I have orange butterfly weed. I thought I gave them all away through garden web. Today I found more in a glass bowl in the garage. You can have them. I might be interested in some bush beans. What kind are they?

Could be any chewing bug, or slugs or snails. They just love eating baby plants of any kind! Sprinkle some bran or sawdust around your babies to prevent the creepy chompers, and make a little tent with some mosquito fabric (the kind you cover your baby's cot or pram with) to keep away the flying chompers. You could try cutting the top and bottom off a plastic soft-drink bottle, or a cardboard milk container and put it over your babies. Makes the plants harder to find and get at. You could also try spraying your plants with some garlic spray. So you can't wait for a week? Use it straight away! It won't affect the flavour of the plants, but yours aren't ready for harvesting yet anyway. Keep up the spray about once a week or so if you've still got thieves - just wash the leaves as you would normally before using them if you don't want the garlic taste. GARLIC SPRAY: Soak 1/2 cup crushed garlic cloves in 1/2 cup vegetable oil for one week. Add a little liquid soap and dilute the mixture - 1 part mixture to 10 parts water. Garlic spay will kill and repel aphids, woolly aphids, bean fly, stink bugs, crickets, grasshoppers, red spider mite, sawfly larvae, scale, snails, slugs, thrips and caterpillars, mosquitoes and ticks, the adult moths of leaf-miners and mealy bugs. It is an effective fungicide when used 3-4 times a week against potato blight and damping off.

Karn. When I lived North I had a lot of trouble with bean fly, the young plants would just keel over and die so maybe the thin maggots are the larvae of those fly which tunnel in the main stem and cannot be seen outside the plant. The fly usually lays the eggs in the leaves and small yellow spots develop when this occurs. Did the stem look swollen, cracked or red in colour.???? Young plants wilt, yellow and fall over after the larvae have tunnelled in the stem near ground level. You have to kill the larvea while it is still on the leaf by spraying a insectide on them weekly starting at three days old and continue till blossoming. The only organic control is do not plant beans in the same bed every year, but I dont think you do that. Hoping this is of some help to you ......MM.

Sounds like fungus gnats, usually a result of overly wet soil. The larvae live in the soil and nibble on roots. They can be a chronic problem indoors, especially if the growing media is kept too wet. The control for them is Bt - same as for mosquitoes - an organic bacteria that kills them. You can just buy a package of Mosquito Dunks, dissolve one in a couple gallons of water and use that to water the plants to kill them. Dave