Eye of the Beholder - Bumblebee Love and Garden Update

Bumblebee on dahlia that also has fed thrips and Japanese beetles.

The bumblebee in the picture to the right doesn't care that the petals of the dahlia have been ruined by thrips and Japanese beetles. The bee is after the abundant pollen, and the petals are relatively unimportant compared to the sweet spot in the center of that amazing flower.

Zucchini in August? It's a Miracle!

Tattered squash stem from Vine Borer activity.

The state of the main stems of these plants makes the late summer zucchini harvest even more of a miracle. 

Squash vine borers have made a mess out of each of the stems, which are looking all tattered and worn out. The borers are very thorough in their work!

Apparently. though, the plants still have enough life in them to support a little more zucchini.

I'm pretty sure that these few squash (pictures below) really are the last efforts at producing fruits for these plants, but I have never had zucchini planted in April still productive this late in the summer.

I'd like to think that it's because I'm such a great gardener, but it's probably just dumb luck.

When I saw the very first evidence, back in June, of borer activity on the stems (little piles of frass), I slit the stems open with a sharp knife and sprayed the insides of each stem, soaked them, really, with Bt for caterpillars.

A great looking late-summer zucchini.

Then I sprayed the stems thoroughly, up to the point where new flowers were opening; then I piled compost onto the lower parts of the stems where I had done my little bit of surgery.

Regardless of whether my little effort made any difference, we are enjoying our zucchini, and will continue to enjoy it every day until it's gone.

Hope there are some nice surprises in all the other gardens out there, too!

More zucchini in August. Amazing!

Not an Avanlanche of Food, but Close Enough

This might be my best "zucchini year" ever. We have brought zucchini, sometimes two or three squashes at a time, to the kitchen almost every day for a few weeks now. Some of it went into the freezer this past weekend, and some went into the freezer the weekend before this one.

Our green beans have produced enough for current meals, but we have harvested more at the garden/farm where we volunteer on Saturday mornings. This weekend, we not only managed to get a lot of our own zucchini into the freezer, but my husband canned 16 pints of  green beans, we made a batch of blackberry jam, made a blackberry pie, and we put a couple of quarts of blueberries into the dehydrator. Not exactly an avalanche of food, but it was a very busy weekend!

The raspberries and blackberries in our yard are never quite so abundant as the blueberries, and they have passed their peak of production. However, the berries have really brightened up our breakfasts. Most of the blackberries that went into this past weekend's jam were from our Saturday work. The berries below are from our yard.

The peppers are doing pretty well, and the cucumbers are now producing "eatin' size" fruits.

The bad news is that the day-flying moths of the squash vine borers that I saw awhile back did exactly as expected; they laid eggs on my zucchini plants. The hole in the big petiole below is a sign that the eggs have hatched and the larvae already have bored into my plants. It is likely that, in a few days, I will need to pull these plants from the garden.

In the better-news category, the cucumbers are about to provide a lot more food. We had a cucumber salad tonight with our potato/zucchini soup, and if all goes well (I have heard some sad tales of downy mildew recently) we should have plenty of cucumber salads ahead of us.

Bad News Bugs

Just before I left town for another trip to Oklahoma, I saw three adults of the squash vine borer flitting among my plants, and I smashed two Mexican bean beetles in the bush beans. It looks as though the pests are going to be as early as the veggies have been! These are two pests that typically cause a lot of damage in my garden, and I know that my zucchini-days, especially, are numbered.

Also before I left town, I pulled up two tomato plants that were not thriving. The two were both Rutgers, which is normally my emergency backup, never-fail variety. Apparently, this gardening year is going to throw one curve after another at the veggie gardeners! When I pulled up the two plants, there didn't seem to be anything overtly wrong. The vascular system looked clean (not gunked up with fungus) and the roots were un-knotted (no root knot nematodes); the roots were not vigorous, though, and the plants weren't growing well. Since I don't know yet what went wrong, I planted sunflowers in the spaces those plants were pulled from.

I got back home on Tuesday evening and didn't have chance to do much more than take a quick look around the garden. Everything looked basically fine. But when I went around on Wednesday to check things out more closely, I saw that one tomato plant had been attacked by a pest:



The gaping holes and some black frass (poop) that had fallen onto some lower leaves were a huge give-away that the pest is one or more caterpillars, but I didn't see any at first. When I leaned across to the next plant, though, I found one:


This guy is very bad news. He/she is an armyworm, and like the squash vine borer and the Mexican bean beetles, this pest has made an early appearance. My copy of the book The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control contains this somewhat alarming sentence about these caterpillars:

Larvae can consume whole plants in 1 night.

