predation fixation

First come the plants, and then come the pests.  Last week, I started seeing the first signs of the usual array of punks, ne'er-do-wells and rascals that bedevil my garden in mid-summer.

Japanese beetles are a definite garden scourge.  Their native habitat is in Japan and eastern Russia, where they are not considered invasive.  Apparently there's some sort of parasite there that seems to keep them in check.  They came here to the U.S. in the early 1900s, on iris bulbs.  And they love it here!  :)

I hate to spray chemicals in the garden, and even the popular Seven Dust can kill pollinators, like bees.  Japanese beetles are fairly slow-moving, and it's easy to pick them from plants and toss them in a container of soapy water as you move through the garden.

Keep a sharp eye out for black powder or accretions on plants.  I would've missed this thistle caterpillar on my yarrow without the tell-tale frass.

"Frass" is a fancy word for caterpillar feces.  If you see it on leaves, look above it.  There's probably a caterpillar eating there!

Thistle caterpillars become Painted Lady butterflies.  They're pretty, but I can't have caterpillars killing my plants.  I snapped off the stem beneath each caterpillar and squashed the whole lot.

Claudia is great at chasing rabbits out of the new garden and bringing them up to the porch, but she's yet to deposit a deer on our doorstep!  We have a lot of deer around here, but so far, we haven't had much damage.  We took down the electric fences around the new garden in order to properly plow it, and we're going to put up new fences...but not yet.  Sure enough, I found a trail of hoof prints last week, crushing (or almost crushing) several flowers.

Careless hoof prints are destructive, but not as destructive as their teeth.

ARGH!  Thankfully, it appeared to be one frisky night, and they haven't been back.  But they will, especially as the season heads on toward fall.  Good fences help to keep deer out, and so does Milorganite, an organic fertilizer sprinkled around fence perimeters.

Not all predators have four (or eight!) legs.  My sedum have been besieged by mildew.

This is a fungal disease that usually proliferates in crowded and wet conditions, although it's been quite dry here for the past few weeks.  This is fairly easily treated with a spray of baking soda and water.

To round things out, there's a predatory virus attacking my Black Beauty tomatoes.  It's transmitted by a type of fly and causes this tell-tale leaf curling.

Of course, tomato leaf curl might also be caused by too much water...or not enough water...or "general stress."  I'll just have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't get worse or start spreading to other plants!  The garden always keeps me on my toes!

The biggest pest, to me, is weeds.  Check out this strip, where I planted sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and nigella.  Looks nice and green, right?  WEEDS.

Of course, it's common sense that if you plow up a weed patch, add nutrition, full sun, and frequent water, you're going to get weeds.  We are ordering mulch, so soon I'll be able to spread wet newspaper in between the plants and mulch the top.  Heavy-duty landscaping fabric will cover the paths.  This will make a huge difference, because this is much too large to weed by hand!

All of these pests are better taken care of if you spot them right away and start treatment.  So far, things haven't been too bad.  Hopefully we'll have a relatively pest-free summer!

Otherwise, good things are happening.  I've mixed up the labels on my zucchini, watermelon, pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers, and cantaloupes...gulp!  But whatever they are, they're starting to flower.

Larkspur is blooming...

...and so is my Cerise Queen yarrow.  Yes, it's a major color clash with my Cherry Brandy Rudbeckia, so I'll have to dig it up and  move it in the fall.

I didn't like my Pastel Mix yarrow last year, but it's so beautiful now!  Pale yellow, pale pink, cream, and darker pink...just really lovely.

You can see it interspersed among the greenery in new front flowerbed that I added last year.

I've gotten some flowering in the new back garden, but...sigh.

I don't like short plants.  I have a few, but most of the varieties that I plant range from 2 - 4 feet tall.  I love tall, bushy, unrestrained growth!  These little zinnias are pretty pathetic.

Another example:  this is a Macarenia zinnia that I grew this year.

This is what they're supposed to look like (36" tall).

