The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

While we were out hoeing the pumpkins a few days ago, I came across a familiar but unwelcome site… a cluster of tiny,  hard objects on one of the leaves.  I knew what it was immediately, we have had these before.  It was a egg mass from a Squash Bug.

I told my helpers to be on the look out for them. Usually the eggs  are found on the under side of a leaf.

They can also be found on a stem or anywhere else on the plant.

Squash Bugs feed on all members of the Squash family of plants, pumpkins included.

I asked my helpers to count the number of egg mass as we set out to smash them by hand.  I was curious about how many there were and thought that you might be interested as well.

We have three 75 foot rows of pumpkins planted into black plastic mulch. The first row had about 75 egg masses, the middle row had 45 egg masses, while the last row had 85 eggs masses.  Each egg mass ranged from a dozen to over 25 individual eggs per clutch.  Anyway you do the math, that would have been a lot of Squash Bugs feeding on our plants!

Our vines were about this long at the time of counting:

The easiest way to look for those bugs is to raise up the entire vine (or roll it over) and check each leaf.  The eggs are very easy to spot.

The Squash Bugs feed by sucking the juice out of the plant. after which the leaves turn brittle and begin to turn brown. The number of bugs that would have hatched could have caused us a major drop in yield or possibly even a crop failure.

Here’s a portrait of  Mama Bug:

Smash her too while you’re at it !  This one oozed out an unusual iridescent blue color when crushed. I’ll spare you the gory photo

Squash Bugs like to hide  from their enemies by crawling under debris. You can use this to your advantage by placing a board near your plant and leaving it over night. By morning, the bugs will have crawled under the board to hide (not knowing that it was you who placed it there).  Lift up the board and dispatch any you find.

Our problem is that we have plastic mulch that they like to hide under and couldn’t  care less about any  board.

While they will do a lot of damage to your squash and pumpins, the good news is that they only breed once a year.

I’ll check the plants now and then to take care of any bugs we may have missed.

Bob

I’d like to share with you a new (to me anyway) flower that we are growing in the perennial garden. It’s called Bupthalum (sometimes spelled Buphthalum).

Our Bupthalum has been blooming since the last week of June and is still going strong.

The plants themselves stand over 4 feet tall, so you need to have a fairly large space for them or plant them at the back of your garden.

We purchased the seed from Thompson and Morgan Seed company last winter. They seem to be fairly easy to grow. The packet had 50 seeds in it and I counted over 40 plants out in the garden this summmer… not a bad average. They also seem to be very hardy and are able to compete very well against weeds.  They will not wimp out and die back at the first sign of stress.

After three weeks of blooming the center of the blossoms are begining to turn a warm shade of brown, giving them a “whole ‘nother look”.

Bupthalum will give you plenty of enjoyment year after year for just a few cents for seeds and a little time to get them started.

Bob

I was out in the vegetable garden the other day and noticed that none of our Broccoli or other cabbage-type plants have any insect damage at all.

Apparently the weather conditions have not been very good for the Cabbage Looper or other cabbage pests which is very good news for the Broccoli plants.

I did happen to spot the first Cabbage butterfly in our garden on Tuesday. This is the culprit that lays the eggs that develops into those destructive cabbage worms.

She and her sisters were not on the Broccoli just yet. I caught them feeding on nectar from our Salvia flowers. Here she alighted on a Hydrangea leaf just long enough for me to get this long distance snapshot.

Notice the distinguishing characteristics: all white with a dark spot on each wing. You often see them in small groups fluttering about in the garden.

If you see them landing on your cabbage and related plants, I guarantee that eggs are being laid and those destructive worms will start munching on your plants real soon.

You can deal with these insects in a couple of non-chemical ways. First you can cover your plants with a thin garden cloth called “floating row covers”, this will keep the butterflies from even reaching your plants in the first place, so no eggs will be laid on the leaves.  The other way is to spray the plants with a biological based material called BT.  BT will not kill the butterflies, but will kill the worms as they begin to feed.  Check at the garden centers for these products.

So…heads up.

Bob

There are still a few Cottonwood seeds floating around today. I think this is just about the end of them for this year.

It apparently has been a great year for Cottonwood seed production. The seed crop was the biggest I have ever seen.

Look at the seeds on this tree, the masses of seeds are as big as pie plates!

We didn’t get to enjoy all the floating cotton as much because of all of the high winds we experienced during the peak of Cottonwood season.

I actually enjoy watching Cottonwood seeds float by… there is something soothing about it. Yes, they can collect in piles at times. This seems to upset some people, especially the “neat nicks” among us.

To me, it’s a reminder of when I was a child. Those floaters meant we were really in summer and school wouldn’t be starting for a long, long time.

Bob

With all of the hustle and bustle of planting 1000′s of flowers and vegetables these past couple of weeks, I almost missed the show that my Passion Flower was putting on.

I planted this from seed about three years ago, this is the first time it has flowered. There are three Passion Flower plants in the green house.

The actual flowers themselves are borne on a vine. Each flower seems to last a day or so then another takes its place. As you can see, they are very impressive, complex-looking blossoms.

These are the same plants that produce Passion fruit, which is used by some people as a mild, fruity tranquilizer.

Even though they look very exotic to us northerners, they grow wild mostly in the southeast states and South America. There are some species that are hardy enough to grow as far north as Tennessee and southern Pennsylvania. I don’t know what variety I have.

For those folks in the south this all may seem mundane, but up here in Michigan…it’s a heck of a lot of fun!

Bob