Battle royale

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

It's an epic battle in my vegetable garden. I use a lot of “square foot gardening” techniques. Square foot gardening is a high density method of planting vegetables for high yield in small spaces. Part of that is I only plant the seeds I intend to grow. It saves on thinning and weeding.

I planted 20 beans, and they began to sprout on Monday. Problem is, since I got a late start, the insects are full-grown and voracious. Four beans have sprouted, and I'm pretty sure earwigs, which is that little brown insect with the pincers on their abdomens, have eaten the primary leaves off of three of them. Fiendishly, they left one leaf on one plant, so it may survive, but that is probably a false hope.

I put out earwig traps, three of them. An earwig trap is a small cup, like a yogurt container, buried with its lip at ground level. Inside, you pour some dark beer—I prefer Guinness for the leftovers—and then some olive oil on top of that. Then you cover it with a piece of cardboard or plywood. My past experience has been that dead insects will fill an entire container by the end of the season. I think the beer attracts them, and the olive oil smothers them.

Another weapon I've used in the past, but I haven't yet installed into the garden, are those solar powered lawn lights. This is largely theoretical, but I figure since the little bastards don't like light, maybe they'll avoid lighted areas. I'll be picking up some new rechargeable batteries today.

On the advice of a friend on Facebook, I've begun cutting plastic bottles down to cylinders and placing them around the plants as they sprout. We'll see. I won't put poison in my garden, but I'm not above sleeping in it to check for bugs throughout the night, at least until they get their secondary leaves.

It helps to be a bit obsessive when you garden in Nevada.

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