Update and Caterpillar Nightmare!

Another obligatory cloud shot. On this one I was having fun with negative space, and I like the effect.

My garden as of August 10th. The weed pressure has been very minor since I planted so late and the weather's been dry. Even in a large-ish garden I don't have to do much control. The landlord has since mown the surrounding weeds down.

It's been ages since I last updated and things in the garden have changed. We had several weeks of dry weather and then some soaking rainstorms, which seem to have jolted the garden out of its dry slumber. My tomatoes are thriving, my beans are finally getting ready to flower, my peppers are flowering, and my turnips have shot up like crazy. Since most people around here are already harvesting the above vegetables, we'll just have to see if these catch up.

My 'Garnet Giant' mustard greens are doing well. They're tasty, but zingy enough to need cooking. I love the color.

My first acorn squash. I got this on impulse at the garden store and put it in a neglected corner of the garden, but it seems to be doing well after a couple weeks of droopiness.

Does anything smell as good as a tomato plant? Oh I hope these make it to maturity!

This shot would have been cooler if I had a manual focus. In the foreground is a cucumber I bought as a seedling, and in the background are seeds I planted. In the few days since I've taken this photo, they've developed at least 2 true leaves.

When I planted this garden I tried to remain detached, since it's my first time with a real, full-size garden, and I had no idea if I'd succeed. I couldn't help but get emotionally invested, though, and now I'm terribly upset by the possible demise of my cabbages. This is worsened, of course, by my desire to make gallons and gallons of sauerkraut.

It turns out that the pretty white butterflies that were 'gracing' my garden are known as 'Introduced Cabbage Moths'. They ugly eggs at the base of the petioles of cole crops, which hatch into velvety green caterpillars. RAVENOUS green caterpillars. They go to town on the leaves, leaving shot holes and eventually destroying or at least greatly reducing yield.

They tend to be a problem later in the year because they've had months to reproduce. It probably doesn't help that the garden was surrounded by massive weeds that the landlord hadn't mowed, where the moths could have been chilling out and reproducing on cruciferae family weeds.

These were nifty until I realized they were massacring my cole crops :'-(

This head of savoy cabbage isn't too badly affected by the evil worms, but you can see some of their naughty nibbling.

So, even though I swore I wouldn't go to great lengths to save my garden from threats, I did anyway and bought up some insecticide at the hardware store. I wanted to start with tamer stuff so I got insecticidal soap and pyrethrin dust. My attempts at control were interrupted by a trip to the City and an all-day rainstorm, so the damage got worse.

I started by picking all the caterpillars I could find off of the leaves and throwing them in a bucket to drown. Then I started spraying both sides of the leaves with the insecticidal soap, but the squirt bottle was a piece of junk and would stop working every 3-4 pumps. This drove me nuts, but I got as far as I could before it got dark (about 2/3 of the plants). After a day and a half, when it stopped raining (this morning), I gave up on the insecticidal soap and switched to pyrethrin dust. It stuck fairly well to the leaves and was much easier to use than the soap--I focused it on the stem and petioles. By this time, the eggs had swollen ominously. It's supposed to kill insects on contact, so hopefully it killed any that hatched this morning. Unfortunately it poured rain today and washed the powder off a few hours later. Pyrethrins are quickly de-activated by sunlight, so perhaps I didn't loose that much activity anyway. In the future I will apply it in the evening when there's no rain predicted.

Who knows if my efforts to save my cabbages will succeed or not. I'll probably apply the pyrethrins again, and then consider that enough. There's always the colorfully rustic local farmer's market. There's only one stand that seems to grow vegetables professionally--the others are just people who planted extra and shelled out $5 to put up a stand at the market. Oh yeah, and the old lady who sells the junk out of her house and uses the market as an opportunity to chat with everyone in town. She specializes dogeared dime-store romance novels :-P

The collards don't seem to like the heat, so I may need to seed a third time, or just give up on them. You can see an evil moth on the left, just waiting to wreak more havoc.

The 'Carson Yellow Wax' beans haven't sprouted at all, much to my disappointment. I'm not sure if it's a bad batch of seed, the heat, or if the resident critters just like to eat the seeds right out of the soil.

Other than the cabbages, things are going pretty well. There are some plants that don't like the heat, so I may do yet another planting. They're doing a little better with the mass of cool air that's hanging over MN, courtesy of Hudson Bay. Let's hope it persists (as it's predicted to)...despite the cold, wet spring the crops seem to be happy this summer and MN is expecting a record harvest (though of course that's due to a record corn PLANTING, thanks to crazy high prices).

Tomatoes have been Staked

Another breathtaking cloud on the march.

If my tomatoes were vampires they'd be so dead. I staked most of them up using the wire frames that my landlords left with the barn. I have 21 plants (or rather mounds--some contain more than one tomato plant) and I staked up the western 2/3rds of them with the wire and did my best with the boxelder branches I cut a few weeks ago. I will definitely need to keep monitoring the tomatoes and tying them up as they grow. A couple of plants were damaged by lodging and a couple were damaged as I staked them, but hopefully they will recover.

So far two of my tomatoes are infected with what seems to be bacterial wilt. One died completely and the other is wilting and looking like it's walking towards the light. If the second one dies I will try a diagnostic test in which you put the infected stem in water and see if it exudes a nasty slime. If it does, it died from bacterial wilt. One additional symptom is yellowing of the lower leaves, which I didn't see, so it could be a different problem altogether. See factsheet here.

At this point I think the most likely explanation is that the stems got fertilizer burn and the ones that had it the worst are the ones dying.

Garden Update

So far nothing's germinated yet, but that's not surprising. I think I see some cracking in the soil over the beans, so hopefully they're doing their sprouting thing.

Half of my peppers are quite wilted now. I'm not sure what the problem is, since we got drenched in rain yesterday and it seems unlikely they'd be thirsty. From what I've read and heard, pepper plants often wilt, especially in hot weather. However, today was pleasant and in the low 80s, so I would think they'd be fine. Five out of five look happier than they did before the rain and the other five look wretched. I guess I will have to keep monitoring them. Like I said, they're in prime real estate so I can always replant. What I'm afraid of is phytophthora stem rot due to too MUCH water. Maybe I should back off with the hose.

My cabbages are looking happier now than before the rain, but I've seen some insect holes on the leaves. I was hoping not to have to get floating row cover this late in the game, but it might be necessary if they're going to make it to sauerkraut stage.