Category: Garden

No, hovering cardinals.

Hovering cardinals, hoovering up sunflower seeds.

I thought that by the time my sunflowers put their heads down (left), at least some seed would be safe from the birds.

 

 

Guess again.

 

 

 

Briefly, here’s my garden update.  Details follow below.

1. Squash vine borer.  Spinosad spray appears to have been almost 100% effective in preventing squash vine borer damage.  Lot of work, though.
2. Powdery mildew.  I’m currently trying three sprays for powdery mildew on cucurbits:  mouthwash, milk, and “triple-threat” spray (horticultural oil-potassium soap-potassium bicarbonate).  This is after several prior fails documented in an earlier post.  Provisionally, the “triple threat” spray appears to be working.
3. Cucumber beetles are still here.  I seem to have reached an equilibrium of finding and crushing around six per morning.  Bacterial wilt (spread by that beetle) has killed virtually all my cucumbers, and I am stubbornly replanting the same species for a fall crop.
4. Regarding sunflowers:  I never knew that cardinals can (briefly) hover like hummingbirds.  What they lack in grace, they make up for in determination.  As long as the prize is black oil seed.
5. Summer squash vines will run.  Mine are climbing out of their raised beds and down onto the lawn.  I now have some yellow squash set a good solid 8′ from the root of the plant.  Never had that happen to me before.
6. Pumpkins.  Pumpkins everywhere.  If I can get the powdery mildew under control, I’m going to end up with my back yard being my own private pumpkin patch.  I harvested my first pie pumpkin a couple of days ago.

Details follow. Continue reading Post #G17: Garden update: Flying Yogis?

Edit:  See Post #G19 for something that actually worked.  That said, once your pumpkin or squash leaves are as heavily infested as these are, a) even if you kill the mildew, those leaves are going to remain badly damaged, and b) you have to keep re-spraying, otherwise the mildew re-infects them.  So, yeah, I found a fairly strong spray that appears to kill the mildew without killing the leaf.  See G19 for the recipe.  But I’m still pondering just how much that gained me, in the context of pumpkins.  Above all, I’m now spraying everything — healthy leaves too — so as to prevent powdery mildew, instead of just spraying the obviously infected leaves.

In short, I’ve learned a lot, none of it was enjoyable, and the moral of the story is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Right now I’m figuring out something that will work with a hose-end sprayer, because once you get to the point of having hundreds of square feet of pumpkin vines, going around with a one-gallon pump sprayer on a weekly basis is just tedious.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that the ONLY way to go about dealing with powdery mildew is to get a bunch of one-quart spray bottles, make up small batches off the recipes suggested by various sources, and try them in small amounts, all at the same time, to see if any of them solves your problem. 

Don’t do what I did, which was to pick one plausible recipe and spray the entire garden.  Then see that fail.  Then pick another one and spray the entire garden.  And repeat.  To my credit, I only did that three times before I woke up to how stupid that was.

Instead, make up a half-dozen small batches of a half-dozen plausible anti-mildew sprays, spray a half-dozen leaves in your garden, see what works, and take it from there.  That’s a lot less work and gets you an answer a lot faster.

There are probably different strains of mildew, there are different plants that get it, we all have different weather and different micro-climates on our plots, and when you get right down to it, what works for somebody else may or may not work for you.  And that’s why you’ll see people swearing by cures that did not work at all for me.  And that may be why what worked for me — see G19 — may or may not work for you.

The original post follows:

 

August 4, pre-treatment

 

 

 

 

 

August 5, one day post treatment

 

 

 

 

 

August 6, 2 days post treatment.

 

 

 

Based on the early returns, I’m calling this one in favor of powdery mildew.  I can now add Neem oil (70% hydrophobic extract, Bonide Rose Rx) to my list of things that haven’t stopped powdery mildew on my pumpkins.

I mixed and sprayed this meticulously according to the manufacturer’s directions.  If you look closely, you can see that not only did this last treatment leave the existing patches of mildew untouched, it didn’t even keep it from spreading.

