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Friday PhotoEssay – October 16, 2015
I’ll be honest that I’m just waiting for it to freeze so we can be done with things. Not that we couldn’t pull things out already, but it’s hard to do! You always want to see if just a few more things can ripen before the yanking happens. I’ve got a couple squashes that I want to ripen, but it probably won’t happen as the nights get colder.
We have slowly been removing tomatoes, but everything else is still growing strong.
The pole beans have really come on strong in the past couple weeks. The moral of this story is that fall planted pole beans can produce well, but spring planted pole beans are awful. Now the question is yield per square foot compared to bush beans…something to look at another year.
We haven’t had much for caterpillars in the garden this year, for whatever reason. We do have a few of these Black Swallowtail caterpillars on the fennel this week.
Not only are the pole beans doing well, the other varieties are producing well too. Beans are a versatile and productive vegetable, although I don’t often recommend them for a small space garden. Now I’m wondering about the pole beans again…
The Mexican Blue Sage (Salvia leucantha) is finally in full, glorious bloom. It is also very attractive to our bees. When I was trying to capture some good pictures, I realized that the grasshoppers are also enjoying the plant!
Have a great weekend!
Friday PhotoEssay – September 11, 2015
The Demo Garden has an Instagram account! Check us out @thedemogarden on Instagram. You can see a few pictures on a more regular basis.
The garden is still looking good after the rain this week. That said, on close inspection a lot of the plants are looking tired, so don’t feel bad if your garden isn’t perfectly beautiful anymore. The lovely lettuce in the close bed is looking a little bit skimpy today, and you will see why in the next picture.
The nice thing about growing red lettuce is that the green caterpillars show up really well. They have been having quite the feast on the lettuce, because it has gone from looking lush to munched in just two days. I had to go out and buy an insecticide this afternoon, because I was pretty sure the lettuce would have been dead by Monday.
When you are dealing with caterpillars, my preference is to use one of two organic products: spinosad or Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) dust. Because we only have a small area planted to lettuce, I bought a ready-to-use spinosad spray. Hopefully the lettuce is strong enough to put on new growth from the roots for this fall.
Since we are on the “death and destruction” theme today, I noticed that most of the leaves that had powdery mildew are gone (dead) since last week, although there are a few (like this one) still showing symptoms. I’m not 100% sure which variety is the susceptible one, but I rather suspect it is the ‘Butterpie.’
I know it is hard to tell because of the light, but most of the rest of the vines, including this one have huge, healthy green leaves. No sign of powdery mildew! I’m glad we have some great resistant varieties, I’m just bummed that I’m not sure which variety is which.
This time of year it is very common to see some big, crunchy grasshoppers. Here in town, they usually are around but not a huge problem like they can be in more rural areas. I think they are very attractive and photogenic – when there’s just a few of them. They can be huge at this time of year! They are not easy to kill right now, other than by smashing, so unless you have a major infestation, don’t bother trying to spray anything.
If your tomatoes look awful, don’t worry! Ours do to. It is natural for this time of year. They are working on ripening the last flush of tomatoes as we move into the cooler parts of fall. Incidentally, this picture is the ‘Beefy Boy’ which I gave a generally favorable review to earlier in the summer. I finally had a chance to taste one, and it is quite good. That means a lot, coming from someone who doesn’t generally care for red tomatoes!
Have a great weekend!
Next Caterpillar Onslaught
Just when I thought we had the cabbageworms under control, another caterpillar comes along and attacks another plant. This time it’s the sweet potatoes!
The sweet potatoes right by the door have taken on a rather holey appearance over the weekend. **Sighs** Now what?!?
The culprit was pretty easy to find. I turned over the first leaf that looked promising and saw this…
They look a lot like tussock moth caterpillars, very similar to some that we had on the sunflowers earlier this summer. Sweet potatoes are supposed to be relatively trouble free, so this is a little surprising. After doing a little research, it sounds like you aren’t supposed to worry about late-season leaf eating pests on sweet potatoes until they are 30% or more defoliated. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we may treat anyway. The Dipel (Bt) would most likely be effective here as well. I’ll keep you posted.
Continuing Caterpillar Saga
Yesterday morning we inspected all our Brassicas to see if we still had more caterpillars to deal with.
Um, yes. Yes we did. I know you see the bigger cabbageworm, but do you see the tiny one too? It’s along the purple midrib. These guys start really small but eat and grow quickly. Yuck. We also found some eggs that haven’t yet hatched.
We dusted with Dipel Dust to see if we could get better control. Of course, with the shaker cans, it is a real challenge to get even coverage and not put on too much. If we aren’t seeing better control by later in the week, we may have to bring out the big guns…I saw that one single cabbage butterfly can lay up to 300 eggs in its lifetime. I really don’t want these caterpillars to get to the adult stage!
Ugh…Caterpillars
Look what got munched on over the weekend?
I knew we were going to be fighting a long, grueling battle against the cabbageworms this fall, but I (mistakenly) thought that they wouldn’t start hatching out and eating until today or tomorrow instead of over the weekend. To see how quickly they started, there was virtually no sign of them on Friday. This morning the plants look like Swiss Cheese. UGH! I sprayed Spinosad this morning, and we will probably dust with Dipel either tomorrow or later this week.
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