We call them armyworms because they move en masse, quickly devour your crop, and after every green leaf is gone fly to their next smorgasbord (crop). Armyworms are awful this year — including fall, stripped and the Hawaiian beet armyworm.
Everything was great with my beans at the Pee Dee Research & Education Center (PDREC) when I left on Friday, but by Monday “Oh, my.” One more day and I would have had a mess. These armyworms are moving from cotton, pastures/lawns, peanuts, and soybeans to our vegetable crops. The moral of the story is “get out of your truck and carefully look at your crop.”
To control them, you can either use a systemic chemical with a long residual like Coragen or Havanta or wait until you see them and use a contact killer — which depends on how often you scout your crop.
We call them Diamondbacks moths because they have a row of diamond shapes on their back like the infamous rattlesnake. They don’t have a venomous bite but collectively their caterpillar stage will take a big bite out of your greens (brassica) crop. They are very small, green, blending into the leaf veins, and you may totally miss them until your greens are riddled with holes. They are very difficult to control and maybe resistant to some of the products many farmers use for caterpillar control.
This fall we are having an awful infestation of early season diamondback caterpillar on brassicas like collards/cabbage. Unlike the armyworms, thank goodness they have a little of selectiveness to their feeding habits and prefer brassica crops. Therefore, disk up any spring-planted brassicas still growing, don’t add brassicas to your cover crop mix, and get rid of their food sources to reduce their population. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the use of cover crops; they have improved row-crop production tremendously, keep down erosion, improve the soil, etc., but they should be selected properly and sometimes they do act as homes for problems in vegetable crops.
Also, cover crops containing brassicas should not be used in vegetable production fields because they increase diseases like bacterial soft rot and Sclerotinia which are tremendous problems in all types of vegetable crops. I believe it is one of the few diseases of which no chemical control is listed in our Southeast Vegetable Crop Handbook. In fact, last week I asked a plant pathologist how to control it and he said, “Disk them up.”
Disking them up, rotation, and bottom plowing are forms of sanitation and are excellent ways to control bacterial soft rot, but they cannot be employed in the middle of the crop season. Sclerotinia is what I call “a white mold on steroids” which can totally devour many types of vegetable crops. I call Sclerotinia a disease “that keeps on giving” because it produces a survival structure that looks like a black bean that can stay in the soil, destroy healthy crops, and be a real pain in the butt for many years.
An ag supplier just asked me to give him a simple cookbook recipe for growing vegetables like the one we have for peanuts. Vegetables are not row crops, folks. They are very hard, complex, and intensive to grow, but our Southeast Vegetable Crop Handbook is the best we have. I still have five copies of the 2021 handbook to give out to farmers on a first come, first serve basis.
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September 27, 2020 at 11:30AM
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TONY MELTON: An army of trouble for vegetables - SCNow
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