Squash Vine Borer Nearly Kills Tomato

Remember that Pantano Romanesco tomato plant whose top suddenly flopped over and died? Well I was trimming the crumbly desiccated bits and found a hole in the stem. Yep. It was a squash vine borer. There's even the tell tale "saw dust" trail in the hole, a sure sign of vine borer activity.

There have been a few of the red moths flying around which are the adult version of the vine borer and of course plenty of cabbage moths fluttering about as well. Luckily the squash plants are still much too little to seduce the moths into laying their eggs, but I'll be spraying Bt on the broccoli and Brussels sprouts tomorrow.

It was actually a fairly large plant and Pantano Romensco is an excellent variety, but it'll now get replaced with a Jubilee tomato. One of the last three unplanted tomato plants that I've been babying after finally potting up the poor root bound creatures.

Today I'm tying up tomato plants in the Florida weave style and later watering the garden with a dose of rock dust. I have to admit, my back is killing me and I'm taking breaks each time I finish tying up a row. This style of tomato support system will get much easier once the plants get taller.

Almost forgot to mention. This year I've seen a tiny insect pollinating the tomatoes, a pretty shiny blue-green flying insect with "saddlebags" for carrying pollen just like a normal bee. I've seen them once before at our old place, the year we had a spectacular tomato and pepper harvest.

Treating the Garden With Beneficial Nematodes

We got the beneficial nematodes in the mail yesterday. My husband immediately brought them inside so they could cool down. They need to stay below 85 degrees Fahrenheit or you risk killing them, I had paid for expedited shipping and yesterday was our coolest day of the week at 82 degrees.

On the back of the insert they list a lot of the insects the beneficial nematodes are supposed to be affective against their larva, and the big one for me is flea beetles. They won't do anything for the adult flea beetles but it's supposed to kill off their young. And hopefully these nematodes will reproduce in the garden and maybe help eradicate flea beetles.

It actually came with 2 packages of sponges but I'm only showing one here. The sponges themselves smell like death. It's really awful. The application is easy though, water the area you're going to treat first, then squeeze the sponge into a big water-filled watering-can and they apply the nematodes over the wetted area, and then water the area again after application. It's like you're watering your garden three times. Each sponge is supposed to do 2 applications, for a total of 4 applications from two sponges. I went ahead and applied the nematodes yesterday once the sun had passed the house and the garden was in shadow.

I've seen little white cabbage moths flying about already so had also ordered some Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). I'm planning on giving the beneficial nematodes 4 days to penetrate the soil before applying the Bt on Sunday. The rest of this week is supposed to be blazing hot with the weekend getting close to a 100 degrees (38 Celsius). It seems overly hot already, but luckily the humidity isn't as awful as it can be.

Harvest Monday, 6/6/16

 Garlic scapes, a first time harvest for us. It has a surprisingly powerful scent.

The scapes was used in this fried tofu, broccoli, and sesame seed dish with a homemade sweet and sour sauce. One of my husband's favorites.

The harvests are very light at this point. Although the Mother Stallard pole beans are just starting to bloom. It's been a slow start to the season with planting being thwarted by rainy weather, but just about everything is in the ground and growing.

Please join us at Harvest Monday hosted by Our Happy Acres. A place where garden enthusiasts share the things happening in their gardens.

The Last Things that Need to Be Planted in the Garden

There's still six packs of Asian greens that need to be planted, pak choi to the left, gailan behind the pak choi, mibuna to the right with choy sum behind it. The choi sum flowered after that string of 95 degree days, I'm planning on adding it to some ramen soup soon.

There's Simpson lettuce to the left which is a wonderfully tender loose leaf type, and tatsoi to the right with its spoon shaped leaves.

I think that's a late flowering type of choy sum on the left and of course the frizzy leaved mizuna on the right.

With greens and herbs I generally pot up the big plants giving them time to grow stronger in a controlled environment, while the tiny plants immediately get set out in the garden. This is supposed to be a classic Italian basil, and it smells really good.

