Sometimes laziness is good?!

I have not gone to my community garden for about 3 weeks or so. Since it has been raining periodically I figured the plants that are left in the garden will be alright. And it turn out, being lazy was good for my garden. One of the hot pepper plants died, but my eggplants (even the one battling the flea beetle) are thriving.  Other than these plants, I have chinese giant pepper, longhorn pepper, yellow pepper, snap peas, beets and lemongrass growing in the community garden.

Pablano pepper is dying, but other plants thriving

Ichiban eggplant

Italian eggplant - the plant that had the worst case of flea beetle attach

Black Beauty with many flowers

The lemongrass has gotten so much bigger. I need to start thinking of different ways to use it.

Bushy lemongrass

The first thing I tried was lemongrass tea. I made in the same way as mint tea, just cut up the whole lemongrass and boil it for 3 minutes. It made a beautiful and delicious tea.

Delicious lemongrass tea

Eggplant flea beetle coffee treatment update

It's been a little over a week since treating the eggplants with coffee to combat the flea beetle. There was never too many flea beetles (or I didn't spot them) but the damage to the leaves was pretty extensive. The coffee treatment seems to have gotten rid of beetles, after a couple of days of treatment I was only able to spot one beetle on the classic eggplant.  A couple of days after that, I found no beetle but the plants (classic and black beauty) was covered with ants.

This picture does not do it justice, there was even more ants on the plant

The first thing I did was sprayed the plant with water which washed away the ants. I noticed that there were little holes on the stem where it looked like the ants were digging. After doing a little searching, it appears that ants are secondary problem to flea beetles. If the beetles do enough damage to the plants, the ants come to feast on the dead tissue. To me, it looked like the ants were digging further, but perhaps the flea beetle dug the holes and the ants came after. I decided to just keep an eye on it. The black beauty plant, which was the bigger of the two, seemed to have recovered despite the damage.

You can see the flea beetle damage on the lower leaves (Black Beauty eggplant)

I don't think the classic eggplant will make it. The flea beetle and/or ants pretty much ate through the stem and the new growth looked like it was struggling. I decided to try cutting off the damage to see if it will promote more growth. I am not optimistic.

Chopped off the damage from the classic eggplant

The ichiban eggplant is doing great. I even see little baby eggplants forming already.

Ichiban eggplant lookin' good

Baby ichiban eggplant

The container ichiban is also doing really well, with lots of flowers and a baby eggplant forming quite nicely. It'll be interesting to compare the growth of this variety in ground versus container.

Ichiban in 5 gallon container

Baby ichiban growing in container

In the future, I think I will wait until the starter plants are big enough before transplanting to the garden. Also, I read that flea beetles are a problem mostly in April and May so I could also hold off transplanting into the garden until June.  I do think the coffee treatment worked, but it's difficult to say definitively because I didn't have a control group and it's possible that the decline in flea beetle just coincided with the end of their life cycle. I chose to be positive and believe that the coffee treatment worked!