Rose Thrips

My roses came up beautifully last week. Well, almost beautifully. There are lots of blooms, but it looked like the tips were rotted brown. After some looking, I discovered that they are being invaded by thrips.

Today, I looked at the blooms carefully. Sure enough, there were tons of tiny brown bugs all over. Eww... According to what I read, these are worse when the plants are stressed because it has been severely hot and dry. So, too much rain=black spot and too much drought=thrips. Great...

I pruned off all the blooms to kill off what I could. Then I pulled away the mulch from the crowns and applied Bayer All-in-One fertilizer for Roses. This is my second treatment for the year. It's supposed to fertilize, plus prevent against various rose pests and diseases, including black spot and thrips.

Hopefully the next round of blossoms will look better.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good:

1. Still picking tons of peas. Looking forward to cooking them this weekend.
2. Cleaned up dead bulb foliage from front flower bed today, and planted marigolds.

The Bad:
Original raised bed has always had problems with ants. Ideas from garden web: Orange oil, Diatomaceous Earth (crushed shell calcium), coffee grounds, or Auntie Fueg0 soil conditioner (mixture of compost tea, orange oil and molasses). All should be found the organic garden sections and if nothing else should enhance the soil.

The Ugly:
Found cabbage loopers (inchworms) eating my broccoli. Two plants have tons of holes in the leaves, and I picked off three of them. I learned that insects are more likely to attack stressed/sick plants--which my broccoli is. Lady bugs are natural predators. There are a ton on my daisies, so I think I will move some to a new home this weekend. If things get bad I can use Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) for caterpillars.

Note to self: Next thing to learn more about is companion planting. One good website is Plants That Attract Beneficial Insects. Many of these plants are herbs, so perhaps that will influence me to get going with fresh herb growing faster. Other major flowers are Queen's Anne Lace, Sunflowers, Marigolds, and Yarrow. One book that was recommended is Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte as well as her second book Roses Love Garlic for flowers.

Building a Lasagna Bed

Here's some step by step photos of my first attempt to create a "lasagna" type bed. I should have started this much earlier to let the layers "cook" for better compost. By the time I really started a decent enough collection of materials it was already getting late in the season.

Basically, I collected everything I could round up that was organic. I bought some composted cow manure and a couple of bales of peat moss to give it a decent start. And then I left it for about a week before planting corn last Monday. I should have made a few more layers than I did. Irregardless, I used what I had and what I could afford to buy. I didn't want to use a lot of peat moss as is suggested in the book because it's a very slow growing resource and kind of expensive.

Now that I'm in the composting mode, I will be starting a pile behind the shed. My goal is to go ahead and start another bed this summer and then gradually pile onto that over the year. Then, it will have cooked much more sufficiently like compost should.

It will be interesting to see how well this truly does.

Growing, growing, growing...

Notes from this week:

1. Sunflowers are all up and doing nicely.

2. Daylilies are transplanted. They looked a little wilty today, but hopefully will establish over the weekend. Maybe they'll start blooming this weekend too. :)

3. The few zinnias that are up are slow but steady. There are a few more than before...that's at least something. Next week I will plant marigolds in the bare spots. Hopefully it won't look too funky in the next month or so.

4. Started picking peas this week. Don't have quite enough to cook yet, but they're steadily coming. Next time I will plant another row, I think.

5. Lasagna bed is just about as done as it's going to be for now. I'm starting to doubt that it's less work, but hopefully the hard part is done. I will plant corn early this next week.

6. Roma tomato & cucumbers are blossoming already. Yay!

7. Strawberries are steadily putting out more leaves for the most part. I think what's left will last, although I certainly won't get any berries this year. I was told on Gardenweb that I shouldn't use the growing bags. I think I will try to keep them happy now that it's summer, and put them in a huge pot this fall.

May's Visual Report

Plant Recovery

It's been hot and dry this last week or so. We really, really need rain. I got my sunflowers planted and a few zinnia seedlings are up. It seems like I had more zinnias than I do now, but there's still not very many. Something is trying to eat them. But, I think the seedlings also need more frequent watering to get started. I will give them another several days and then try to plant marigolds where there are holes. Hopefully it won't end up looking too funny once I'm all done. I really need to get some daylilies from my mom's garden transplanted. Hopefully it's not too late yet.

My crapemyrtle is recovering, sort of. There are lots of new canes coming from the rootball. Unfortunately, the original branches look quite dead. I have this bad feeling I'm going to have to start completely over and wait a few years just for the tree to be the height it was supposed to be this year.

The raised bed is starting to look quite nice. The peas have finally taken off. There are tons of flowers and quite a few pods forming. I'm hoping we'll have fresh peas for supper next week. The broccoli is looking better as well, although it looks like a couple plants are buttoning off from the stress. Sunday I will probably have to cut them. The only real concern in this bed is my romaine. The extreme cold to hot seems to have put them in a stasis. The leaves look dotted or something as well. I haven't looked up what I can do for them yet.

My containers are doing great as well for the most part. I've harvested my spinach again as well as the mustard and collards. Here again, my lettuce is slow probably because of the heat.

My main concern right now is my strawberries. They came up wonderfully and survived the cold snap inside. But, then they started turning brown and dieing off a few days before I got them outside again. Some plants look okay, but I've lost about half of them. I tried to transplant two of my nice ones from a pot into the growing bag. I didn't do anymore because I wasn't sure if that was too healthy. So far they look okay though. The soil inside the bag was pretty wet, so perhaps they were suffering from some root rot? I really don't know what the problem is or what to do.

I finally registered an account at Garden Web I'm going to take some pictures tomorrow to record here as well as hopefully to get some answers about my strawberries and crapemyrtle.

I also started laying out my new lasagna garden bed. It's about 7x12', and I will try the three sisters method with corn, pole beans, and squash. It should be really interesting combining methods. I hope I can build one more small 8x8 bed next to my current one for okra and cantaloupe. I'm getting so late though; that probably isn't going to happen. My long term goal is to have 4 big beds for rotation and the two small ones for strawberries, asparagus, and herbs. If I get one bed built per year, that will be another 4-5 years down the road...

Goals for this week:

1. Finish building lasagna bed and plant corn.

2. Dig up daylilies and transfer.

3. Find answers to my strawberry dilemma.