peppers and tomatoes, the pollen is sterilized if it gets too warm. And you know, 30 degrees, anybody with these kinds of crops in a greenhouse or a tunnel will easily get 30 degrees during the day. And you may wonder why you don't seem to be getting as many tomatoes as you should or as many peppers. And it's because the flowers that were forming during a heat wave were sterilized and so they just fall off. You can see there's nothing wrong with this plant. There's a beautiful tomato here, but this is a lost tomato. We are seeing more sunscald. And the reason I put these up for you, even though we're not seeing sunscald right now is because this looked like diseases. And I want you to see what the difference is. Do you see that the damage is between the leaf veins here and the worst damage is the farther away you get from the main veins of the leaf where the sap is carrying the liquid. So it's the tips of leaves. And this is classic. You can see on this rhododendron, you can actually see the shadow of the leaf, of the leaf above here protecting this leaf. But when the damage is between the veins, that's and on the edges, leaf margins, that's classic. Also when the damage happens to a lot of different varieties of plant, different unrelated plants in your garden, then that's not disease either. That is an injury. So but fruit can also be damaged. These little white droplets on your raspberries, that's heat injury. And we can get all kinds of growth abnormalities once things get extreme. This is partially sterilized pollen. This is, it was too hot and bright for tomatoes. Believe it or not, it can be too hot and bright for tomatoes. As soon as it gets hot, anyone that's grown cauliflower knows perfectly well that cauliflower will just go into a crazy, crazy state. And this is drought and heat on corn. No, complete disconnect between the flowering part of the corn and the ear of where the female part of the flowers are. You get no crop at all. So the flowering disorders, some are caused by extreme temperature for the time of year. Too cold, too hot, usually too hot. And some are, and this is what we see here. This is a button head on cauliflower. This was a summer variety of cauliflower being grown for a winter crop. And in the fall, you get a button head and that's the end of that. That's not the right variety. You can't, annual cauliflower is not meant to be a winter crop. We want the biannual cauliflower or the two year cauliflower. So growing the wrong things at the wrong time or growing the right things, but having extreme weather. Here's a whole row of chard going to seed in a heat wave and it shouldn't have gone to seed that year. It should wait till next year. Metabolic disorders, that bitter pit on that apple that I showed you earlier is a metabolic disorder. And that is when several of these things interact. So again, that's how you take care of the plant but also the weather. And it could be irrigation, nutrients, things that influence the nutrient levels in the leaves and the flowers and the fruit. And a lot of them have to do with calcium. That apple had to do with calcium deficiency in the cells of the fruit. And that's exactly what happened to these tomatoes and peppers. This was a grower that lost $3,000 worth of a crop because the irrigation system wasn't working in a big greenhouse during a heat wave. And these plants, it didn't get hot enough at all to injure the plants directly. What happened was is that the plants couldn't get, the soil was dry, so the plants couldn't get enough calcium. And that's where blossom end rot comes from in tomatoes is not enough calcium in the fruit. And then you get this really terrible injury. And actually this is calcium deficiency in the lettuce as well. So how do we know which is which? And I started to mention this earlier, but the big clue is whatever the damage or injury or weird appearance is, if it's on a bunch of unrelated plants, then it's something wrong with the growing condition. If it's limited to just one variety in your garden or just only squash, for example, or only beans, then it could be a disease because again, pathogens would be much more likely to be restricted to only closely related plants. If you see spores, now this is spores all over this squash, that's a sign of a fungus disease. You wouldn't see spores on plants injured by something wrong with growing conditions. And often, not always, but if it is a disease, it tends to start on the older leaves first because younger leaves are more able to resist infection. And a clue here, if it's something wrong with the growing conditions, is as soon as whatever the problem is, is remedy might cool off or it might warm up, the new growth looks fine. So that is, but recent weather is an important clue to both of them because if it's been wet moist weather, that helps tell you it might be a fungus disease. If it's been very hot or very dry, that can tell you that it may be a disorder. Preventing plant diseases, I'll just sort of talk about them separately from insects for a moment here. This is a, if you take plants pathology 101, you're going, the first thing that you're gonna see in your class is the disease triangle. And this is three things that have to be present for any plant to get sick. And it's just like people. You have to have the environment that is conducive to that disease. Oops, sorry, back we go. The disease organism has to be there and you have to have a susceptible plant. So you only need to solve one of those. If you don't have the disease organism, you can prevent that from coming in. Or if you've grown plants that are resistant to the disease, that's removing the susceptible host. You just need to change one of these and that will prevent the plant disease. And a common reminder this time of year, peas that you're planting now, which I mean, I plant peas right up till the end of June so that I have peas all summer. But the summer peas are more likely to get the odd aphid and the aphids are likely to spread this virus disease. So you go to your seed catalog and you just look up which ones say they're resistant to pea and nation virus. Or they might say, pea and nation mosaic virus. Or they might just say, a nation virus. Or they might say, P-E-M-V. Whatever that is all the same disease and it's spread by aphids. And if you have a resistant variety for the summer crops, you don't have to worry about it. So choosing disease resistant varieties, that's what actually a nation looks like on peas once they get it and they get very bumpy and weird. But there are powdery mildew resistant crops and flowers. There are apples and pears that are resistant to scab. There are even cabbage family plants, a few available in North America now that are resistant to club root. Changing the disease environment is only applicable in some situations, but it is very effective where we can do it. Then you think, well, you can't change the weather. It's gonna rain all winter. But if you can keep peach branches, peaches and nectarines are susceptible to this disease. This is what it looks like here, all the strange distortions. If you can keep them dry in February, which is when the infection happens, then you don't get this leaf curl disease. And