Market Farming

[Ken Bezilla <kenbez AT hotmail.com>]

We had a bean beetle disaster this year, even though we did two separate releases of pedio wasps to try to control them.  The product itself was fine -- another grower who shared one our shipments had good control of the wasps from her own release -- but on our own farm the bean beetles got out of control and killed off all the pole beans and any older bush bean plantings.

We usually get good control of bean beetles with the pedio wasps, but this year we didn't, and so probably next year we'll have an even bigger problem.

Thinking ahead to next year, a strategy I'm thinking about is to try an extra-early small planting of beans in our high tunnel to try to establish the pedio wasps early.  Normally our first bean planting is outside ~4/10-4/15.  Instead, we'd do a first planting under row cover in the high tunnel ~3/1-3/5.  Then the bean beetle larvae should appear a month earlier, and we could do a small release of the wasps to get them established earlier.  (And later supplement this with a second release of pedio wasps when we first see larvae on the outside plantings.)

This could be clever.  Or this could be very stupid, because we might allow the bean beetles to get established even earlier if it doesn't work.  So before I re-invent stupid... anyone ever tried this?

Ken Bezilla
Acorn Community Farm
central VA