Wascally Wabbits

The cabbages that survived the rabbit attack are growing back.  I wonder if they've escaped attacks by the early cabbage worm moths.  We'll find out.  I planted marigolds amongst them to see if that was a deterrent to the moths, but that experiment has now been nullified, since, if they have escaped, I won't know if it's the late start or the marigolds that worked.

The lettuce has outrun the rabbits, but I'm paying for letting them run free in the garden.  Turns out, there are three large rabbits (at least), and they knocked my peas way back.  I was so looking forward to a great pea harvest.  

 I don't know if they have time to recover before it gets too hot for them.

See if you can find two culprits in this picture:

In a fine example of closing the barn door after the horse is gone, I've been spraying the pea stubbles with Liquid Fence deer and rabbit repellant. 

I ran out of Ortho Deer-b-Gone, and the Liquid Fence product was the only thing available when I needed to buy something.

Lowe's website has the skinny on Liquid Fence:

Putrescent whole egg solids and it's unscented???   

Believe me, this is wrong.  Deer-b-Gone has added cloves and cinnamon to its product, which is also primarily putrescent whole egg solids, that make the smell of it tolerable to the human olfactory sense, but Liquid Fence doesn't bother with such amenities.  It smells exactly like putrescent egg solids.

(Other  Liquid Fence ingredients are: garlic, sodium lauryl sulfate, potassium sorbate, thyme oil, sodium benzoate, citric acid, and xanthum gum.)

So do I.  And I thought you said it was unscented.

There's another contradiction in the information as well:

But...

If the duration of effectiveness is less than a day, why do you apply it only once a week? 

The beets are just little stumps that the rabbits left, but they don't eat the carrots or arugula.  Of course, the beets are sweet.  Hopefully the clover in the yard has grown up large enough to keep them out of the garden, in combination with the "unscented" Liquid Fence.

carrots and arugula

The arugula is reaching the maturity stagevwhere it's not as tender as I like it.  I sheared it off to see if it's easier to pick new leaves - if in fact it produces new leaves.  I haven't tried that before, and if it doesn't work out, I'll have to pull what's there and reseed.  It certainly spoils the ornamental function of the ornamental vegetable garden.

I used the clippings to mulch the two new rhubarb plants I put in this year. 

'Canada Red' rhubarb

Last year I finally broke down and bought a red-stemmed variety (which all of the ones I grew from seed were supposed to be) that I could see actually had red stems ('Canada Red').  It was so hot and dry that it died.  This year, the weather has been cool (and wet), so I'm hoping I can keep these alive with extra attention.  I had no idea rhubarb would be so touchy about getting established because they don't seem to have any problem when I divide them.  I suppose it's probably due to the fact that the ones I bought had been living in a protected greenhouse.

Seems like overnight the lettuce has been growing distorted.  Many of the leaves are cupping and curling.

I thought this was probably caused by some insect pest, and when I unfurled one of the celtuce leaves, I found this guy.

However, after unfurling a dozen more leaves, I didn't find any other insect.  Researching the matter online, at the Wisconsin Russell Lab, I found that the insect I found was a bean leaf beetle, and not something I think would be creating the damage, but simply taking advantage of it for shelter.

I haven't found bean leaf beetles on anything in the past, but there is very close cropland that's sown in soybeans every other year.  Last year it was in corn, however, and no alfalfa was nearby, so I don't know where this guy has been all winter.

At any rate, I'm quite certain that beetle didn't cause the damage, and although I have a microscope, I didn't bother ito nvestigate further, because the new grapes I planted this year on the opposite end of the garden have had cupped leaves ever since it leafed out.

Other causes of leaf cupping, according to the information I found, include physiological factors caused by ... too much water.  I think that's probably the culprit, because we have certainly had too much water this spring.  It's been difficult just finding dry enough times to get things planted.  I'll keep a watch on the plants to see if they straighten out.  Assuming, of course, that it doesn't keep raining torrents.

The lettuce is still perfectly edible.  It tastes great.

The onions have sprouted up and are now readily visible.  Well, they were until I mulched the bed with grass clippings.

 Onions

I was very happy to see them, because the ground was so wet when I planted the seeds, and the weather cool enough, that I thought they might just rot, which is what happened to the cucumber seeds. 

Thankfully, I had also started some cucumbers indoors, so I had plants to set out under my wagon wheel. 

I'm starting to wonder what I'm going to do for composted garden soil when my compost pile is gone.  It's about a quarter of the size it was when I started the garden five years ago.  It consists of all the grass and top couple of inches of soil from the plot where the garden is situated, plus plant matter and compostable kitchen garbage in the intervening years.  Last year, I pulled all the Egyptian walking (bunch type) onions from the garden and threw them on the pile. They happily put down roots.

I've planted my extra melon starts there. 

This year, I bought crimson clover seed from Outside Pride, which I'm going to use as a cover crop.  The idea is that I can turn it under to act as green manure and substitute compost.  The reason I chose clover is that it has the added benefit of "fixing" nitrogen in the soil (like all legumes do), making the nitrogen readily available to other plants.  I don't know how this is going to work out, but I already planted it in a plot where only a few zinnia seeds germinated. If it works out well, I'll plant it everywhere a crop comes out in the fall.

Here's a little money-saving tip that I hit upon last week:  Peony rings and U-shaped plant supports are quite expensive; $10 - $20 each.  I have six peonies that I've been debating with myself about whether to put out that much money to support, or just  keep letting the flower stalks fall.  Then I realized I had three useless store-bought tomato cages that looked a lot like something that could support a peony.  They certainly don't support tomatoes - much too small.  I took wire cutters and cut them vertically so that the bottom ring and legs were separated from the top two rings.  That gave me one taller, and larger, piece, and one a bit shorter.  Then I cut those in half through the rings, giving me six supports that I could spread open  to whatever diameter I needed to support the front and sides of each peony, like a U-shaped support.

Those cages cost $3 or $4 each, as I recall.  You can buy them in several colors, as well as the plain galvanized ones, so the green ones would be perfect.  You just have to be careful not to poke yourself on the cut ends.  And you have to have access to a wire cutter.  If not, you could just use them as they come before the plants grow too large to place the rings around them and still save a fair bit of money.

Till next time.

Bees in the chives