Vine Borers, Cabbage Stalks, and Pickles

Yesterday I spotted a vine borer moth flying around the lone pumpkin that sprouted on its own in a flower bed. I had pumpkins wiped out by this bug a couple of years ago. It lays eggs near the base of the vine and when they eggs hatch, the little worm eats its way inside. Once in the vine,it just keeps eating and growing. Eventually it's eaten so much that the vine wilts and dies. That's how I found out I had them...one morning all my vines were wilted and dead.

When I saw this moth yesterday, I watered the pumpkin and added a little imidacloprid at the base of the vine. This is one of my favorite chemicals. It gets absorbed by a plant and makes the plant poisonous to bugs but not to us. One bite and it's dead bug. I don't know if it's approved for pumpkins but I won't be eating these anyway so I'm not that worried. Hopefully it will work.

We've had hot dry weather for a long time. We finally got rain last night. According to my rain gauge we got an inch and 7/10. That's a lot of water.




This morning is the first time in weeks that I don't hear a dozen large diesel irrigation pumps running at full throttle in the far off distance. Also noticeably absent is tap-tap-tap of a dozen large irrigation guns that we've been hearing and seeing in all directions. It's oddly quiet.

I have been growing "Giant Walking Stick Cabbage" as an experiment this year. According to the info that was in the seed catalog, these things grow a tall stalk with something similar to a cabbage at the top. The dried stalk is supposed to make a good walking stick. Right now these things look like big kale, and are just growing at ground level. No stalk. I have been expecting these things to make some sort of stalk with a seed head just like lettuce, raddish, spinach, and other similar plants will when the weather gets hot. Turns out I was wrong.

I did some searching and found out that to get the stalk, you need to remove the lower leaves. as long as you keep removing the lower leaves, it will grow taller and make more leaves. So this morning I removed the lower leaves. Now it's looking more like I expected.




Something's been cutting the leaves off of my peppers. Probably a leaf cutter worm of some sort.



Now for some of the good news:

I had my first peach this morning. Not as soft and ripe as I prefer but good enough to eat and actually tasted like a peach. We'll probably only end up with a dozen actually etable peaches between the fungusus, insects, june drop, and other problems but this is my first year getting any peaches so a dozen's better than none. (I almost said 12x better but everyone knows you have to multiply 0 by ∞ to get 12 but somehow a dozen peaches just doesn't feel infinitely better)

The pear I thought I was going to loose hasn't shown any signs of fire blight in a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of summer left so I'm not out of the woods yet but I'm hopeful. It's even still got a few pears on it.


And finally, I had enough cucumbers and dill to make a batch of pickles. I made some last year that were not terrible but were too salty. This year I changed the recipe a little and increased the amount of vinegar and only used half the salt. I used my own cucumbers and dill and had to buy garlic. I did spears, flat round slices for burgers, and long flat slices for sandwiches. We'll know if they're any good in 8 weeks.