Needless to say, I have a date with a little sprayer full of Bt (the bottle I have is called Thuricide), the organic-approved pest control substance for caterpillars.

Even worse, when I was looking at the tomato-neighbor to the damaged plant, the plant on which I found the armyworm, I found some of these brown lesions on the lower leaves:


It's a little faint in the photo, but the ringed brown spot indicates a disease called Early Blight, which means that this particular plant is a goner. Several leaves had similar lesions. After verifying the disease with my handbook (hoping that my first guess was wrong), I got out a pair of pruners and a big garbage bag so I could get this plant out of the garden.

The plant was big, and it already had nice big tomatoes on it - making the loss especially annoying - and it had to be cut up to be removed from the cage. Cutting through the stems was a revelation! The insides of all the stems were already completely brown, and the lower stem was mushy inside.

I haven't decided yet what to plant in the space from which the diseased plant was removed. It shouldn't be another tomato or tomato-family relative, but that leaves a lot of options open.

Happily, the biggest problem some of my plants have is that they are so overloaded with pretty flowers that they are falling over.  Bee balm always reminds me of fireworks, but my husband thinks they look like Sideshow Bob, from The Simpsons.

Squash Vine Borer Unveiled

One of my favorite neighbors stopped by the other day to let me know that he was going to find the borers in the squash stems in his Mom's garden. I walked back to his yard with him to see the damage.



His Mom was there, too, so I got out my pocket knife and handed it to my friend (after asking his Mom if he was old enough, at 9, to use one). The stem was still tough, so getting to the borers wasn't easy, but it turned out that the stem was pretty full of the little guys.



The larval borer, on first glance, resembles a grub more than a caterpiller, but the lifecycle of this particular insect is well-documented. We know what it is.



In my yard, I sprayed the zucchini with Bt (bacterial product that is toxic to caterpillars) once each week through June, but the plants haven't been sprayed since I got back from Texas. The spraying did seem to delay the borers in my yard, but my squash plants are just about done-in, too. Luckily, I have some young squash plants growing under netting right now. They have begun to flower, so the netting will come off soon.

The netting prevents the adult borer moth from laying eggs on my plants, but it also will keep bees and other pollinators away from the flowers.

Right now, the flowers are all male. When I see the first female flowers getting ready to open, I might pull off that netting. I might, though, hand-pollinate those plants until they are just too big to fit under the netting. That strategy would probably give me the most squash.

Squash Tales

This is a picture of my sister-in-Louisiana's garden. The last time I actually saw the space it currently occupies, I was helping my sister mark out the garden with stakes and string and then spraying the spiky weeds that lived there with RoundUp. I am so glad she sent me a picture! It looks a lot like I imagined it, and the plants look great.

My sister has bought most of her seeds at the local "feed & seed" store, but some plants were given to her by a friend who is a Very Long Time Gardener (decades). One plant that he gave my sister to grow was supposed to be a cucumber, but the plant is producing zucchini.

This would normally be fine, except that my sister's husband really does not like zucchini. This particular plant is growing and producing like crazy. When my sister was telling me about it, I was reminded of a cat we used to know. This cat wasn't especially social, but it seemed to know when someone was around who didn't like cats. He would hone in on the cat-disliker and hop into the person's lap and just purr away.

The cat pretty much ignored all the rest of the people, who all liked cats, who might be nearby.

This squash plant is like that cat. It is producing abundantly, copiously, for a family in which the man of the house has to actually leave the house when squash is on the stove, because the aroma of its cooking is so overwhelming for him.

Of course, the zucchini in my yard, longed-for as the plants matured and treasured when the squash were finally produced, have all keeled over (weeks ago!) from the squash vine borers.

However, at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden where I volunteer, one of our gardeners went through the squash patch and carefully sliced open infested stems, pulled out the larvae of the squash vine borers, then covered the wounded stems with dirt. Many of these plants have continued to produce squash for weeks beyond what we would normally expect, so squash-stem surgery is going to be a standard treatment in the upcoming years!