there's some variety, a variety of ways you can approach it, growing under an overhang of a house, a temporary shelter for part of the year, the old glass little, what was called a peach porch in the, you know, the walled gardens in England, the great brick wall with a peach tree on it, always had a little glass overhang sticking out. It was just called a peach porch and that's all it did was prevent this disease. Much more of a problem, I think, well, that I think is going to happen this year is late blight. We have late blight as a disease. It is not late in the season necessarily. It's just got called late blight because it did used to only be a problem in BC late in the year. But now it overwinters here. We've had a lot of dry summers up until last year. And I think people just forgot about this problem. But last summer late blight started to come back and we've started out with again, a wet, cool gardening year. And so if it continues like this, we will have more late blight on tomatoes. And the reason I'm really emphasizing this disease of all of them is this one's fatal. Your plants collapse pretty quickly. There's nothing salvageable. Unlike almost anything else that I can show you, this is fatal. It's the end of your crop. It spreads right on down the row and that can be the end of it. So it's a very odd organism. It's kind of like a fungus, but it's called a water mold. And it needs water, free water, wet, not just humid conditions, but wet leaves in order to germinate. If you can keep your leaves dry, you don't have this late blight infecting your tomatoes. But irrigation splashes, rain, condensation from a tunnel, all of these, if they leave water on the leaves for long, for a period of time, then you can have late blight infections if the spores are in your garden. So these people here have built these high tunnels. These were from years where late blight was really a bad problem. And people found that these tunnels are not really keeping the tomatoes warm. They're just keeping the tomatoes dry. But with the big openings, making sure that you didn't get condensation at night dropping down on the tomatoes. Or if you've got tomatoes in pots and can grow them along, this is an overhang of a roof here. If you can do that, then they get plenty of light and sun and they're not going to get wet. Then that can actually do, they can do very well. Another thing in preventing diseases is I'm putting this up here because I see a lot of problems with espaliered fruit trees. It's very common to get European canker, which is a disease, infecting where the branches or trunks have rubbed on wires. Or they've been tied and people didn't keep going and adjusting the ties or more checking. And once you get a big canker on a branch, eventually the branch dies and whatever is on the other end of it. That's the end of that branch. In this case, this whole tree was failing. So rubbing injury or damage from string tremors, if you're getting too close with the weed whacker, that's how you damage bark and gets these very, it takes a while for them to get in damaging the tree, but the tree can end up dying from this or you can lose a lot of branches. So protect barks from injury, make sure they don't get injured. Pruning for good air circulation is you might have thought, Mel, it's kind of a lot of work or just doing it to get sun in the middle on the fruit. You're actually doing it as well to have the leaves dry out really quickly after dew or rainfall or irrigation, whatever reason got the leaves wet on anything, whether it's tomato plants or apple trees or rose bushes, if you have good air circulation through the foliage, then a lot of these things that I've been talking about that are diseases don't have time, enough time to germinate. So it's not at all a feeble approach. It's very effective. This is the same apple tree. This is apples on the top of the tree. This is a dwarf tree. And these were a branch down where there was a lot of weeds along a fence line. And these are so scabby that they had to be removed. They didn't even, they weren't, they couldn't grow. That's how bad the scab was. And these are the same apples in the top of the tree. And that is simply a difference in air circulation. And the last thing that's really important for plant diseases is the diseases that live in the soil that attack roots. Now there's garlic diseases, garlic and onion diseases that attack the roots, potato diseases. These, you can't get at the pathogen. It's in the soil. There's nothing you can do to the soil. So you need to make sure that the host plants are not there for a long enough period after growing a crop. So that the path spores that are left behind in the soil starve. So because these are all very host specific diseases, it is actually very simple to control, say botrytis neck rot or anything like that in garlic. You just don't plant garlic there for three or four years and the spores die out. And then you can come back and plant your onions or your garlic and the crop is fine. So you're really just starving the dormant stages. So the highest risk families that you really need to rotate in a garden are the whole onion family, which means leeks, garlic, onions, shallots, all of that and potatoes out of the night shade family. There are some diseases in cabbage family, turnips, radishes, leafy greens. I'm assuming you don't have club root because unfortunately club root stays in the soil for decades and so a short rotation isn't really going to help much with club root. But for other kinds of root diseases in cabbage family, try and get a couple of years at least between cabbage family crops. When it comes to almost everything else we grow in a vegetable garden, we don't have common soil-borne diseases. So you don't have to worry about rotating the crops. This makes vegetable gardening a lot easier, especially in a small garden because you don't have to rotate everything. You have to know what your onion family is. You make sure you don't grow potatoes and any related plants in the beds after potatoes. And it would be good if you could do some rotation in cabbage family. But that means you don't have to worry about your chart and beans and melons and corn and spinach and lots of other plants don't have to be rotated. Okay, so that was all about prevention. And I do like to spend a lot of time on prevention, but you're gonna say, you're sitting there going, okay, but I've already got a problem. Well, yes, these are some things that we could see. There's European chaffer. This is what people call a chaffer beetle. But saying chaffer beetle is like saying beetle beetle. So this is actually called European chaffer. This is a little tiny strips and gladiolas. And this is the guy that chews on your rhododendrons. And there's a number of odd little things here. So what do you do? Well, first you have to make absolutely sure you know what the problem is. An awful lot of things look like an awful lot of other things, completely unrelated. These distorted leaves on this Brussels sprout look like a disease. And in fact, it's aphids. This also looks like a disease in this apple tree. These pink edges, it's a midge. It's an insect that causes this. And this little