Rivenrock Gardens Cactus Blog

Our Bell Peppers

It’s really neat to be able to step out and pick a pepper and bring it in to cut and put into the pan with some other good foods…. yeah, I for sure do love to eat.

   Bell Peppers like a good soil with plenty of sun. They should be kept on the edge of ‘always moist’. In other words, when the soil is drying out, get water back in it for these guys.  But don’t leave it sopping wet all the time. Let it drain out just a bit. In the gravelly soil of the arroyo these are in, I water them once a day, but they don’t get too much because a lot would just wash through the gravel. So they get a half gallon per plant on average.

  You can tell from the photos that they do like the conditions. Healthy happy plants are more resistant to disease and pests… so it is worth making the soil a bit extra good, make sure you plant and harvest when the season is right for that activity with that crop….etc. In other words, ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. It’s so much easier to keep the plants growing well in the first place than to have to fret over problems with scroungy plans that are stressed.

   I have anAnt Killer we use in the house. It’s a pretty benign little chemical called Boric Acid which you can get at many pharmacies. It’s not the most dangerous thing in the world, but in the interests of self preservation in legal situations, I must encourage you to wear a rubber apron, face shield with chemical goggles, Self Contained Breathing Apparatus, Nitrile gloves, and mix the preparation behind a splash shield and under a ventilation hood… and like any chemical, you should consult the MSDS for proper protection.  While you’re at it, make sure you have a properly trained EMT and QA tech to watch you, as well as a Chemical Engineer to read aloud the instructions as you mix.  Make sure your chemical Fire Extinguisher is at hand also…. you just can’t be too careful you know.

   A friend who knows how well this works, and has seen it in action, recently asked me for the recipe, so I enclose it here for him and others….

   Boric acid ant killer recipe follows….

1 cup sugar

3 cups water

1 teaspoon Boric Acid

   Bring the water and sugar to a boil and add the boric acid allowing it to dissolve into the water.

  Let it cool and it will be a thin syrup.

   Pour the syrup into cotton filled containers and place where ants can get to them (which is just about anywhere).

   The ants will travel long distances to get the syrup, filling up on it and carrying it to the nest feeding it to the young and the queen. The boric acid is a slow acting killer to ants, you want to let the ants eat it for a couple of days so that they can feed it through the whole colony. So the formulation should not be too strong, or the ants will die before they get back to the colony and feed it to the others there.

   We’ve had people telling us they could not stand to ‘feed’ the ants. Yes, sometimes the cup or saucer with this formula will be crawling with tons of ants, all lapping up the syrup excitedly, their little antennae twitching in delight as the ravenously inhale the sweet dessert you have made specially for them. Then happily, their little syrup filled grocery bags under their little ant arms, they will trot home happy as a pig in mud, eager to share the delectable syrup with their sisters and mama in the colony.

  Expect to see a reduction in ants visiting the dispenser after a couple of days. On the third day the few you see are obviously adversely affected by the formula, yet… being the diligent little workers they are, they drag themselves, stumbling and halting to the feeder dish with the life-stealing syrup, their little heads fall into the syrup to fill up, just one more time, to take the syrup back to a colony on it’s last legs.

   Yeah, there’s a philosophy to killing ants, and even though it is sad to kill living things, I do need to reduce their numbers to reduce the damage the ants cause to the skin of the cactus. Oddly enough, the ants are one of our greatest environmental problems we have interfering with our production of the very finest cactus. So we work diligently to keep their numbers low. We are organically certified, so we have to stick to name brands of products, so for killing ants, we have for a number of years used the ‘Safers Brand of Ant and Roach Killer’. But to tell ya the truth, I liked my old recipe printed above better. And it’s cheaper to boot! So feel free to make that recipe above, it works right fine and is environmentally responsible.

   How often have you ever heard people asking “Why did God create ticks”?  Now a daring and bold writer has gone out into the world asking this retorical question to some of the country’s leading scientists. And she put it into an article, go to ‘The Life Story of a Tick’ by Constance Casey for the inside scoop. You will likely find out a lot of little tidbits of tick info.

   Organic farming is difficult to do on a huge basis. Part of the tenet of organics is the pull away from a monoculture environment wherein all the plants in a field, on a farm are of one variety or species. With diversification on a small organic farm, there is more interaction between the groups of plants, more rotation that might be practiced, and the movement from host to refuge plant for the good and bad bugs. This overall can have a very healthy effect on the plants and help to keep pest populations within manageable limits without the farmer having to resort to ‘control’ methods.

   Part of the problem with the modern organics movement is the plethora of large farms now signing on as ‘organic’ and trying to revert to the organic production of their grandparents. Unfortunately, organics is more difficult on a large scale, and these folks who are coming in often seem to be chasing the organic dollar rather than entering into agreements for organic production based upon philosophical reasons.

  Just recently this has been brought into the forefront due to a large cattle operation that is accused of violating organic standards and falsifying records. You can read the entire article at ‘USDA’s Organic Factory Farming Scandal Continues to Unravel’.

 is one of the pests that causes us some problems in our cactus plantings. The adults eat the tops of the leaves, leaving holes here and there. I suspect that they also lay eggs in the plants and this causes the entire plant to die.

   I looked at a number of websites that describe this insect pest, here are some of the best….

Bug facts site has a great article on this pest.

OK State University has a short articlethat also shows the insect in its larval stage where it would be described as a white worm or grub. This is the stage where they enter into plants near the ground, and tunneling through cause damage and rot to follow usually killing the entire plant.

   The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service has among the best articles on this little critter.

   Yeah, they are a pest alright. And since we are organic, about the only thing we can do is put out sticky traps of yellow. But that would only be a small percentage gain. So we’ve just suffered through it, they are a constant headache, but cause only a small percentage of damage, still, you want all the leaves to be beautiful, but such is never to be. We live in a world in which nearly half the harvest is lost to insects, diseases, animals, mismanagement, theft and confiscation.  I guess I’m lucky that all we get is the occasional deer, gopher, ant, scale and cucumber beetle.