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.

More good than bad.

Today the carrots are almost carrot sized.




I first noticed watermellons on the vines about a week ago. Now they're probably 6" across.





The tiny, sickly little pepper plants have more pepper than plant.





The celery looks just like the stuff in the store. I even used some in a pasta salad the other day. I plan to wrap them in paper soon for a couple of weeks to lighten the stalks and remove some of the bitter flavor.





The corn is as high as an elephant's eye today.





The cucumbers have cucumbers





The replacement tomatoes in the garden have a few tomatoes and even my hanging tomato has tomatoes.





And best of all, the Japanese Beetles keep dying.

Mystery Wilt

It was suggested that my tomatoes have Fusarium wilt, a fungus, and that's why they're looking bad. I did some reading and I don't think that's what I have. It could be, I'm not a plant pathologist and I don't have a lab but it doesn't look like the pictures and description on the net.

With fusarium wilt, the fungus moves into the plant through the roots and is does damage to the tissues in the stem that transport water and nutrients. There should be visible dark spots between the woody inner layer of the stem and the outer layer. Since they're in bad shape, I cut a couple down and looked inside. No dark spots.

no black spots

Although the whole plant just looks sickly, the tips of the new leaves look the worst and this doesn't seem like fusarium either.

mystery wilt

Just in case, I wanted to spray something. It seems like the right thing to do so I gave everything a good coat of Daconil fungicide. Hopefully I can stop whatever this is from spreading.

So I don't know what's really wrong but as long as it doesn't spread to other plants the point is now moot. I pulled the bad tomatoes out and bought a couple of nice big tomato plants yesterday at the garden center. These got planted at the other end of the garden so they don't get the same disease. So now I've got two plants instead of seven but I don't like tomatoes anyway so two is plenty.

new tomatoes, not dead yet

In other garden news: I couldn't' find any cucumber plants last weekend to replace my dead ones. I got lucky and found some yesterday while looking for tomatoes. I've finished the cucumber trellis and should have enough for pickles now.

cucumber trellis

The bush type peas in the garden didn't do very well. We got a few pods but they never really took off. I've had trouble with peas before. The vine type peas did well on their trellis and are just about done. If we want any more peas, we had better pick them in the next few days.

peas

I personally don't want any peas and I can't imagine anybody else going out to pick any so I guess we won't have to eat any peas. Peas are pretty bad, even for vegetables. My daughter ate a few pea pods when they were smaller with ranch dressing and like them that way. They don't have much flavor when they're small pods so the pods were really just a ranch dressing delivery system and I can appreciate that but now that they actually taste like peas, I'll pass.

peas

So far so good

It's summer, it's hot, and a lot has happened since my last post on the 8th. Two weeks ago I was loosing peaches and my pears had what looked like fire blight.

The permanent plantings

So far, so good. The peaches stopped dropping and I've still got a lot left on the tree. I'm assuming there was just too much fruit ont he tree and it was natural thinning.

Peaches, almost full size

I've had to cut out a couple of more branch tips on my pears as they curl and turn black to keep the fire blight from getting a real foot hold but there hasn't been any new damage in a week so I'm hoping I'm out of the woods. The few pears that were on my two small trees are still there and starting to look like pears.

pears looking like pears

The apples have been doing well. They've got some brown spots but nothing that's really going to hurt them. They're not pretty enough for the supermarket but I'll eat them.

apples

The only other permanent planting that's doing anything interesting is my grapes. I've got grapes, lots of them. Most are hidden under the leaves but you can see a couple of bunches on the left side of this picture.

grapes

Now onto the garden.

You might remember that I'm trying some giant walking stick cabbage this year. I think they're doing well. I have no idea what they're supposed to be doing but they're not dead. This is one of this year's odd ball plants I'm trying. I should have walking sticks in no time.


The corn and sugar sorghum is looking good. Actually, only about half the sorghum came up but that half is looking healthy. Corn always does well until just before it's ready to be picked. Then beetles eat the silk, worms move into the husk, or earwigs take over.

The broccoli came on unusually early this year. I cut the first heads a couple of weeks ago and it was already full of worms. I'm going to let the rest go to seed without cutting any more. I just want to see how that happens and I can buy broccoli at the supermarket without worms. If I was starving, I could eat the broccoli. Thankfully I'm not.

The onions are looking great. I don't have much luck with onions so I don't know what's different this year. Usually, they get rotten right at the ground line in the early spring.

corn and a sparse row of sorghum

Celery is starting to look like celery, The lettuce and other greens are past their peak and should be sending up flowering stalks to make seeds soon. I've never tried planting lettuce from my own seeds but I have had them go to seed and ended up with a yard full of lettuce in the fall. There are hundreds of little 1/4" diameter carrots.

everything else (almost)

I planted 5 tomatoes. Three regular full size tomato plants and two grape tomatoes. They're not doing well. I don't know what's wrong. They haven't grown much, they look a little wilty and the color isn't really as green as they should be. There are a couple of diseases that can do this but they've been like this for three weeks and if it was a disease, they'd be dead.

I've still got some room left so I think I'll try some new tomato plants on the other side this weekend.

underachiever

I had planted 8 cucumbers. only two have survived. The two look good but I'm also growing dill and was hoping to can some dill pickles. I went looking for cucumber plants last weekend to replace the dead ones but no body had any left. It looks like I need to finish stringing the trellis for the cucumbers this weekend. I am going to try growing them up on a trellis to keep the cucumbers off the ground.

lonely cucumber

I can win the battle, can I win the war?

