[japanese beetle, hibiscus sawfly, maypop]
Today, June 30th, I saw my first couple of Japanese beetles of the season. They looked innocent enough, a single one on a grape leaf earlier in the day and then another one on a different grape leaf later in the day.
I know they weren’t the same beetle because each one I saw I wrapped in its resident leaf and squeezed hard. Ruthless? Perhaps. But any beetles now could be — probably will be — forerunners of hoards to come. What’s more, the more beetles that show up, the more new beetles will be attracted. And last summer’s wet weather provided good conditions for the beetles’ egg-laying in grassy areas, so plenty of young ‘uns might soon be making their way out of the soil. (Then again, last summer’s cool weather might have put a crink in their fecundity.)
In previous summers, I hung beetle traps that drew beetles in by use of a sex attractant. Each day I “harvested” bagfuls of beetles, which my chickens ate. Like most birds, chickens do not relish Japanese beetles. Problem is that traps, even at the far ends of a property, can attract more beetles to an area than they catch, especially if not emptied frequently. And remember, having some beetles around attracts even more beetles.
This summer, the plan is to spray a nontoxic repellant on some of my most susceptible plants: filberts, hardy kiwifruit, and grapes. The material: kaolin clay, sold commercially as ‘Surround.’ Raspberries and roses are also beetle favorites but spraying the latter would ruin the fruits, which are now ripe, and spraying the former would ruin the beauty of the blooms.
Japanese beetles stop feeding to lay new eggs in the ground in August, so the Surround should wash off by late summer and fall, when the filberts, kiwis, and grapes are ready for harvest.
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Japanese beetles have cosmopolitan tastes, feasting on more than 300 different kinds of plants; another annual pest, hibiscus sawfly, chews leaves of only one plant, hibiscus. It does sometimes broaden its pallet a bit to nibble on related plants such as rose of sharon, cotton, hollyhock, and okra.
Afflicted hibiscus look ragged but still manage to cough forth a few blooms. You don’t need many blooms to put on a good show because each one is the size of a dinnerplate and, on my plant, at least, fire-engine red. Other varieties come in more subdued pinks and white.
Still, more healthy leaves should make more blooms so I decided to do something about the sawflies this year. As soon as the first holey leaves appeared, I checked for the creepy caterpillars. Handpicking is an option but seemed too tedious so I mixed up a quart of Safer’s Insecticidal Soap, which is nothing more than a specially formulated soap to kill insects. Gardeners of yore used regular old hand soap as a similarly nontoxic insecticide.
One spray, thoroughly applied to the tops and the bottoms of the leaves, thoroughly did in the sawflies. Repeated sprays will be necessary to do in subsequent generations of the insect.
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Enough about pests! A flower equally striking as hibiscus yet much smaller is passionflower. I’m not sure what species I have now in bloom because this particular plant was mislabeled when I purchased it (at a supermarket) and there are many species and hybrids of passionflower.
At any rate, the flowers are spectacular. Picture 3 club-like, purple speckled stigmas, backed by 5 yellow anthers, in turn backed by a crown of myriad, thin, deep blue threads, short ones back by long ones, with a white midsection in some of the long ones. Finally set all that intricate beauty against a backdrop of 10 deep purple petals.
All these flower parts are what put the “passion” in passionflowers. Lest any eyebrows go up, the “passion” referred to in the name is the passion of Christ. When Christian missionaries arrived in the Americas, they saw in wild passionflowers the symbolism of the crucifixion — the 3 nails, the 5 wounds, the crown of thorns, etc. — and went on to use the plant as a seventeenth-century teaching tool for spreading the gospel.
The passionflower I wanted, and which was spelled out on the plant’s label when bought, was maypop (Passiflora incarnata). This species is native to eastern US and is actually hardy outdoors here. The stems of this species die to the ground each fall, then sprout anew late each spring from overwintered roots. I have one plant and wanted another for needed cross-pollination. Maypop has flowers equally spectacular to the unknown passionflower species. And more: delectable fruits that look and taste just like the tropical passionfruits, the main flavouring in “Hawaiian punch.”
Since I bought the unknown plant I’ve gotten some other maypop plants, so plan on enjoying the fruits of my labor in a few weeks.
[Tomatoes for G, Healthy tomatoes, Pea problems]
My daughter Genevieve does not like to garden but does like good-tasting vegetables, especially tomatoes. So when she recently moved to the third floor of a rented house with access to some backyard space, I, of course, offered her some special tomato plants and help in planting them. No, this wasn’t necessarily going to be a garden, but 9 tomato plants bearing fruits of minimal labor.
The plants — the varieties Anna Russian, Amish Paste, Sungold, Carmello, and Valencia — went into the ground at the end of May. I brought along, besides the 9 plants, some building paper (“rosin paper”), bamboo stakes, a small sledge hammer, compost, and soybean meal (for nitrogen fertilizer).