Maybe this works for other plants, or under other conditions.  But it pretty clearly failed for my sugar pie pumpkins this year.

That’s now a total of four failed attempts to find a powdery mildew eradicant, including:

• Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) mix
• Potassium bicarbonate mix
• Hydrogen peroxide solution (three days running)
• Neem oil solution

No point repeating the recipes (given in prior posts) because none of them seems to have worked.  Not where I need it, which is on my pumpkins.

On the plus side, aggressive pruning seems to be the complete solution for powdery mildew on summer squash.  The idea of pruning summer squash was new to me this year, but I’ve now run across several seemingly competent YouTube gardeners who do that.  I can now attest that summer squash will grow new leaves as fast as you can reasonably prune them.  In particular, under current conditions, they’ll grow new leaves much faster than powdery mildew can destroy the old ones. 

The upshot is that my summer squash look fine.  Not because they are completely resistant to powdery mildew, but because all the infected leaves are in the trash,  not on the plant.  I don’t think I’m even going to bother to spray the summer squash any more, because vigorous pruning seems to be an adequate solution.

I don’t think pruning is a solution for pumpkin vines, as they won’t regrow leaves.  Or, rather, all the new leaves are at the trailing ends of the vines.

I stumbled across this fairly comprehensive list of potential treatments.  Most appear to be protectants, not eradicants (see Post #G15).  I will continue to experiment.

Addendum:  Up to now, I’ve been testing these substances serially, one after another, spraying all the relevant plants in my garden every time.  Sometimes, waiting to see if there’s an effect. 

And as a result, a) my powdery mildew problem just keeps getting worse, b) time is slipping away, and c) I’ve wasted hours of time by, in effect, spraying my entire garden with a placebo.

If all I’m going to do is stumble through a list of possible cures, none of which works on my pumpkins, it should be adequate to spray just a few leaves each time.  Failure to cure this on a few leaves will tell me just as much as failure to cure it in my garden generally.

Which brings me to the obvious face-palm moment.  The smart way to do this is to test all the remaining candidates at the same time, making up micro-batches and spraying just a few leaves with each substance.  Test them in parallel, and test them as soon as possible.

I’m not seeing any commercial product I can get that advertises itself as an eradicant.  Other than neem oil, above, which did not work.  Daconyl is just too toxic to use.  Serenade ™ is a protectant.  Triazole fungicides and sulfur are recommended only for the earliest stage of infection.  I assume the same holds for copper.  Various systemic fungicides are unappealing because I’m going to eat the produce.

I think the list of potential eradicants that I can get is a fairly short one.  Might as well try them all.

Above:  Extremely over-ripe Boston Pickling cucumber.  Source:  My garden.

Another gardening post.  Just move along if you have no interest in gardening. Continue reading Post #G13: Et tu, cuke?

Just a few brief gardening updates.  If you’re not into gardening, move on.

---

Shade your tomatoes. It appears to work.

See these little green guys, pictured left?  We’ve gotten to know each other on a first-name basis this past month.  Every day, I would come out and swear at them, individually, and at length.  And every day they just sat there, full-sized yet completely unripe.

 

But note the slight tinge of orange, on the alpha tomato.  That just showed up today.  He and his green brothers and sisters appear to be ripening now.  Just two days after I set up a sun shade for them.

As discussed in Post #G11, this year a lot of Vienna gardeners are experiencing tomatoes that won’t ripen.  Myself included.  Gardening gurus on the Vienna plant swap Facebook group suggested that the problem was that it’s too warm.  We went from too cold, to too warm, and didn’t spend enough time in the 75F sweet spot that promotes tomato ripening.

A quick check of the science verified high temperatures as the likely culprit, with a common solution being to shade your tomatoes.  So, two days ago, I shaded my tomatoes using a couple of pieces of PVC for the frame, and three layers of very thin floating row cover as the roof.  The idea was to reduce light transmission by 30%, which I verified with a light meter.

