No More Mr. Nice Guy

Well things just got real. My beet leaves have looked a little wilted and under developed for a few weeks. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. After much closer looks and research, I have discovered they have leaf miners which is a type of fly and it's larvae. I found this article about them. I even found some of the flies in action on some of the plants and killed them straight away. They are very small and hard to see, not like a regular house fly. I went through all of my beet leaves and found the tell tale white eggs and wiped/crushed all of them with my fingers. I plan on doing this at least a few times a week to help reduce the numbers since it is too late to put on floating row covers this year. Obviously next year I will place them in a different location and start with floating row covers to see if that helps. The other bummer part is that I found some of the white eggs on the underside of my spinach about ten feet away. I did the same to them by crushing the eggs. I would say I found eggs on about 75% of the beet leaves and about 33% of the spinach leaves. Another downer is that I found 3 leaves of my beets to have brown aphids on the underside. I ripped off the affected leaf and crushed the aphids between my fingers and disposed of the leaves. I looked around my other plants in the area, especially my Romaine lettuce and didn't see any signs of either of these two pests.

Oh, we aren't done yet. I have radishes on opposite ends of my yard, two different beds. Just got done plucking round two of radishes (as seen below) from the bed on the east side of my yard.

Look how pretty they are!

Wandered over to the ones on the west side. These are twice as old as the ones I just picked and while the leaves are developed nicely, the root itself was slow to develop. I always just attributed this to it not having as much sun throughout the day. Nope. I pulled up four or five radishes and all had white maggots in them. And due to the basic disgusting nature of them and how they aren't suitable for most viewers, I will not put up a picture. Just from some quick internet research, I believe they are cabbage maggots or root maggots? Bummer. Not a fan of that. So I guess it is off to the gardening store I go looking for alternative measures. I'll also take suggestions from all of you as well!