Mined Rainbow Chard Leaves
If you’re growing chard, spinach or other leafy greens in Seattle this month, you may be seeing widening lines of twirling damage running through your crops. Fall and Spring seem to be the season for the leafminer to go crazy on our food crops. And, they’re tough to remedy.
Leaf miners are small maggot creatures that live in the mid-tissue layer of plant leaves. They “mine” out the nutrients in a rapidly-widening path that skeletonizes plant leaves. If you break open the remaining layers of the leaves, you may find a tiny maggot wiggling around in its speckled black poop. You may find that the worm has turned into a pupae or the pupae has hatched and flown away.
Mined Leaf with Exit Hole
How to get rid of them? Hopefully you have parasitic wasps that will do the work for you (another reason not to spray bee-killing insecticides in the garden!) But, if your leaves are being mined already, then you need to get to work removing and destroying the affected leaves. If you remove the leaves early, you avoid the chance that another crop will destroy additional leaves on the same or other plants. Plus, if you let the leaves remain, you may infect your soil with pupae, bringing on a fresh crop of problems next spring.
Can you spray? Please don’t. Because leaf miners live inside the layers of the leaves, its unlikely that a spray application will even affect them. And if a product promises that it does kill leafminer larvae, keep in mind that it must have the ability to penetrate the cell layers of the leaf that you plan to eat.
Close Up of Mined Rainbow Chard Leaf
Too, there are some weeds like plantain and chickweed that serve as host plants for this pest. Be vigilant in removing them from your garden.
Oh, and when you cut off a leaf of infected chard or spinach, you can eat the part that hasn’t already been eaten by the miner. Just tear the good part away and toss it in your salad. Share and share alike!
Now that you’ve harvested all those leafy greens, here’s a quick recipe that you’re bound to enjoy:
Ingredients:
- Leafy greens like spinach or chard, torn into pieces with mid-ribs removed
- Mid-ribs of leafy greens, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped
- 1 tomato, cut in wedges
- olive oil
- dash red pepper flakes or fresh ground black pepper
- 2 T. soy sauce
Heat olive oil in large saute pan or wok. Add chopped mid-ribs of greens and onion. Saute over medium heat until slightly browned. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and saute briefly. Begin adding chopped greens, tossing to wilt. As each batch starts to shrink, add another batch. Try not to overcook. When all are slightly wilted, add soy. Remove from heat and toss with tomatoes.
Take that Leaf Miners…you never had it so good!
