Garlics and Onions Spoiled by the Allium Leafminer

It’s rotten to have to give a bad update. When you take time to dig the soil, amend it, select the plants and plunk them in the ground, you hope it all works out and that you get to eventually taste something yummy. It’s bad news for the garlic we so carefully planted way back in the fall and the young onions, too.

Onions Not Growing Tall, Look Deformed
Onions Not Growing Tall, Look Deformed

Shouldn’t these young onions be standing a little taller? Their leaves are looking deformed. (Photo taken May 23, 2017. Click on any photo to see a larger image.)

Mother nature had something else in mind when on the winds came a little yellow-headed fly. That critter laid her eggs on the onions, garlic and leeks. When they hatched the “worms” ate their way down to near the bulbs. Being full enough of onion or garlic leaves they transformed themselves into pupae and that’s what we found. Little brown grains of rice – actually they’re smaller than grains of rice but easy to see against the white Allium fruits.

Harvested garlic and leeks (elephant garlic) show the presence of Allium leafminer pupae. (Harvest photos taken June 14, 2017.)

Garlic Showing Deformed Leaves
Garlic Showing Deformed Leaves

Deformed leaves of garlic weren’t obvious in their early growth.

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Hot Peppers and Dog Hair to the Groundhog

Anybody out there with a good Groundhog Remedy?

Frickin’ groundhog made her way into the garden a couple of weeks ago and munched on the sugar peas so about half of the plant tops were nibbled down to a few inches tall. Uuuuh! Here’s what they look like now.

Groundhog Damage to the Sugar Peas
Groundhog Damage to the Sugar Peas
The peas in the left row took a hit and then the fat pig wandered through the garden lettuce before I could chase her outta there.

Gotta scare ’em away somehow. Their tunnels are all over the place leading to and from the bean field. We live next to an agricultural field but separated by 100 feet or so of a wooded area.

I read in Dr. Bader’s Pest Cures Natural Solutions to Bigger Pests that the woodchuck doesn’t like hot peppers. The book itself is very basic but will introduce you to a lot of natural remedies that are definitely worth a try. It came with a second book on how to deal with bugs, the smaller pests. (Amazon offers both very inexpensively.)

So, instead of getting out the shotgun, I wanted to try something less destructive.

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