guy, you know, what is this? Well, this is the winter moth. So once you know what the problem is, and again, I urge you to get help. Talk to master gardeners. When clinics are open again, the master gardeners are doing a huge amount of online. Just take a picture and send it to them. There's the Vancouver master gardeners and through bandos and gardens. But there's, you know, the whole website is set up to deal with people with pest and disease problem or any other gardening questions. But get a master gardener, look at my website, look at ministry of agriculture books, look at information that is for our region. No point in going to Missouri or the UK. Like find out what's going on here and get some help to make sure that you know what things are. Because once you know, you can look up lots of information about life cycles, biology, natural enemies, prevention methods, sorry, my dog is digging a hole in the couch. Pippi, sweetie, stop it. Sorry, I know we're taping this, but the dog is getting bored. So this is often the hard part. This is the hardest part, to figure out what the problem is. Cause look at all these pictures. These are holes in leaves. And large holes in leaves can be anything. So you've got to find out what's doing the damage. Now I can pretty well look at this and say those are bird beak bites, but this is slug damage. If it's hostas, it's definitely slug damage. But brown spots on leaves, what is that? Wilting plants, what is that? It can be a detective job. And so just remember, there's no point in doing anything unless you know for sure what the problem is. Because it can be actually counterproductive. I mean, I've seen people on a plant with a sunscald, they pulled all the leaves off because they thought it was a disease. Well, that's a horrible thing to do to a plant. You've just removed its ability to feed itself. So it's ability to recover from an injury. You've just disabled it. So you do really need to know what you're doing. And if we were all in a big room together, I would have you put your hands up and tell me what you thought this was. And I know that there are people out there looking at this that are saying, I think that's a wire worm. It's about a centimeter and a half long and it's really tough and weak and it's very narrow and it's in the vegetable garden. But it is in fact a predator of wire worms. This is a half of a wire worm sticking out of the soil, but you see the hole drilled in it? This little guy did that. So you can, unless you're certain that you know what you're looking at, you could be ending up killing all the things that were eating the wire worms. This little fly, the stiletto fly. So keep an eye on problems. Look closely, do it regularly, take some photos, keep them in a file somewhere with dates so that you know when you took the picture. The records are important because you're gonna see only of handful of pests or diseases and they're gonna happen at the same time every year or to the same plants. And you don't have to worry about all the things that are in like my big bug book has, I don't know, about two or 300 things in it. That's not gonna happen to your garden. You just need to know about the common things that you're likely to see. And once you know what they are and know when they're going to be a problem, it will be much easier to deal with them. By looking closely, you can also tell whether the problem's getting better or worse. You know, is the damage continuing? For example, here we have this chewed up leaf. Well, the edges are dry and brown. So whatever chewed this leaf up, it's gone. So in fact, I happen to know what did the damage here. It was this European, sorry, gooseberry soft fly and it causes a lot of damage on gooseberries and currants, but knowing that, I've saw that one year. It's too late now to do anything about it, but the next year in the early spring, you can go and look for the eggs now that you know that you've got this problem. So keeping a record of it, what the host plants will, when you saw it, now we just go in here in April and we look for the eggs and remove. There's a few leaves with the eggs and that's it. You remove them and that's it. Also, if you did any action, did you try spraying? Did you try some other method? So going back and inspecting the plants tells you if that worked, did it even matter? So one of the first things here to decide is treatment necessary. Well, here's coddling moth. One caterpillar damaged this apple. Here's a tusk moth. One caterpillar is eating a little bit of holes and leaves but making no difference in any way to this tree or the fruit. So it really depends what the pest is and what kind of damage it does. And you need to think about that because is it worth it? Do you need to do anything? Do you have a few apples that are like this? Cause you can salvage the rest of that apple for applesauce or is the whole crop like that? Is it just a few? Is it a lot? Is it more than you want to bother with? It all depends on the part of the plant that is being affected. You know, for example, these are the little green caterpillars that come from that white butterfly that the one that everybody calls a cabbage moth. It lays eggs on cabbage family, the caterpillars eat leaves. Well, if it's eating kale, you and that caterpillar are competing for the same leaf. You know, so I would want them to be controlled when there's just a few eating kale. But this example, which is the worst I've ever seen was in a place, it was actually in China many, many years ago on a research project and a lot of insecticides were being used. And there were no wasps and natural enemies eating the caterpillars of this butterfly. But even in this situation, which is really bad, the cabbage underneath is fine. If you removed the one layer of outer leaves, no one would have known that cabbage had been chewed on. So it really depends what they're doing, where they're doing it. And again, the age of the damage. This is that leaf again, the dry brown edges. This, there's nothing you can do here. And it depends on personal tolerance too. You know, sometimes it's just as easy to pick something off and get rid of it than it is to worry about having a perfect leaf. Now, if you decide that something needs to be done, there's quite a range of controls that can be used, but you do need to know how they work. Most pests and diseases can be managed with prevention or prevention and a combination of some of these other kinds of controls like physical controls, bio controls. I will talk about some examples, but you do need to know what the pest problem is because some of these controls only work a certain way on certain pests. If you put a sticky tree band on your tree in the wintertime, that's only gonna work on a moth called winter moth. It's not gonna do anything for anything else. Though, if you don't have winter moths, then that's not going to work. You know, and some of these have to be done just at the right time of year and you don't have to use them right to get the effect. And even the low toxicity pesticides like soap are a last resort, you really rarely, I won't say never, but rarely need anything like that in a food garden particularly. So the first thing is just simply