The Curious Gardener | Gardening discoveries in Singapore

The green stink bug and the long beans

Posted on March 23, 2012 by CuriousG

Top view of the green stink bug.

I recently noticed a new insect hanging around our long bean plants – or, rather, on the long beans themselves. Kind of diamond-shaped and green matching the beans, it was noticeable because it had a bit of light brown edging along both sides. I initially gave it a wide berth because it looked to me like the green stink bug that emits a yucky smell when disturbed.

Well it turns out that it was indeed the stink bug, so it’s lucky that I didn’t provoke it and experience the stink. Bleah…

Left alone, the bug apparently invited some friends to join it, and they decided that the long bean plants – that are sharing the trellis with my snake gourd vine – would be a great place to set up home.

I was wondering why the beans started looking rather odd – very bumpy and dehydrated. Some of the beans were also eaten away right near the tops, making me wonder if the birds had started eating them.

Profile view of the stink bug. Know thy enemy...

No, apparently it’s the stink bugs that are responsible for the damage. I’ve since learned that they are sap-sucking pests that have needle-like mouthparts akin to mosquitoes, and to add insult to injury, the adult bugs have a taste for developing seeds, i.e. the developing long beans.

Well that explains the sick-looking long beans, and the young beans that have dropped off.

The bugs have apparently procreated on the long bean plants, because I’ve seen a number of miniature stink bugs – the smallest ones, black, and the medium ones, brownish – running along the beans. Since we haven’t been able to harvest a single healthy bean in over a week, and have had to discard a number of weird-looking beans, I’m about ready to get out the insecticide and start spraying…

Does anyone have suggestions that are organic in practice? Long beans are one of the veggies that grow well here, and we love eating them. I’ll be darned if the stink bugs take that away from us!

This may look like a cockroach, but it's the stink bug in one of the instar stages. Know thy enemy...

I initially thought these were lace bugs because of their bumpy bodies. However, closer inspection showed them to be in the shape of... the stink bug. Look closely and you'll see the topmost bug busily sucking sap from the long bean. Know thy enemies!

In our final step of going backwards in the life cycle of the dastardly stink bug, here are what I believe are their eggs. They're described as being "barrel-like". It's my most fervent hope that the spider in the picture is waiting for the eggs to hatch so it can feast on the little stink bugs!

The baby snake gourd

Posted on March 21, 2012 by CuriousG

The tiny green snake gourd just 4 days after the flower bloomed.

I should have guessed from the vigorous way the green snake gourd vine has been growing and branching out that it wasn’t going to be shy where growing fruits is concerned. Normally when the first female flower of a cucurbitaceae blooms, it’s just on a test run. However, it looks like the first lady is all systems go!

The female flower bloomed less than a week ago, and it appears that the first fruit is now on its way. Here it is, growing fatter and longer. I can’t wait to see how long it will take to reach maturity!

Coffee in the garden

Posted on March 19, 2012 by CuriousG

Used coffee grounds look just like compost but smell just like coffee!

I recently got my hands on a load of used coffee grounds, thanks to Growing Like A Weed’s mum, aka The Mother Weed. Like all companionable gardeners, excess resources have to be shared, you see, so I found myself with the equivalent of about a month’s worth of used coffee grounds if we brewed a big pot of coffee every day…

If you do some online research, you’ll learn that coffee places overseas give away their used coffee grounds as part of an attempt to “go green”. Why destine something for a landfill when it can be recycled? Especially when you get good PR out of it from gardeners.

Well, Mother Weed found the local equivalent, and shared her booty of coffee grounds. I knew they can be used in composting, and I’d heard that you can make a “tea” from the used grounds – but since I wasn’t certain, I did some research, just to be sure.

One of the things that takes the fun out of gardening for me is technical jargon – so when articles began to mention pH values and the such, my brain began to glaze over. To put it in terms I can accept easily, coffee grounds are not acidic after they’ve been brewed – the acid is water soluble and is guzzled by us in liquid form, so the grounds left behind are almost pH neutral, more or less.

This means that the grounds can be used:

to amend soil
as a lower layer in mulching
in a compost heap

In composting, the grounds reportedly help to sustain the high temperatures needed to kill off pathogens and seeds in the pile.

Some sources say the grounds can be sprinkled around as-is; others say the grounds have to be composted before they can be used near plants. I decided to sprinkle small amounts as side-dressing to see how my plants would react. Besides that, I’d also read that earthworms like coffee grounds. Well, my plants would definitely benefit from having more worms aerating the soil they grow in, so if the coffee grounds really attract them, then we will definitely keep adding them around the garden.

The grounds can also be used as a tea. Soak them in water for a day or three, letting them steep in the sun, and use that tea to water your plants, or as a foliar spray. I haven’t tried this yet, though.

Coffee grounds reportedly contain nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, potassium, magnesium and sulphur, which makes them a great source of nutrition for our plants. I will definitely continue using them in the garden, moderately, of course. If anything, you shouldn’t introduce new elements too suddenly in big quantities, otherwise your garden’s ecosystem can be thrown off balance, and your plants may suffer for it. We don’t usually brew a lot of coffee, so this nice injection of the coffee grounds was very welcome. Thank you, Mother Weed!

Meet the snake gourd flowers

Posted on March 17, 2012 by CuriousG

Well, the green snake gourd flowers have finally started blooming.

The male flower buds came first:

Green snake gourd male flower buds.

And then they started to bloom:

Although they bud in a bunch, the male flowers bloom individually.

Then the first female flower bud came along:

The female flower bud of the green snake gourd reminds me of a giraffe! The top of the bud looks like the head, and the stem is the neck, while the fruit is the body. Don't you agree? :D

And finally, here is the female flower in bloom:

The female green snake gourd flower looking all feminine with the lacy white petals. See the mini fruit at the base of the stem? That's one way to identify the female flower of a cucurbitaceae.

So there you have them, the flowers that will hopefully soon result in the fruits! Stay tuned…

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