(photo credit Floret Farms)

I have to face facts:  these seedlings sat for too long in their pots, and are completely stunted.  They aren't going to do anything this year, and I can't save their seeds, because seeds from unhealthy, wimpy plants have a very good chance of producing a new generation of unhealthy, wimpy plants.  It's a bitter disappointment, BUT I have learned a lot of invaluable lessons this spring.  I feel very capable of doing some amazing things next year and have a huge flower garden that's blazing with color!  This year I'll focus on improving the soil and keeping down the weeds, and I'll continue to amuse myself by thinking that the turkey vultures that are frequently lurking over the garden are ready to swoop in for the kill on these pathetic plants.  Can't you just see a helpless bundle of droopy sunflowers clutched in his talons?  :)

Oh...and continue to try to stay cool in the increasing heat and humidity.

Have a great week!

going the extra chamo-mile

Late-spring and early-summer flowers have finally given up the ghost and are going to seed.  Alas, I don't have great luck with catching seeds before they fall.  Sometimes the seeds are so tiny that they're hard to find on the plant...sometimes the seed pods "pop" when they're ripe, so you have to time it just right...and sometimes I scatter seeds just by trying to remove the pods.  This year I read about a new method - the organza bag.

I ordered 100 of these on Amazon for around $7.  They're the little pull-tie bags that people sometimes use for wedding favors, and they're perfect for this.  Just invert them over the seed head and pull the drawstrings.  No need to tie!  The seed head will eventually die and drop the seeds into the top of the bag.  Just clip off the stem and you've got a bag full of seeds.

It's a miracle!  For the first time, I've successfully gathered Jacob's Ladder, Euphorbia, and Wild Geranium seeds.  Lots of Columbine, too, which can be tricky.  You've got to catch them while they're still a bit green and juuu-uuu-uuust starting to split at the top.

Some flower spikes are too large for bags, like these foxgloves that are going to seed.

Those little green balls are immature pods.  They will turn brown as they ripen, then they'll split and drop the seeds. I've got to catch them just before this happens! 

Getting better at seed collection has been an education, and so has learning about how to prune things the right way.  I enjoy deadheading, which is popping off a spent flower head or spike once it's finished its bloom.  But proper pruning has taken a little bit of study.  For example, salvia.  I have a lot of salvia, and it produces a fantastic bloom.  But the flowers die after a couple of weeks.  I used to just take shears to the plant and chop it down to the leaves, which you can technically do.  But a little bit of reading, and I discovered that I was delaying new growth by a couple of weeks.  If I just cut off the dead spike, right above the main set of leaves below the flower, new buds would grow out of that leaf set, which I have always sheared off.

Now I'm getting new blooms in a few days, instead of a few weeks!  Victory!

We're progressing quickly through summer, and new things are blooming.  Coneflowers!  From just a couple of small plants last year, I'm going to have quite a crop soon.

Black-eyed susans are opening up...

Sedum is blooming!

Bee balm is finally blooming, too.  I'm not too crazy about red and yellow together, but I'm too garden work-exhausted to do anything about it now!

I love the coreopsis.  It's so sunny and cheerful, and just requires regular deadheading to keep going all summer long!

I've got several large patches of german chamomile.  I love it!  I don't use it for tea.  I enjoy the ferny foliage and the delightful, bobbing flowers.

These, too, need to be cut back in a few days. If I, ahem, go the extra chamo-mile now,  I should get another nice flush of flowers in a week or so...same with these delphiniums, which are growing like crazy!  A quick snip once these flower spikes start to die and I should get new, healthy spikes again.

You can see from the front that many of my 'old faithfuls' are still plugging along...the yarrow, balloon flower, golden loosestrife, etc.  We just added the frost-free pump in front to make watering easier.  A planted disguises it nicely.

The side beds are doing well.  I've cut back the catmint, salvia, euphorbia, and penstemon.  Yarrow and coneflowers are just getting ready to open up.