remove the problem. So you can pick off eggs and nests and that's the easiest way around tent caterpillars when they're doing an outbreak year. Often it's quite sufficient to just get a pole pruner out and snip off the webs and drop them in silky water. Or in this case, this is what a European canker looks like on this apple tree and it had one branch. So you very carefully prune out the infected branch and destroy this material. So depending what it is, physically removing can do a very good job. If you're getting peritralis rust, which is this weird looking sort of outer space bumps on your pear tree, the problem lies with juniper that is infected. This is a fungus that spends the summer on pears and spends the winter in juniper. So you need to go find an infected juniper in March and April. If you remove that, then you won't have peritralis rust going onto your pears. It is usually not that much of a problem. If there's this, this is not damaging the pear at all. It's sometimes you see the whole leaf turning orange and then you wanna try looking for an infected juniper, but usually on your neighbor's property and then you have to negotiate that. But you can remove overwintering sites for some diseases where you get brown rot in fruit trees like the stone fruit, cherries and peaches and plums. If you see these shriveled up masses of fruit at harvest time that stay on the tree and become these mummified, they just look like dried prunes stuck to the branches in the winter. That's where this fungus disease is going to spend the winter. All you have to do is take a stick and knock those out of the tree, throw them in the garbage and you have done a really good job of actually controlling this disease. If you leave it in the tree in the spring, the spores are forming and rain will deliver the spores to every blossom in the tree and you might in fact lose a whole crop. But it's something where physical removal just works unbelievably well. And part of controlling some very difficult pests like codling moth and apple maggot is just picking up the dropped fruit which calls a sanitation step. Just get rid of it the minute it falls out of the tree. In a few cases we can use traps. This was the winter trap that I was talking about with winter moth. But the winter moth climbs up there in the winter so we only want to trap from the end of October to the end of February because if we have this sticky bands on the trees at other times of the year, we'll do more harm than good by catching beneficials and also people are more active and kids get their hair stuck in it and pets get their tails in it and it's very difficult to live with. Indoors yellow sticky traps are very good for white flies and fungus gnats. You'll see these at any garden center, lots of little designs of sticky traps to put in your pots. And we can trap wireworms out of our, this is several wireworms here. We can trap them out of a vegetable bed very easily in early spring by burying chunks of potato in the soil. Just for two days and I've got a stick on here with a little tag tied to it so I can find it again. And you lift it up and pull the wireworms out. And if you're really cheap like me you just put the potato chunk back in and use the same one over again. Water sprays are a great physical control. You can blast aphids, soft-ly larvae. These are weird little soft flies that get on pairs. Thrips, spider mites, you can control aphids and soft-ly larvae and you can knock back thrips and spider mites with water sprays. And interestingly, it also suppresses powdery mildew which is that white fungus that I showed you on the squash plants earlier. That is an interesting group of fungi that can only germinate on dry leaves in humid conditions. So the air is humid but the leaves are dry. And with water on the leaf, the spores can't germinate. Physical barriers are useful for some of our vegetables. We have two really intractable pests for home gardens. And one is a root maggot that feeds in cabbage roots, cabbage family plants. And another is carrot rust fly, very similar insect, different species that gets into carrots and parsnips. Now the carrot rust fly won't go on the cabbage and vice versa. But both of those are quite difficult pests to control in any other way but barriers work really well. We simply don't let the insect lay its eggs on the plants. So this is a bed of carrots and the carrot crop under there is just going to be absolutely fine. There will be no pest damage to it at all. But you do have to cover before the plants come up because those insects can find even the tiniest little seedling and lay their egg. So, and it has to be there for the whole life of the crop. So that's in order for this to work. For cabbage root maggots and this is a blow up actually a slide demonstrating these barriers here. These insects, both cabbage and the cabbage root maggot and carrot rust fly are very particular. They will only lay their eggs on their host plant and they only lay their eggs right where the plant is going into the soil. So this lettuce over here, they won't lay their eggs there. They won't lay their eggs out here in the soil with no plants, they will only lay their eggs there. So on these really big cabbage family things like broccoli and cabbage, you don't wanna necessarily have covers over the whole garden for those. You can just put a little barrier around the base of the plant. You do it as soon as you put the plant out in the garden. And if you've got little plants out there and you didn't do it, do it now because there are several generations a year and that will prevent the later generations from adding to the attack in case there may be some eggs laid there now. But what this is is any kind of material that is soft enough not to damage the stem but waterproof enough to get through the summer. So if you've got compost bags that you've got compost in, you can just cut those up, freezer paper, thin foam from packing around computers and consumer products. As long as it is going to get through the season, I've actually found that compost bags or fertilizer bags or chicken feed bags or anything like that are probably the thing that I have the most of and they're just easy. Cut them into a square, six inches, 15 centimeters. Cut a slit to the middle and cut a little cross here so that you can make the tightest possible fit to the stem of that little plant. And I usually need a few pebbles to hold it down while the plant's growing but a little bit later, I will be mulching. I'll just mulch right over the top. You leave it in place, you're done for the whole season. Now, in some cases you may need to cover the whole plant. This is mostly due with fruit. And now, thank heavens, for years we've had insect netting, proper, strong, knitted monofilament that is really, really sturdy. You can put it over bushes that have thorns and it won't rip. We've always had remae and in the case of carrots, this is insect netting now but you could have used floating row cover and with the soft leaf on the carrots or the cabbage family, that works fine. But when it comes to covering bushes and trees, remae rip so the floating row covers get ripped, although you can certainly use them on strawberries. So