Thursday, August 08, 2019

The garden

The garden has had a rough go of it this year. We had aphids and thrips.  We have subterranean beetles that killed some tomato plants.  We had a cold and cloudy spring.   We had an outbreak of powdery mildew in June that damaged the cucumber flowers and resulted in less production.

The cure for powdery mildew is a mixture of vegetable oil, water, baking soda, and dish soap, but it is a cure for powdery mildew like radiation and chemotherapy are a cure for cancer; it hurts the patient almost as much as the disease.  So, now we have powdery mildew in the pumpkin vines, in the yellow summer squash, the butternut squash, and half of the cucumber vines.  Since it is so late in the summer I'm going to let the disease run its course, hoping to harvest before it kills the plants.  I think next spring I will treat the whole garden with copper sulfate and lay down barley straw as prophylactics.  (I tried the milk cure last year.  In my experience it does not work.)

Even with bug, weather, and disease working against us we have harvest a lot of food.   We planted more this year, and harvested less than last year, but it is still more than enough to eat all summer.  Not enough to pickle for the winter, but enough for now.  And that's okay.  I just hope I get those seven pumpkins in before the vines die.

1 comment:

GretchenJoanna said...

I wonder how the pumpkins are doing at this point. I don't have so many pests in my garden, but there were some new ones :-( and they killed off my beans and kale, or desecrated them enough that I couldn't stand to look at them anymore. I took pictures of the new pests, including some on my strawberry tree, of all places, little flat worms (larva, I assume) in the fruit.

The most annoying thing is still the aphids, which I guess are going to be a neverending problem as long as I want to have milkweek around for the Monarchs. Yes, I could get ladybugs, but it turns out that along with the aphids they will eat Monarch eggs!