To plant, we first knocked down some of the existing weeds sprouting along the south border of the narrow, thankfully sunny, city yard. A sprinkling of soybean meal at each planting site was topped with an 18 inch by 18 inch square of the paper slit to its center, into which we cut a planting hole just big enough to accommodate a plant’s root ball. Each plant went into a root-ball-sized hole poked into the ground beneath the opening in the paper. We covered each paper square with an inch or so of compost, hammered a bamboo stake into the ground next to each plant, and the tomato planting was complete.
Genevieve’s job was to water the plants for a few days to get them established, to keep the plants to a single stem by pruning off suckers, and to tie the plants to the stakes, as needed.
I’ve started whole gardens with a more refined version of this paper/compost method, so this week’s visit to the “garden,” possibly Philadelphia’s most low-maintenance “garden,” brought no surprises. The plants were growing and tomatoes were on their way. I couldn’t restrain myself from whacking back weeds that had grown up beyond the paper barriers to shade some of the plants. I stopped my whacking every few minutes to move the end of a hose from one plant to the next to thoroughly soak the ground beneath each plant.
Great-tasting tomatoes are scheduled to begin about the third week in July.
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Tomato plants in my own garden also require little care from me now, basically nothing more than periodic tying to their stakes and occasional weeding.
In contrast to last year’s summer of late blight, plants this year look lusty and fruitful. Late blight has already been reported this year in isolated pockets in in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and on Long Island. My plant’s healthy look comes from a thorough cleanup and composting of diseased residues last year, moving this year’s tomatoes to a new location in the garden, and starting my own planting from seed. All these measures also go a long way to thwarting the other leaf spot diseases (septoria leaf spot and early blight) that more commonly attack tomatoes around here.
The hot, sunny weather also helps a lot, ultraviolet rays and heat stopping late blight dead in its tracks.
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Back in March I wrote of my pea problems. In brief, every year for the past few years, my peas have begun bearing pods and then too soon afterwards have begun to yellow and die. I thought I narrowed down the cause to one or two root diseases of peas, fusarium and aphanomyces, both of which live for a long, long time in the soil, making crop rotation of limited utility in their control.
To keep these diseases in check, I planted the fusarium resistant variety Little Marvel and, because aphanomyces likes wet soil, kept the pea beds on the dry side. I also made one planting in an area that’s never been home to peas.
The only peas still thriving are the ones planted in a previously pea-less home. Pulling up yellowing vines from the other beds did not, unfortunately, yield tell tale symptoms of few branch roots (aphanomyces) or reddish roots (fusarium), so I’m still in a quandary.
[, rain]
June 17, 2010
a gardener’s notebook
by Lee Reich
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Last summer’s incessant rains and the late blight of tomato that the rains helped spread make this spring’s dry weather especially welcome.
Dry weather does, of course, mean that watering is needed. The vegetables are under the care of battery operated timers and drip irrigation lines. Water drips out the lines for a total of 20 minutes each day, spread over intervals during daylight hours. That might seem like lots of water, but it’s not; at each watering, water drips very slowly, at the rate of 1/2 gallon per hour, from emitters spaced 6” along the line running down each bed. Spreading the watering throughout the day replenishes soil moisture as plants use it up.
Beyond the vegetable garden, plants are on their own for water — except for newly planted trees, shrubs, and flowers. All these plants get off to a good start with some hand watering which, depending on plant size, may be once after planting or once a week the whole season. Hand watering can become tedious, but the plants love it and it’s crucial to getting them established.
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A couple of cloudbursts last week got my gardening friends excited. Not to be a stick in the mud, but the rainfall was actually paltry. Yes, it did feel torrential at times, an effect heightened by the rumbling of thunder and dark skies.
A rain gauge tells all, though. In fact, only about a third of an inch of rain fell (0.39 inch, to be exact, at my house). Through summer, a garden needs, on the average, about an inch of rain per week. An inch of rain wets the soil to the depth of about a foot, which is where most plant roots reside. So that third of an inch of rainfall, following on the heels of weeks of dry weather, didn’t go far.
Then again, it’s still early in the season. New roots haven’t yet filled the soil to suck up all the soil moisture, and young plants and annuals haven’t grown enough new stems and leaves to pump that moisture back into the air. The soil is still a reservoir for last winter’s rain and snow. I planted some new berry plants in my berry patch yesterday and the soil there was still plenty moist. That’s because the ground there lies beneath a permanent blanket of wood chip and/or leafy mulch. Expect the soil to be drier beneath bare ground or lawn.
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Rose de Rescht, basking in all that sunlight, is in spot where I haven’t yet mulched the ground. This is one old-fashioned rose that is supposed to blossom all summer long, but the blossoming has tapered. Perhaps Rose de Rescht is just taking a short rest from its burst of spring blooms. Perhaps soil is too dry. I’m going to water it by hand, then mulch. A gallon of water sprinkled slowly around the base of the plant is equivalent to an inch depth of rainfall (over a square foot), enough for another week of dry weather.
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Nix on that watering; two-thirds an inch of rain fell in the hours since writing above. Let’s hope for sunny weather for a week, then another inch, total, of rainfall.
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Any gardening questions? Email them to me at garden@leereich.com and I’ll try answering them directly or in this column. Check out my garden’s blog at www.leereich.blogspot.com.