Siam Queen Asian basil with it's intense licorice aroma. It's more affected by drought conditions with leaves dying off from lack of water, but it's hardy enough to come back and produce well. I've had plants last all summer, just keep pinching off the flowers and the plant will branch out and produce more leaves.

These are the extra basil I've been setting out in the garden. See that odd puffy wrinkly basil to the back left and to the right? That's Bolloso Napoletano, it's supposed to grow leaves the size of your hand and have a wonderfully intense flavor that most giant basil lacks. I have a couple dozen potted up but forgot to take a close up picture of it.

An enormous planter with more gailan surrounding a sweet potato.

There's also pak choi growing in styrofoam containers.

This container of pak choi keeps getting dug out by critters. There's a couple other styrofoam containers  that are currently planted with garlic. Once the garlic is pulled they'll be filled with Asian greens.

The broccoli is tiny compared to last year, they're being invaded by leaf miners and other insects that keep nibbling on their leaves. I fertilized them a bit yesterday and I'll be looking for Bt at local stores, my friend mentioned that Bacillus thuringiensis is sold as mosquito dunks that you can add to a big barrel of water and then wet your plants with it. Ah, never mind, that Bt is specific to mosquitoes.

The shelly pole beans are doing fantastic, they're filling out their trellises really well but something is eating the snap pole beans. I find holes all the time where the plants are completely pulled up, so weird. Birds still hang out in that part of the garden because there's no soaker hoses set up there, so... Are they to blame?

The rain is thwarting us. There's no way we can start on the fence this weekend. But next week promises to be sunny and dry. Hopefully the mason who's working on our foundation will be able to come out then, too.

I missed taking a picture of our lawn after the dump truck debacle. My husband ended up rototilling and reshaping the whole non-garden area, we'll be adding a couple yards of soil to fill in low spots and then reseed the grass. It's better this way, you always end up with patches of different colored grass when you don't know the variety.

Hot Chilli Peppers are Finally Planted in the Garden

My husband and I saw a funnel cloud forming while driving home from dinner Wednesday, luckily it started breaking up once it neared the river. Just a few weeks ago a small tornado hit a town 20 minutes from here. The tornado sirens in our town are incredibly loud and unnerving, a strangely forlorn up and down cry like a voice wailing in anguish.

I'm so happy the hot peppers are finally planted in the garden. In just a couple days the chilli plants have already doubled in size (it just seems like that), they love being planted in the ground and sure are enjoying the heat and humidity. This bed contains 38 pepper plants with 31 of them being hot chilli peppers. There's  about 2 feet between rows and 1 foot between plants within a row.

The tender new growth on this Corno Rosso sweet pepper plant are a pretty lighter green in color. My plants are still small because I had to reseed after a tragic overheating incident where I believe the seeds got cooked.

Aji Lemon Drop hot chilli pepper with its cupped leaves, these are supposed to be especially hot with a wonderful citrus-y flavor.

Serrano hot peppers immediately start producing side shoots when they're very small, they even have side shoots at their cotyledon's point of attatchment. They're a very hot pepper, although not as hot as Santa Fe Grande which I'm also growing.

Four Korean Ginkaku melons were planted amongst the pepper bed. I'm hoping they're similar to the melons we ate while visiting my dad in Virginia.

The tomato supports will get put in some time next week because this weekend I'm helping my husband put in the support posts for a fence. So exciting! The tomato support system I've decided to use this year is the Florida weave which just uses t-posts and twine, two things I have lots of.

On Tuesday, I accidently sat on this Celebrity tomato while planting basil the next row over and snapped the top off, it was just hanging by a piece of skin. I taped the stem back into place and it seems to be doing fine.

But I don't know what happened to this Pantano Romensco tomato, the top part just flopped over and died. The stem isn't broken or anything, makes me think of insects or some kind of disease, or maybe it got wacked with the heavy hose. 

I'm going to have to give up on growing eggplants in the ground, it's impossible to fight the flea beetles. Should I dig them up and replace them with pepper plants, or just leave them in the ground and keep fighting the battle? I still have a few eggplants in pots that'll probably end up making the front porch their home.

Gray-blue little mushrooms, very delicate and only lasting a day before disappearing.