you can buy these products now and there's a lot of different brand names around. Bugout seems to be readily available in nurseries. Protect net is available. Sometimes you see in viral mesh. As long as it's for this purpose of insect, preventing insects from laying eggs, the thing is, I find it works amazingly well on, obviously birds can't get in, but it's a lot easier to install insect netting than bird netting. Bird netting rips, it catches on all the branches and birds can see the fruit through the bird netting. They don't see the fruit through the insect netting. So even if I didn't have a reason to cover my currents or cherries or something to keep out birds, I would still do it to keep out insects. I would still do it to keep out birds because it's so much easier to manage than bird net. You can bag individual fruit and that sounds very tedious, but in fact, if you have a dwarf apple tree in your yard and after the June drop when the tree sheds its fruit, then you go through and thin your apples and then after that you can put organza fruit bag, gift bags on those apples very easily and that keeps out coddling moth and apple maggot. We did not used to ever worry about apple maggot and now we have it well established in BC. So unfortunately, we now have a serious apple pest that is working its way into every kind of corner of the province in the apple growing areas. So be aware that this control is there as possible. This is what commercial growers use in the Okanagan and in Washington state, organic apples, it may seem tedious to bag the apples, but then the grower has no need to worry about a whole range of pest problems. You can make homemade bags. These are bags on grapes to keep out raccoons. Works actually really well if you use really sturdy material and strong like shoelaces or clothesline cord for the string. Raccoons, I've used this for 20 years on my grapes and almost never get an attack by raccoons. Sometimes they try to squeeze at the bags but they can't get away with it and that's a good solution for raccoons. Another thing that's really important is to take advantage of the fact that there are literally thousands of species of beneficial or biological controls already native here. Thousands of them that attack aphids and caterpillars and all kinds of other rather difficult pests. And although you can buy a few, there's very few compared to what is naturally here and very few of them are useful outdoors in a garden. Most of the ones that are sold commercially are for the big greenhouses. The growers know how to use them and they're for pests of greenhouse crops. This is just a few of some of the things that we could see in our gardens that are really useful here. You know, yellow jackets eat a lot of caterpillars. It's their main diet to take home to their nest to feed their larvae. Lover flies, their larvae eat aphids and this little orange midge here, you'll see this again, is a very voracious aphid predator, very common. This is one of the wasps that parasitizes caterpillars. So the way we get this army of insects working for us is attract them to the garden, is feed them what they need. And the adults of these insects need pollen and nectar. They're like pollinators and in fact, a lot of them do pollination as well. It is the juvenile stage or the larvae that are actually the killers of the other insects. So in order to get the adults to come to your garden to look for pests to lay their eggs on, you need to feed those adults and where those females find their own food, that's where they start looking for places to lay their eggs. So for example, dill and cilantro, just letting those flower in the garden. Sweetalism is probably the biggest, fastest fixed for most gardens. Many species of aphid predators visit this, but a lot of other insects do as well. And if you know this plant, it's really easy to buy it at any garden nursery. They have tiny flowers that smell like honey and what you're smelling is a rich little nectar droplet in each flower. And it's a very fast fix for a lot of gardens. Calendula, bright yellow flowers attract hoverflies. There are lots of good insect plants and you can have perennial plants. They don't have to be right. If you're in a vegetable garden, the plants may be on the edge of the vegetable garden or they could be on the rock walls or in flower beds just in your yard. That's all that's important. So these tiny little flowers, they fit the insect mouth parts. A lot of insects, a lady beetle is relatively large compared to a lot of these beneficials. Tiny little parasitic wasps that attack aphids and caterpillars, they will drown in a big pool of nectar. So they need to come to really tiny flowers. Here's cilantro in flower, here's sweetalism. And the fastest way to control aphids in your roses is the border of sweetalism. And the white sweetalism goes with any roses. This will clean up aphids very quickly. You can employ this if you've got a greenhouse or a tunnel with peppers and things in it, which often have aphids in the spring, plant some sweetalism in the greenhouse or in the tunnel. And that attracts, here's a hoverfly, come right in the same day that I planted a sweetalism in there. She's right in there looking for places to lay eggs. And this is a pepper leaf covered with aphids, but she's already started laying eggs here. And this is that same leaf a week later, and all that is on that leaf are two big fat hoverfly larvae. So you don't have to buy these creatures, you just attract them in and give them good conditions, protect them, don't ever put soap on the aphids because the soap will kill these insects, but also it makes a smell on the leaf that these insects will avoid. So they won't commonly lay their eggs if you've been using soap to control aphids. You can use water, blast the aphids off and then put in sweetalism and attract your predators and let them do the job. Something else that is really important when we have the dry spell in the summer is that these beneficial insects don't have a source of water because they rely on dew. Or if you have a stream or something, they will be getting water from a natural water body, but in a lot of yards and gardens, there's no water source at all. And once there's no dew for a while in the summer, these insects can be very thirsty and it cuts their life short. So if they are drinking in a bird bath and drowning, all you have to do is put a stone or rock or something that they can climb out on so that they don't drown. Now we also, these are all for the airborne insects, but there's a whole army of things that live in the soil and I just thought I'd put some pictures here so that you have a really good idea of these big, dark beetles and weird looking pill bug spiders and all these things that are all beneficial. They eat slugs and snails and they root weevil larvae and root maggots. And the way you make to protect them is that you use a lot of mulch, which to cover the soil and they live under that mulch. And don't disturb the soil as much as possible. These creatures are territorial and they live for a long time in their little territories. So the less disturbance of the soil, the better to maintain a good population. Now, should you