We were chased from the garden last Sunday evening by a thunderstorm with several rows left to plant. The live plants survived the week in my dark shop and I got some planting done tonight. I finished up the corn and now have three rows. I may plant another couple of rows in a few weeks to extend the harvest. I always plan on doing that and get tired of gardening by then. Maybe blogging will keep me going just so I don't look like the quitter I am.

Half a row of dill and half a row of cucumbers finished up tonight's planting. The dill was planted from seed...tiny, paper thin, impossible to manage seed. The instructions on the pack said to plant 2" apart and thin to 6". The row is more of a continuum of seed than individual seeds. In fact, the wind picked up slightly while I was trying to get some of the extra seeds back in the packet and now my garden is a continuum of dill seeds.

I bought the cucumber plants last week. 4 pickling cucumbers and 4 "tasty green" cucumbers. cucumbers take up a lot of room on spreading vines that take over the garden. Last year I tried growing the vines on a trellis, I'm going to see if I can improve on that this year and grow them up instead of out.

I canned a few jars of pickles last year. The bread and butter pickles were pretty good. The regular dill pickles came out way too salty.

There's still more I plan to plant this weekend so I'll probably have another blog soon.

COLORADO POTATO BEETLE AND HOW I WON A BATTLE
My wife found a Colorado potato beetle walking through the garden tonight. These things are the worst. They eat potato, tomato, and other plants down to the ground some years and they've developed resistance to just about every pesticide there is. The home owner remedy is to spray B.t. or Bacillus thuringiensis, a bio-pesticide based on the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis. Even that only works if ingested by the beetle and only when it's in the larval stage. Not really much help when a thousand beetles are chomping on your garden.

Colorado Potato Beetle.
AKA Potato Bug

Always looking for a better way, I came up with something last year that worked against the Colorado Potato Beetle. Before I share, I want to let you know that according to the pesticide label, "It is against federal law to use any product in a manner that is inconsistent with its labeling." And I always respect federal law, even the really really stupid ones. So consider the following a fictitious story.

There is a fairly new (not much more than a decade old) pesticide that Potato Bugs aren't resistant too yet. Yes, that's what we call them...potato bugs. This new chemical is sold under a couple of different names. One that's used for the Potato Bug is Admire. Admire is sold only to licensed commercial growers and is only sold in quantities that would be ridiculous for a guy with a garden to own. But the same chemical ingredient (imidacloprid) is sold in garden centers under the name "Bayer advanced Tree and Shrub Insect Control".

And yes, that's the same Bayer that makes aspirin. It seems that chemical companies are chemical companies and when you discover one that makes you better, you market it as a medicine. When you discover one that kills stuff, you just market it as a pesticide.

Although the chemical is the same, the concentrations of the Bayer Tree and Shrub pesticide and Admire are very different so I had to do some math and mix the stuff with water to get the concentration right. Converting Admire's listed "active ingredients per acre" rate to the little 18 inch circle I'm spraying around a plant took some figuring and I'll have to do the math again this year but I ended up with such a small amount of chemical needed that I mixed it with an eye dropper. But this stuff worked well and worked immediately. I had dead potato bugs within hours.

There's more good news. This chemical isn't just for potatoes. The same chemical is also sold for use on lots of fruits and vegetables under the name Provado. With a little more math, I was able to figure out the right mix and protect just about everything in my garden last year. Last year was the first time I actually let my garden grow all season. Every year before that, I gave up and just mowed it down my mid-summer because of all the damage done by insects, weeds, and disease. But I've mostly tackled the insect problem.

And the best part is Imidacloprid is systemic. It's drawn into the plant through the roots and gets into the entire plant making the entire plant poisonous to bugs so once it's applied it works for a long long time.

Now I just need to find out a way to kill whatever's eating my strawberries.

The strawberry patch massacre.

Finally past the frost free date

Saturday was busy but Sunday was planting day. I've been waiting for May 15th for a long time. May 15th is our "Frost Free" date, supposedly the last day frost can happen. We actually haven't had a frost for a month or so.

I picked up a flat of plants. Two six-packs of green bell pepper plants, two six-packs of yellow bell pepper plants, two varieties of cucumbers for canning pickles, half a dozen regular tomatoes and half a dozen grape tomatoes, and 4 watermelon plants.




I've never seen chocolate peppers before and I like trying odd-ball stuff so I had to get them. Last year I had 4 tomato plants and we had 30X more tomatoes than we could use or give away. I only really want two plants this year but they come in packs of 4 or 6. To get two different varieties, I ended up with more than I can use.

It's looking like I'm going to run out of room in my garden. I've only planted just under half the space so far but I've got big plans, so I need to save space. I planted the peppers and tomatoes between the rows of lettuce, spinach, peas, and other greens. Since the leafy vegetables and peas will be done before the weather gets really warm, and tomatoes and peppers are subtropical plants that really take off in the heat of summer, I'm hoping the leafy stuff will be gone just as the tomatoes and peppers start to take over the space. Another garden experiment.




After planting a row of a dozen peppers and 5 tomatoes, my 8 year old daughter and I marked out, raked smooth, trenched, planted, and covered a row of silver queen sweet corn. I plan on doing 4 rows of corn. We were starting to mark out the second row when a storm blew up. We grabbed everything and ran for the shop. So now I've got a flat of cucumbers, watermelon, and the extra peppers and tomatoes sitting in the shop waiting to be planted.