And two days later, amid the hottest days of the year, as if by magic, those very tomatoes are now starting to ripen.  Oldest first, as is the way of the tomato world.  With no other tomatoes in my garden ripening yet.  Either that’s a heck of a coincidence, or shade is just what they need to ripen in this hot weather.

So I’m checking this one off in the gardening success column.  Give it a try.  Per the reference above, you can shade them by doing something as simple as draping thin shade cloth over your tomato stakes.

---

Damnable squash vine borer (SVB) moth is still here.

I thought we’d reached the end of the SVB season, but that’s not yet so.  I saw one this afternoon on and around my pumpkin vines.  They are tough to catch in the best of times, but when the weather gets hot, they speed up.  I didn’t even manage to get close.

The practical upshot is that this extends the period over which I am spraying the stems of my cucurbit vines, per Post #G11.

Plausibly, the reason nobody would give a hard date for the typical length of the SVB season around here is that it’s hard to tell.  I might even have been SVB-free these past few days, and just had another one show up.  (They only live about five days, on average, in the field.)  It may be just plain difficult to tell when the season is actually over.

---

A

Are canning supplies the next shortage?

We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.

Source:  Wal-Mart.

A canning supply shortage would make sense.  First, you couldn’t find seeds locally.  Then the hardware stores sold out of (and remain sold out of) many common pesticides.  And now that gardens are producing, it seems to be unusually hard to find canning supplies locally.

My go-to local supplier is Twins Hardware in Fairfax, where they have a ridiculously complete home canning section.  But they’re out of wide-mouth pints and quarts.

I checked Giant in Vienna, which manages to have a fairly good stock of canning jars most of the time.  Nothing but some regular-mouth pints and then some half-pints and decorative jars.  Oakton Giant either doesn’t carry them or is fully out-of-stock.

But one of our local Wal-Marts remained abundantly stocked with canning supplies of all types, as of today (7/21/2020).  A tip of the hat to the aforementioned Vienna plant swap group for that advice.  They must have had 50 12-packs of the wide-mouth pints that I was looking for.

For whatever reason, I could not manage to get the Wal-Mart website to tell me that this particular store a) existed, and b) had that much stock.  Which may well be why there was stock left.  Only because my wife joined that plant swap group years back did we find out, by word-of-mouth, where we could get some jars.  If you want to know which store, join that group.  I ain’t blabbing.

I’m scrambling to find jars because my cucumbers just won’t quit.  Bacterial wilt, powdery mildew, cucumber beetles, and no doubt some hits by the SVB.  And yet they are still cranking out cucumbers.  So I’ve started running out of canning jars.  I’ve now made three gallons of pickles (two lacto-fermented, one bread-and-butter).  I’m getting set to do a gallon of vinegar pickle spears this afternoon.

I didn’t expect this because I’d never had a garden succeed before.  To me, cucumber vines were these pitiful little plants that might give you a cuke or two before they died from exhaustion.  Or any of the bugs and diseases mentioned above.  But that was fair, because I never did much beyond planting the seeds and maybe watering now and again.  But this year, I’m taking it a lot more seriously, and planted this square in the middle of my sunny back yard.  And I wasn’t prepared for the results.

Oddly, having a successful garden is making me a much pickier home canner.  It’s one thing to ferment and can some market-bought pickling cucumbers.  It’s another thing entirely to do that with the fruits of your own labor.  So now, quarts are not good enough (you have to keep them in the boiling water for longer).  It’s wide-mouth pints or bust, despite the extra labor.

Bottom line is that I’ve never had a garden produce much of anything before.  So I planned for and planted for failure.  Now I’m scrambling to find enough canning jars.

I’m so desperate that I made dehydrated pickle chips, from my fermented dills.  Not only to they vastly reduce the amount of storage space required, they are like little pickle flavor bombs.  Sour patch kids:lemonade :: dehydrated pickle chips:pickles.  You really have to like pickles to like these.  But if you like pickles, give them a try.

Cut them into pickle chips (quarter-inch thick or less), dehydrate at 125 to 135F, stop when they are crispy.  Not a snack for the faint of heart.