be buying any of these? Well, I said earlier that there's actually very few that are very useful for home gardens or greenhouses and they're expensive and they're perishable. You can use them absolutely, but you do need to know what you're doing. You need to read up on this, understand what they are, understand what they're used for and make sure you're applying the right species to the right pest problem, especially given the investment in these creatures. Now, you can buy aphid midges and they're very effective, but there are so many outdoors that for a garden or a yard, it doesn't make sense to buy them. A commercial greenhouse or a big landscape with problems in the roses or something, aphids in the roses, they make a lot of sense because they do very well and they do a good job. And then here's one like, I'm sure a lot of you have seen it, praying mantids advertised in years past, they never made any sense for controlling pests because they eat anything. They eat butterflies and they eat lace wings which are predators and they eat grasshoppers which are pests and they eat whatever they can catch. And so they actually aren't, they don't exert any kind of control on a pest population. In contrast, this little fly that lays her eggs by aphids, they only eat aphids. They won't grow up and get bigger and start eating something else. Something that's maybe top of mind right now are insect parasitic nematodes. And this is a biological control you can buy. Tiny little parasitic worms, this is a picture under a microscope that attack insects. Now, in some cases, they do a very good job. Unfortunately, they are being advertised for a lot of pests that they don't do a good job on. Basically, if you put an insect in a petri dish in a lab and you put nematodes in there, sooner or later the nematodes will get into the insect. But whether they work well in the outdoor setting in a real landscape or a real garden is another thing. And in some cases, if you get the right ones at the right time in timing for the pest, then they can do a good job. But again, they are expensive and they're perishable. The soil needs to be warm and it needs to be very wet. So nematodes don't prevent an infestation. They attack after, they stop things from developing. And one of the places that you'll see them being used most now is for European chaffer or what you probably know as chaffer beetle in lawns. But note that they are being sold on the label. They will have all kinds of other things and they do not work for these other things. They work for, there are species around that work very well for root weevils and for the European chaffer. It's too late now to be applying them for root weevils. The root weevil larvae, which is the only stage that's susceptible to being attacked by nematodes is in the soil but it is now gone to the next stage. So insects from the egg hatches a little larva. The larva can be attacked by nematodes. But when they get to the pupa case, the pupal stage where the adult is going to form inside the pupa, they aren't susceptible and the adults are not susceptible. So if you're going to use nematodes for black fine weevils, you need to have already done it or do it in the fall. And you do it when the soil is warm. So that's September or October. For European chaffer however, it's a very different insect and studies have shown that the nematodes that you can buy right now are really effective. Usually about the third week of July is just the right stage to catch these grubs in the soil. But you'll need a lot of water and if you're under water restrictions and we usually are under some kind of water restrictions, you may need to get a watering exemption permit for summer use. And the municipalities give these out. Sometimes they ask you to prove that you've bought the nematodes and that's what you're going to use the water for because it's for a lawn which would ordinarily not be allowed to be watered. But there is an exception for this case. And so go ahead and use nematodes for chaffer if you want but don't fall for the idea that they're useful on a lot of other things because they're actually not. One other biocontrol, this one is registered as an insecticide because it's bacteria. Once things are small enough like bacteria and fungi, they have to be registered as under the process for registering insecticides in Canada. So this is very effective. It's a caterpillar disease. It's been around for decades. It's the product in the store is called Safer's Biological Insecticide. So tent caterpillars, cabbageworm. The cabbageworm is another name for that little green caterpillar from the white butterfly. A lot of different caterpillars that are pests on crops can be controlled with this. But only if you spray when the caterpillar is present and eating because they have to eat the spores. They actually die of blood poisoning. So they have to be present and just spraying it out there in the environment does no good at all. And if you're spraying it on a lot of different plants you might affect some native butterflies. There are other bacterial diseases for beetles, mosquitoes available as well. These work if you apply them for the right pest. So there are a few least toxic pesticides. And again, they're always a last resort. And the BT is the insecticide I just talked about. Mineral oils would be like oils that you would spray on. There's in the wintertime on dormant trees but you can also mix it in a different ratio with water for summertime sprays. There are a few things. Now, spinosad and kale and clay could be used if there was a domestic product available. They're registered in Canada for commercial growers at the moment. And so I'm just putting them there so you can see that there is a list of things. The slug baits, these are quite effective actually the iron or ferric phosphate baits, the safe baits. And there are a few fungicides and bacillus subtilis is again is there because it used to be available in Canada and it's very effective. I'm hoping it will come back but it's for things like black spot on roses. But right now you're limited to sulfur sprays. If some of you may have been familiar reading organic gardening books about Bordeaux copper sprays, Bordeaux copper sprays are not allowed in BC. Copper builds up in the soil and we now know that that's toxic. So some of these things that you'll read about in older books are not available. So, you know, some people I know that you may have heard if you've got fruit trees that you've got to spray your fruit trees every winter with dormant oil. Do you need to? Well, only if pests have been on your apple tree for which the oil sprays will actually work. People spray for tank caterpillar eggs and it doesn't harm them. I mean, they're fine. Oil sprays don't harm them at all. So it doesn't work on some things but it does work on winter moth eggs and these are scale insects that are on this apple. Very weird oyster shell scale. If you had soft lies on your pears and cherries you can wash them off with water in the summer and then make a note to self do a dormant oil spray on the tree in the winter. So they do work on some things. But I should go back. But if you don't have pests for which the sprays work then