Daily Garden Chores

At this time of the year, daily chores in the garden amount to harvesting and weeding.  In dry years, it might also include watering.  The copious amounts of rain and the months-long run of high temperatures this year have been a boon to the weeds.

I'm not harvesting as many tomatoes as I'd like to be, but they don't seem to be thrilled with the temperature themselves.  I don't know which of the critters has been after my ripening tomatoes, but I've found a couple that would have been nice slicers had they not been chewed up by somebody.

I got the idea from my cousin's comment about putting pantyhose on cabbages to keep bugs off them to see if that could work to keep stink bugs and other piercing insects off the tomatoes.  It would take a lot of stockings, therefore making it impractical, but I wanted to do the experiment anyway.

I did see one bug crawl across a sheathed tomato and keep going.  I'm going to see if this lets me leave the ones near the ground to ripen longer without being eaten by whomever is coming around at night.  I think it must be a raccoon, because one of the tomatoes higher than a rabbit could reach was eaten, and I don't know how dexterous a possum is and whether they can get up on their hind legs.

I had to spray my roses with carbaryl (Sevin) again yesterday for Japanese beetle control.  That makes the third time.  The residual lasts a good while on the leaves, but those pesky boogers burrow down into the rose petals where the spray doesn't reach while the rose is still in bud stage.

They've been destroying my Julia Child roses as fast as they bud out.  They don't do as much damage to Pink Enchantment, very little to Shazam!, and they don't seem to bother the red roses at all.  Those are in shady spots.  I wonder if that's the reason.  I'll get at the spraying early next spring, because I'd like to have this kind of display all summer:

Pink Enchantment

Pink Enchantment

Julia Child

Red roses in shade (they were here before me; don't know their name)

Shazam!

Shazam!

Shazam!

Yesterday, I collected fewer beetles than usual from the okra, and this morning I found less than a half dozen on the plants.  Maybe their season is about to be over.  I sure hope so.  I've been picking them since the second week of June, and recalling that expert management article I read that said they only last about a month.

They will have laid eggs in the soil, so I know I'll have some next year again, but I hope that by having the carbaryl waiting in the spring I'll be able to stay ahead of them.  I'll still have to capture them from my okra.

Japanese beetles on ferned-out asparagus

I've heard a couple people talking about putting up pheromone traps that they purchased to rid themselves of Japanese beetle, and I think they've wasted their money.  When I was studying pest management, the consensus was that the traps actually lure beetles from great distances that you wouldn't otherwise have.  When I was doing research on the MU campus, I put up the traps down in an area away from the ornamental plantings just for that reason.  If those traps would keep the bugs off your plants, they might be worth it, but if even a few go to the plants instead of the traps, they can do a whole lot of damage in a little bit of time.  You might be helping your neighbors, however, by attracting their beetles to your place.

My pathetic little Kent Beauty oregano is still hanging in there and growing, and I'm cheering it on.  It has one tiny little flower on it.  Or, it had one.  I thought it was a flower that dropped off the lavender plant next to it and picked it off!  If you know what you're looking for, you can see it near the end of the stem at the bottom of the picture below nestled between light green bracts.  It's trumpet shaped and looks white in the picture, but it looked purple on the plant.  That's why I thought it was from the lavender.  Those bracts will eventually turn a pale pink, and perhaps that's why I never saw any flowers on the plant I had the first year.  They quickly blended into the bracts.  Or maybe it didn't flower.  I don't know.  But what I do know is that if I pick off the flowers, there's no way I'm going to get any seed.  They must be microscopic.

If the cucumber plants hadn't died off, I would expect to still be harvesting some of them.  And perhaps the squash.  Alas, I think too much rain did in both of those early on.  

I'm still tending some seedlings I've got growing.  I gave away eight rhubarb starts, and I have eight left.  I'll probably plant four or five of them - somewhere! - and give the remainder to a local church garden that donates their produce to a food bank.

I also have some cypress seedlings that I've dug up from sprouts in the yard and potted.  I'm hoping to get a few decent saplings to plant between the house and the corn/bean field.  There's one old beauty far too near the house that was planted back when the house was built, I think.  It drops its leaves into the rain gutters and clogs up the downspouts.  It's the only one like it that I know of around here, and hopefully, by the time it's dying off, I will have managed to get some of its progeny established.*

How is your garden growing?  I hope your harvest is plentiful.

Drop me a line in the comments section (above every post).

'Til next time.

*Update:  I've just learned that in fact there's a cypress at a house a couple of miles down the road, but much younger and smaller, and that someone else has one at a house in Blackwater, about three miles away.  I've driven by both these houses many times.  See how observant I am?