You can see a bit of a green haze over the new back garden, but I remain a bit ambivalent about it.  I just don't think it's going to look much different until next year.

I'm deeply watering every day to help the transplants become established, because we haven't had rain in about 2 weeks, and it's been very hot and dry.  I can see flower buds forming, but on plants that are about 6"...that are supposed to be a couple of feet tall.  At least I can collect the seeds!

So far, rabbits haven't bothered this space, which will be fenced in soon...

Of course, Claudia is working hard to keep the local rabbit population down!

(This rabbit was only stunned and was able to escape while Claudia was distracted!)

We're soon going to be into my least-favorite time of the year - the hot, dry, humid stretch of July and August.  The weather has been great so far, so I think these hot months will be a lot easier to tolerate this year...I hope!  I can ease off a bit on gardening and concentrate on other hobbies that have fallen by the wayside. 

Have a great week!

field of schemes

IT IS DONE.  Finally!

Those dark spots aren't uneven beds, just the spots where I've watered.  Here is a better idea of the bed shapes:

Let me start at the beginning.  When we were looking at this property, I saw the potential for a big flower cutting garden in the front field.  But as is, it was looking a little...rough.  And this picture was taken in early spring, before the field filled in with weeds.

Fast forward to this year.  We ordered lots and lots and lots of compost...

...and hired someone to level the field.

Then the compost was spread and the field was heavily tilled.  Todd and I dug out those paths, which we'll later line with landscaping fabric and top with mulch.  The garden was plant-ready! 

Unfortunately, my plants weren't exactly thrilled at the prospect of another move.  These little guys have been through the ringer!

I got off on the wrong foot with my seeds, using the wrong soil, wrong containers, wrong light, and wrong watering methods.  They had to be transplanted again...and again...and again as we dealt with project delays (the original plan was to have the plants in the ground by mid-May).  I finally ran out of containers, so they had to sit, root bound and crowded, while the job got finished.  They did NOT appreciate yet another move, especially in this heat, but it had to be done.  I actually felt a bit down while I was planting, because I'm not sure that I'll get a single flower from my efforts this year.  Because of the huge delay, the plants are stunted and their stems are weak.  Look what happened with my snapdragons, which were supposed to be 3 foot monsters, but because of sitting too long in pots only grew about 15" tall when I finally got them in a bed.  Weak and small flowers, too.  They should've been spectacular...but the timing just didn't work out this time.  I accept that I did everything possible to have a great garden this year, and even if it's just a dirt patch with green sticks, IT IS DONE and all ready for next year's flower bonanza, when I'll start my seeds inside, under grow lights, in mid-March.  It's nice to have this extra space for new plant purchases this year, and I've already had a visitor...and a gift!

She loves it when I spend as much time outside with her as possible.

We finished another near-and-dear-to-me project last week as well.  Remember our eyesore of a chicken coop?  Before we moved in, I don't think the back of the property had been touched in over 5 years.  Yikes!!

The inside was full of garbage...old tires and metal junk.  Todd and I cleaned it out...

...and beckoned to the dozer.  It was going...

...going...

...gone.

We had the space flattened, because we're getting ready to extend our red barn another 30 feet or so.

Half of that new space will be devoted to my garden projects...hooray!!  I've taken over our two-car garage with my soil mixes, pots, and tools...and I need space for shelving (seed starting) and grow lights.  We're also adding a very cute chicken coop with a little fenced-in run in front of the white animal barn.  Things are really starting to come together around here!  It's been so nice to work outside, sweet-smelling hay fields  and tree-covered slopes around the flower field...

...and plenty of blue skies overhead!

We've even been walking through the back fields a bit, even though they're a month overdue for a mow and the grasses are chest-high in places.  There's a dog at the end of that leash...somewhere!

I had to remove 2 ticks from Todd's back after this, though.  Hopefully we'll get it mowed soon!  We're talking about mulching a path down to the water, so we'll always be able to get there easily, even if the grass gets a bit high.  But that's a project for another day.

Have a great week!