just spraying for no reason does more harm than good because there are beneficial mites and other organisms that live in the tree bark that spend the winter there that will be killed. And you may get an outbreak of some pest mites on your trees if you kill the beneficial mites with oil sprays. So you, you know, don't spray if you don't have a pest problem on your tree. And I know people think that botanical insecticides because they're a natural source might be a good idea but in fact pyrethrum daisies where the pyrethrums come from that this is a pretty powerful nerve toxin. It's moderately toxic to people and pets. It is not, it is not low toxicity. It has a very fast knockdown and if you were spraying it it would knock out bees and butterflies as well as insects that were on the plants you're spraying. So it can be used in certain situations but the bottom line is that insecticides are rarely if ever needed. And, you know, what about homemade sprays? Well, you know what? Okay, if it works on pests it's going to have the same drawbacks as any insecticide. And also you can damage your leaves, you know with soap and all these things that people make up with home remedies they're not intended to be used on plants, you know and they can contain perfumes and additives for soap and they can be very damaging to plants and as they can just kill the same beneficials. And in fact, it's technically illegal. I mean, you shouldn't even be doing it because of the potential damage to plants. So the summary here is is to manage pests and diseases prevention is really the way to go if you can. It's the most reliable and you end up with no damage. If you've got problem is occurring then you really have to get correct identification and then keep an eye on it because, you know, lots of things solve themselves. Plants resist disease, natural enemies catch up with insects, birds eat the caterpillars. So keep an eye on the problem and keep some kind of records and then make a conscious decision about whether treatment is or is not necessary because it often isn't necessary. And then don't hesitate to combine some different approaches. I mean, water sprays and, you know, some netting or whatever the problem is and be sure that you follow up and check, you know, figure out whether something worked or not and then make some plans for next year because if you missed a pest problem that's only out chewing on your plants in the spring you can be on top of that for next year and intercept the problem really early. And I will end the same way as I started is most of all, don't panic. There are very few problems that are serious and there are lots of tools for cutting your losses. So with that, I'm happy to take questions. Okay, well, there are questions, of course, specific questions and let's have a look at that. We'll just pull up the Q and A. So one of the questions is about a black fungus on shrubs and roses. And I'll just read it. I also have a black fungus on my shrubs and roses that I need to deal with. We looked at it under a microscope and it is a fungus. But there's fungus and fungus among us. Now there's two, if it's on shrubs and roses at the same time, then it's probably on honeydew. Without a picture, again, this is a question where it's very hard to identify something like this without a photo. But there is a disease of roses called black spot, but it makes black splashes like with a fringed edge on each circle of black fungus. And that does not go on other shrubs. It is just on roses. That is a disease that is best handled with resistant roses or with good air circulation in the leaves and you can use sulfur sprays. However, the fact that she or she is suggesting it's on other plants tells me that it might not in fact be a fungus disease of plants. It could be a fungus growing on sugar that has been splashed on the plants. When sucking insects like aphids or mealybugs feed on plants, they suck sap and they eject a lot of sweet, sugary excretion really. They're just pumping out the sugar of the plant and it splashes onto the leaves below. And then it is a fungus, but it's not a disease. It's a fungus growing on that sugar layer. And you can get black marks on tree trunks and branches because the sugary excretion from the sucking insects has left this coating on the plants and then the fungus grows there. The problem is not the fungus. The problem is the sucking insects. So you go back and have a look and see if the leaves are sticky or because the fungus, I'm sorry, the excretion can be splashed out onto anything and it doesn't even have to be a living plant. It can be, so black mold showing up on things is a different indication. Okay, thank you. So Olga, who by the way says, happy to see you, Linda. I wish to see you too, Olga. He's wondering about putting things in our compost, specifically rusted garlic. Yeah, it's, you know, there is a dormant, some of those spores can live in the soil. So if you've got rusted garlic, you can certainly use the bulbs from those plants for your next crop because it's not on the garlic bulbs, but the tops, you should cut them off and they should be buried or disposed. You're probably not where you can burn because a lot of municipalities don't allow that, but they should not be composted just to be safe. Okay, what about just, I mean, if we throw them into the municipal yard waste, I guess. Yes, that's fine because they're composting at very high temperatures. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you're fine. It's just a whole compost is almost never at an adequate temperature. Right, okay, great. The question about calcium in the soil, so she says, we were told we had a high level of calcium in our soil that I still get blossom and rot. Well, that's because you probably need to look to the watering. See, the calcium, you can have all the calcium you need in the soil, but if the soil is dry or just temporarily dry, the plants can't get it because the calcium is moving in that soil water that goes into the roots, the roots take it up from in the water. So the calcium can be there and the plant's not getting it. And in fact, most blossom and rot problems, the soil is not the problem. It's the watering or the evenness of watering. So if you've got plants and tomatoes and things in pots are really vulnerable to this because in the summer, a potted plant can easily dry out and maybe even need two waterings or three waterings a day in the summertime in hot weather and especially if it's windy. So most of the soil to keep it more moist, be more on top of your watering. Okay. Question about growing potatoes vertically. So she says, if I do vertical potatoes and save the soil every year for building the vertical beds up, should I be getting different soil every year? Yes, your potatoes. You could grow anything else in that soil. You know, if you're, if I assume she's maybe thinking of potato bags where you put in the potato and you keep that. Yeah, yeah. That soil, tip that out and use it in part of your bed where you're not going to grow tomatoes, peppers or eggplants or potatoes next year and use different soil in the potato bag. And then the old soil from the bag can easily be, you know, can grow anything else in it. It's