check for bugs!

This is the time of year when the cutworms and wire worms can do a lot of damage.  Unfortunately there is nothing you can do at this stage about wire worms other than plan for next years rotation.  Cutworms on the other hand can be managed at this point.  Cutworms like loose mellow soil, usually on south facing slopes/hills.  They tend to be  little bit worse on peas stubble or silage or on grass that was broke last fall and is now in canola.  However they can also be in wheat stubble from last year and can show up in fields that have never been a problem in the past. So its a good idea to take a quick look at your canola fields and look for any cut off plants.  If you find any, brush the surface soil away starting shallow and working your way deeper.  Cutworms are usually right near the surface however if it is wet they could be deeper.  They can be yellow, red or a brown grey in color and will curl into a ball wen you touch them.  Its well worth your time to check and make sure you don't have any as apposed to assuming you don't have any.
So far the Bertha forcast is low for our area and the diamond back moths are late this year but this can change quickly depending on our heat units.

Flea Beetles

Now that your canola is all seeded and coming up nicely, its important to keep an eye on insect pressure to make sure your hard work in seeding is not wasted.  It is easy to panic when you see some feeding on the cotyledons of your new canola, but think it through and take a closer look.  The threshold for spraying is 25%  of the cotyledon eaten, and gone.  This is a lot of damage and looks like far more than 25%.  In order for the beetle to die they have to ingest some of the leaf as that is where the insecticide from the seed treatment goes to.  So a little bit of damage is a sign that they are there but they are also dying. This is totally normal and something that happens every year.  Don't panic but keep an eye on it to ensure that they are really dying and the population is not increasing.    There are two kinds of flea beetles in our area, Crusifer (the all black smaller beetle) and the Striped which has a stripe running the length of the beetle on each side.  The Striped is a bit bigger beetle therefore it has to eat more leaf to get enough insecticide into its system to die.  They are not resistant to the seed treatment but rather just a bigger insect to kill. Something else to think of is that the canola has not been sitting in the ground for three weeks waiting to emerge, it is out of the ground with in a few days and is growing rapidly.  In many cases the crop will out grow the beetle competition and get to the stage where the beeltes don't harm the plant.   but there is the odd case where the beetle population increase to the point there are just to many mouths to feed.  Keep in mind you only want to do a maximum of two applications of insecticide per year for residue reasons, and that every time you spray to kill bad insects you are also kill and reducing the population of the natural predators that do the same thing.  Its a catch 22, if you have a population of insects worth spraying then do so for sure but try to avoid spraying just because its easy to throw in the herbicide tank in case there are some flea beetles there.  Take a look, this is threshold!   
As always call if you have any questions!