The Ornamental Vegetable Garden: September 2018

Welcome to Autumn!

First, a few bits and baubs, and then a look at the rose garden beauties.

I was sad to have to pull out the 'Savor' French Charentais melon vines. I'll have to plant extra next year. In their place, I've put a new planting of cucumbers. We'll see if they have a chance to produce anything big enough to harvest before the first fall freeze.

The mini sweet peppers are producing abundantly, but the regular bell peppers are pathetic.

The chili peppers produced well, too. I've never seen one split open like this before:

I don't know if that's because of a sudden supply of plentiful rain that made it burst or what happened. It doesn't seem like it's a way to disperse seed, because I don't think that seed is fully ripe. And I've only ever seen them mature, dry whole and drop.

Aside from the cucumbers and the peppers, the garden has otherwise pretty much run its course and is no longer a lovely sight.

If you get a diffrent angle, it's better, but not what it was only a short while ago.

I've just let the okra go, and little plants are sprouting up at their bases from seeds that dropped. Those won't get to even a flowering point, but I'll just leave them all until spring, including the old plants.

This one's seed pod didn't fully open before enough moisture collected to sprout the seeds right in the pod. Normally, the pods dry, split open, and the seeds drop out.

I've noticed some interesting insects this year that I haven't seen before.

This one I couldn't identify. I sent an email to the University Extension person who supposedly handles these things, but never heard back. Whatever it is, there have been dozens on the snapdragons. I've been picking them off and crushing them; otherwise, they eat the flower buds. If you know what its name is, drop me a note in the comments (link at the top of this post).

I planted fall cabbages, but I didn't keep them protected from bugs, and that was a mistake.

I thought that one plant pictured above might have gotten past the stage of whatever insect was eating them, which I though was grasshoppers. But, in a couple of days, it was nothing but lace like all the others.

When I finally decided to pull them all out, I noticed clusters of white eggs kind of webbed together and lots of frass (poop).

moth eggs and black dots ofcaterpillar frass on cabbage

When I downloaded the pictures I took onto my computer and inspected them, I also saw distinctive worms.

Cross-striped cabbageworm and eggs

I had to look this one up, as I hadn't seen it before. It could be that every year I've grown cabbage and have thought it was grasshoppers eating them, it was this guy instead. I never looked closely. Anyway, this is the very distinctive, if well-hidden, cross-striped cabbageworm.

I wonder if they're the same culprit that did this to my fall planting of tatsoi:

It may have been somebody else - maybe actually the grasshoppers. Whoever did it, did the same thing to my lettuce.

Praying mantids were plentiful this year. too bad they didn't keep down the pest insect populations. Or maybe they did, and without them it would have been much worse.

The bees were plentiful this year, too, thank goodness. Here's one in the wildflower garden on a pretty blue Lobelia.

I always get excited to see Monarch caterpillars on my butterfly milkweed. That's one time when I don't mind caterpillars devouring a plant.

I've seen American Giant Mosquitos before, but only in Georgia and Alabama. According to some information on the internet, the hurricanes in the southeast were pushing them further inland.

This one is the only one I saw, but one was enough. I did find out it's male, so it couldn't have stung me. Still, I'm guessing if there's a male, there's a female around somewhere.

The only reason I know it's a male is because I did some online research. The females apparently don't have feathery antennae.

That graphic comes from this website.

And here's a litttle video if you care to check it out. I'm guessing with climate change, we're going to eventually be seeing more of these guys.

Can you pick out the spider with her egg sack I spotted on my compost pile? I saw it only because it was moving. Otherwise, I'm sure I'd never have noticed.

I got one small celery plant this year. Perhaps my seed wasn't good. It was saved from the previous year's plants.

The zi su grew beautifully, and nothing ate on it. Not even me.

Unfortunately, it tastes pretty yucky to my senses, it wouldn't keep as foliage in a vase, and the flowers are unremarkablee. So, I finally cut it down.

The 'Black Pearl' ornhamental peppers grew taller than I expected. They're now sporting beautiful glossy fruit in shades of purple, red, green and black.

The cardinal basil is still blooming and full.

This guy made a surprise appearance in the lawn. When fully opened, it had a majestic diameter of 8 inches.

I thought I had killed my Madagascar palm. It fell over out of the pot and appeared to no longer have any roots, but rather a hollow core. It was beginning to sprout a bunch of new branches at the very top, and I thought maybe I could cut some off and root them. So I stuck it back upright in the pot and set it aside next to the house until I was ready to tackle it. To my surprise, those branches started leafing out quite nicely.

I suppose there's enough nutrition in the stalk to feed those branches in the absence of roots, but I don't know how long that will last. I really don't know whether to go ahead and cut them and try to root them, or see if the main stalk will put out new roots of its own. So for now, I'm just letting it be. I'll have to do some research on propagating this type of plant.

The last of the dreaded Japanese beetles did their damage the first week of September. Was I ever glad to see the back side of them!