not a problem. Okay. So those are like the nightshade plants. Yes, the nightshade plants. Okay. And, okay, ants. We haven't talked about ants yet. Okay. So I have ants crawling down my kale and into the root zone and killing the kale. I've never encountered this before and can see the ants in the roots when I dig around. Many, many ants. The root is often eventually severed. How can I prevent this? Well, it may just be a one-time thing. There's obviously a nest. There are some ants that will nest in the soil and they will, they may not actually be directly damaging the kale because they're just making the soil so loose and dry that the roots are getting too dry and the plant dies. The other thing that they can do, and I've seen on lettuce sometimes, is they can actually import a root aphid that feeds on lettuce roots. But I don't think that we have any species of aphids that feed on the kale roots. So probably all the ants are doing is disrupting the soil situation so much and aerating it so much the plants are dying. So you need to control the aphids. I mean, it could be even any other kind of plant might die. It's really not to do with the kale. So chop up the nest, dig it up. You can use ant traps. The baits, they take quite a while. That has boric acid in it. It takes quite a while to eliminate an ant nest with the boric acid bait. Mostly disturbance, boiling water and digging up the nest and they'll send them on their way to somewhere else. Okay, good. The question about a peach tree. So Linda says, the leaves on my peach tree are curled and have whitish powder on the tips of the leaves. Some of the leaves are rusty colored. Yeah, that's peach leaf curl disease. That's the disease I was talking about. You can keep that tree dry next winter. Depends where it's planted. I mean, people build all kinds of elaborate, I only gave you a few examples, but elaborate peach porches that are temporary and get taken down or that are permanent. So the principle here is, is that you need those to stay dry in February when infection. Now, if that's impossible, because your peach is already out somewhere where that's just not gonna work, the lime sulfur dormant sprays can help quite a lot, but you need to be very accurate with your timing. You don't use it in the middle of the winter what the label says. You use it in the fall as about 90% of the leaves have fallen off the tree. There's still a few, but they're definitely turning yellow and falling off. You spray then and then you spray again in the spring, February probably, as the buds are just beginning to swell, but not open. And so if you do those two sprays, you will catch those spores and you can do a pretty good job. And the reason I don't usually lead with that as a control is it's a little tricky getting the spray timing. But if you're tree, if you don't have a peach porch for it, do that. And that can work as well. Wow, okay, that's great. Well, that was it for questions. I just want you to tell us about this picture. Are we looking at your garden? Yes, this is last summer. This is probably June last year. Yeah, I kind of went a little crazy with the cosmos in the broccoli patch. And this is squash here. I have a little bit of a lawn here and I have flowers and I adore my roses. I've climbing roses on all my gates and clematis. Oh yeah, I know this would probably be a July, end of June picture. Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful. I'm attracting a lot of insects into my garden. I mean, it was alive with pollinators and little wasps. And I never worry about trying to control cabbage caterpillars that from that white butterfly. I don't really worry about them because the wasps go off with them or the birds do before they ever do any significant damage and get into my broccoli and things. Yeah, it just looks like such a happy, healthy place. Yeah, this is one of my little, one of my apple trees. Beautiful. So you're personally, it sounds like your garden is pretty balanced, pretty healthy. You're not fighting a lot of insects or diseases. No, and although I gave you some possibilities of pests and stuff, the only thing that I use at all is I sometimes use slug bait. I'm up actually in a forested area and a lot of those big European black slugs have gotten into the region and they're quite damaging. So slug bait would be literally the only thing I've used in years and years. I think once I put a dormant sulfur spray on a pear tree, what else have I ever used? As your garden gets richer and more full of plants of all kinds, not just the ones you eat, but if you pack your landscape with ground covers and extra things in the rock walls and attract insects, you get this really rich environment that really takes care of itself. Yeah. And I find there's less and less things to worry about. My vegetable garden, I always put the little barriers on the cabbage. I don't bother waiting to see if they're going to get cabbage root maggot. I always cover the carrots. Those are the only two other pests that I know I'm gonna get. I'm gonna just prevent them and then I don't even worry about them for the rest of the season. Yeah, I mean, that's true. You were saying before you'll, there'll be specific things to each garden that come back, right? Yeah. Yeah, and once you learn what it is, what you're vulnerable to. That's right. And it'll just be a handful of things. It's not going to be all possibilities. Which is so hopeful. Yeah. And things get a bit of damage and they grow out of the damage and a month later you'll forget where the damage even was. Right. So again, don't panic. Don't try to pull leaves off of things and take any action. If you really, really are stumped, take really good photos, send me a picture or send one to your master gardeners there. That's what they do and they've got a really well-trained, lot of people are master gardeners now and they've got good training in this. Well, actually on that note, just to mention that on Thursday, we have the master gardeners at the library. They're going to set up on the rooftop from 10 to two. So that's June 3rd. If people have any questions, they can drop by. They're going to be here, I think every other Thursday all through the summer and Saturdays once a month as well. So that's always great because you can just bring a sample of the problem and show it to them. Yeah, it's great. Well, thank you so much. So appreciate that you took time out of your garden this afternoon. It's been so, so interesting. I really just love learning about that because I think, you know, when we go into the garden and we're looking at the plants, we forget about the insects, right? And it's, well, we don't forget about them. I love seeing the bees, but it's so fascinating all the other things that are down in the ground. And as you say, they're not all bad. So it's great. It's interesting. The majority are either good or they're not a problem one way or the other. They're just living their little lives out there. Yeah, that's right. Thank you so much, Linda. You're very, very welcome. Okay, and thank you everyone for coming in and spending your afternoon with us and all the great questions. That's great. Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye.