[cabbageworms, begonia seedlings]
I hate to spray. That’s why last week I wrote that I’d rather snap the ends off ears of sweet corn infested with earworms rather than spray the corn to avert damage. That, despite the fact that the spray, Thuricide, isn’t poisonous to humans and most other creatures besides corn earworms and related insects. Today I had to spray, using this very material on a different plant.
Thuricide, one trade name for the bacterial insecticide Bacillus thurengiensis karstaki, or BTK, is specific against lepidopterous caterpillars. Lepidoptera is the order of insects that includes moths and butterflies (which these particular caterpillars become). Some lepidoptera, such as the swallowtails, are very beautiful. Other lepidoptera, such as those white moths that flit about cabbage, broccoli, kale, and related plants, are mundane.
Those innocent looking white moths are the culprits du jour, laying eggs on cabbage and its kin. The eggs hatch into velvety green caterpillars, known as imported cabbageworms, with voracious appetites for these same plants’ leaves. Although the insects’ camouflage is almost perfect, they can be spotted in various sizes if you look closely, especially on the undersides of leaves.
This morning I checked kale seedlings to find that they had been stripped to their main veins. This damage might spell death to them. Then again, it might not. Besides eating leaves of larger plants, the caterpillars also typically work their way in among broccoli buds. The insects turn pale green when cooked, making them look too prominent on that plate of cooked broccoli — yuk!
Because I dislike spraying, I hold off as long as possible before spraying Thuricide. Large plants can, anyway, tolerate a certain amount of damage. Not the seedlings, though. Perhaps this spray will hold the imported cabbageworms at bay for the rest of the season.
******************************************
Last fall I wrote of an exciting tuft of leaves sprouting in a flowerpot. The plantlets were the result of sowing dust-like seeds from some Mandalay Mandarin hybrid begonia plants. Excitement mounted this spring when the frail seedlings started to grow robustly and, then, when only a few weeks old, began to flower.
The seedlings have now grown up into sturdy plants that are smothered with flowers among the attractive, lance-shaped leaves having wavy edges. Like the parent, a plant that I highly recommend growing, the offspring have been flowering nonstop all summer, and keep up a neat appearance by cleanly shedding spent flowers. The resemblance of the children to the parent extends to the appearance of the flowers, which are red with a tinge of orange and dangle downward from the stems.
How odd all this resemblance! Mandalay Mandarin is a hybrid, the result of a breeder’s deliberately bringing together the pollen and egg cells from two carefully selected parents, perhaps a number of generations of carefully selected parents. When you sow seeds of any hybrid, be it a tomato, a begonia, or any other plant, the hybrid’s parents are, of course, different from the children’s parents, so the children should be different from their parent. My seedling begonias’ parent was Mandalay Mandarin; Mandalay Mandarin’s parent were — who knows what?
Carol Deppe, in her excellent book Breed Your own Vegetable Varieties, points out that a similarity between children of a hybrid and the hybrid could come about if the hybrid was not really a hybrid or if the parents of the hybrid were very, very similar.
At any rate, I now am growing, in addition to Mandalay Mandarin hybrid begonias, some other topnotch begonias that are genetically different from Mandalay Mandarin. The two siblings that made it alive through last fall and winter, now that I look at them, also look identical to each other. How odd, but beautiful.
[bagged grapes, squirrels, fig]
Almost everyone, upon taking their first step out my back door, glances upward and says, “What are those bags for?” They’re looking at my grape arbor from which dangle bunches of grapes as well as white paper bags. To me, the purpose of the bags is obvious: to enclose some of the bunches. Perhaps the fact that not all the grapes are bagged is confusing. Perhaps people are thrown off by the inscription “Fresh Delicious Wholesome Baked Goods” printed ini bold letters on the bags, which I bought in bulk from a bakery supplier.
Grapes are a luscious treat not only to us humans, but also to birds, bees, and some furry creatures. And disease organisms, such as black rot and powdery mildew, enjoy “eating” the berries as well as the leaves. The bags keep birds and furry creatures from eating the grapes or, at least, makes these creatures first figure out what is inside the bags and then work to get at the fruit. (I don’t think the bakery inscription throws them off.) The bags also keep the bunches dry and less susceptible to diseases that need moisture to flourish.
Bagging grapes fends off all these threats to let grape bunches be harvested when they are thoroughly ripe. And I mean thoroughly ripe, which is usually after the recommended harvest date for a particular variety. What a treat to tear open a bag to reveal a perfect bunch of grapes, dusted with their natural bloom, very sweet, and very rich in flavor! In autumn’s cool weather, ripe grapes hang in prime condition, bagged, for weeks.
Bag a bunch of grape by first making slits a couple of inches down each side of the open end of a paper bag. After snapping off the leaf or tendril opposite where a bunch attaches to the vine, a bag can be slipped up over a bunch and then its top folded back down over the stem and itself to seal out water and insects. Two staples, one on either side of the bag, hold it in place.
So why are aren’t all my grape bunches bagged? Because bagging all the bunches on the dozen different grape vines here would be too tedious a job. And anyway, not every unprotected bunch gets pilfered or diseased so we just eat the unbagged ones first.
******************************************
Squirrels seem to have receded back into the woods, and not because I played bagpipe music at them (which, I reported previously, was found to scare or otherwise keep rats away from tourists in Vienna’s historic sewers).
I still may resort to bagpipe music. For now, I have live traps ready, baited with peanuts and wired open for a few days so that any errant squirrels feel more at home wandering into them for a meal.
A few weeks ago, squirrels cleared green fruit from my one old apple tree, which was the one apple tree that did not get sprayed with Surround, a commercial clay product for organic insect control. Perhaps squirrels left my other trees alone because they don’t like the taste or feel of the clay. Just in case, today I gave all the trees still laden with apples another spray of Surround.
*******************************************
Today, July 20th, we ate our first ripe fig, a Green Ischia, picked from the greenhouse and almost the size of a tennis ball. Halving the fruit reveals a glistening deep red, juicy, sweet flesh.
This first fig is of the so-called breba crop, the crop that ripens on stems that grew last summer. My Green Ischia breba crop is always light because I had to cut back many of the stems late last fall, as I do every year, to keep the plants from overgrowing the greenhouse.
The main crop should start ripening in about a month, and fresh figs will continue ripening well into fall. Main crop figs form and ripen on new stems, a bearing habit that makes it easy to keep a fig tree from growing too large and makes it possible to harvest fruit well north of fig’s subtropical origins. All that’s needed is a season long enough and hot enough for new stems to grow, develop, and ripen fruit. The more drastically a plant is cut back (or freezes back), the longer the season needed to ripen fruit.
My other two varieties — Brown Turkey and Kadota — bear only main crop fruits. Their large crops of fruits, nearing ripeness soon, are different from each other and from Green Ischia, but are equally delicious.
[ligularia]
As of this writing, launch of the space shuttle Endeavour has been again delayed; here in the garden, though, the Rocket has been soaring for days. That’s Ligularia ‘The Rocket,’ a perennial with a whorl of dark green leaves at ground level from which shoot skyward 5-foot-high vertical spikes lined with small, yellow flowers. The flowers open from the base up so each spike is streamlined by being more slender and less colorful as you look up the spike. Sort of like a rocket.
In contrast to the Endeavour, Ligularia ‘The Rocket” doesn’t need bright, sunny days to launch. In fact, leaves typically wilt in full sunlight. Then again, growing in shade, the spikes would curve towards light, ruining their rocket-like appearance. So filtered sunlight is generally recommended for this plant.
My Rockets are in full sunlight, just outside the low fence to the rear of the vegetable garden, where they provide the same sort of backdrop for the garden that a row of flags on poles do for a architecture. Fortunately, the vegetable bed right inside that fence receives daily quenching with drip irrigation, so the Rockets can steal a bit of water from across the fence and thrive.
Today is dry, sunny, and breezy, but the Rockets are soaring high.
