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Sunrise at 6:07 am on Friday, June 20, 2025. |
An account of my attempts at growing vegetables, flowers and native plants - some that turned out Ok, and some that didn't.
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about an insect pest whose behavior seems against its self-interest. The unanswered question in that post was "why do cutworms cut down (and therefore kill) the young plants they feed on?"
Today, I'm asking the same question about squash vine borers (Eichlinia cucurbitae).
A squash plant will go from looking like this...
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(Unfortunately, I don't have a "before" picture of the plant in question, so I had to settle for a picture of the one growing in the same hill.) |
...to looking like this in a matter of hours.
I've tried really hard to take care of my squash and pumpkins this year, making the rounds twice a day to check for and remove any squash bugs or squash bug eggs that I find. And as I make my rounds, I try to check for signs of the squash vine borers and their eggs.
I thought I was doing a good job. I hadn't seen any signs of frass coming from the stem on any plants, including the one in the picture.
But when I looked out the window at the garden this afternoon and saw one of the plants wilting much more than would be expected in the afternoon sun, I knew what was causing it. The plant seemed fine this morning.
Obviously, I wasn't doing as well at detecting the pests as I thought.
From past experience, I know that once the plant wilts, it can't be saved. So I just got my box cutter, cut it off at the base, and pulled the rooted part out of the ground.
The damage is always extensive and absolute. And looking inside the stem, one can see why the plant won't survive. The insides are nothing but mush. The poor plant has zero chance once the borers are inside for any length of time.
So again, I find myself asking, "Why they do this?!!!!"
What does the moth benefit by killing the plant it depends on before the plant has even had a chance to produce seeds?
I've harvested seven yellow squash this year, and was looking forward to having more. After today, I'm wondering if the other plants will be wilted later today or tomorrow.
Because squash vine borers have become such a problem for me, I actually planted a second and third round of seeds. The plant that died today was from the second planting. The third ones just came up a couple of days ago. Maybe those plants will be growing in the window of time when the borers aren't active? I hope so.
When the shade gets over the garden this evening, I intend to try to dig down to find the pupa. I expected it to be buried down in the soil under the plant, but didn't see it when I scratched around in the dirt. I probably didn't dig down deep enough, or maybe didn't go out far enough from the plant.
But if I find it, I will very gladly smash it with my boot. And as it sees my boot coming down on it, I hope it is thinking, "Why she do this?!!!"
Update 6/21:
I never did find the chyrsalis of the caterpillar that killed my squash vine. But I found several eggs on the squash yesterday and today.
Those were scraped off and squished between my fingers.
And I noticed several leaves with frass coming out a hole near the top of the stem. I cracked the stems open and found the nasty little caterpillars.
I stomped them with my boot.
I got it in my head that I wanted to turn the west field into a wildflower meadow.
RAF helped me move the fence, and after that was done, I felt quite intimidated.
What I thought was going to be a small meadow seemed overwhelmingly large after the old fence was gone...especially large when I put down my 10'x 16' billboard tarp to start killing out the bermuda grass.
With only a small tarp like that, and taking into account that the grass has to stay covered for at least a year to be sure it's good and dead, I estimated it would take me over 100 years to kill out all of the grass just using my billboard tarp.
Needless to say, I don't think the tarp will last that long - and I certainly know I won't!
Many experts who create native wildflower meadows recommend killing the existing vegetation with herbicide. And while I'm not opposed to all use of herbicide (recall my war on privet) I'd prefer not to use it unless I have no other choice.
So my older sister and her husband run a market garden, and I asked her one day if they had an old silage tarp I could buy. She said they didn't have one to sell, but they had one I could "borrow indefinitely." (I'm still trying to figure out how to make that loan fair to them. I'll think of something.)
I was anxious to get started on the meadow, so late last summer, I decided I'd take a chance that the grass under the billboard tarp had been killed. I dragged it over 9' to the west.
In the "bare" 10' x 16' space where the tarp had originally been, I set out a few native plants that I had started from seed, transplanted some plants that had come up in "the wrong place" and scattered some seeds I had collected or that were given to me:
In the early spring of this year, I picked up the silage tarp from my sister. The tarp had been cut into three smaller pieces, which was very good, because they are pretty heavy when they're all in one piece. After battling the strong winds that kept blowing the tarp around, I ended up putting it in a "U" shape around the billboard tarp, weighted down with t-posts and some old wheels and tires.
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Purple Lovegrass |
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Little Bluestem |
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Plains Coreopsis? |
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Spiderwort |
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Five nuts from cross 36xx, received on 12/14/2024 |
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Five nuts from cross CT-1, received on 2/6/2025. |
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Little chinquapin tree from cross CT-1. |
The Waiting Month finally ended. The yard and garden were quiet.
When my little sister said maybe she could come take a tour, there was really nothing much to see. "Just a patch of hope here, and a patch of wishes there," I told her.
But as the days slowly got longer and the temperatures warmer, things began to wake up from the winter sleep.
By March 7, the cereal rye/hairy vetch cover crop had grown a couple of inches.
One of the catkins on the American Hazelnut opened and released little puffs of pollen every time the wind breathed on it.
Over the past few years, I've informally gauged how bad of a winter we've had by making a note of when the first daffodil blooms.
As the snow melted away, I was curious to see how the cover crops in the garden were doing.
To borrow a phrase from the YouTube gardeners in the UK, they were looking pretty sorry for themselves.
Many of the fava beans are flat on the ground and the ones that aren't have been hit pretty hard by the cold. I don't know if they'll recover or not.
The Daikon radish are likely gone. I expected that though, because they are a "winter kill" cover crop and they didn't make it through the cold last year. But it makes me sad that I got them planted so late that they didn't get a chance to make any significant root before they froze. It feels like I pretty much wasted all of those seeds.
The weather warmed up a bit this week, so I took advantage of the sunshine to get a few garden tasks taken care of.
Sunday, January 12 - pruned the blueberries and the reliance grape. I took some of the trimmed off branches and put them in cardboard tubes to see if I could get them to root. While I was on my cuttings kick (again...am I an eternal optimist, or just stupid?), I also took cuttings of American hazelnut; lavender; Ninebark; Aronia berry; coral honeysuckle; and a sassafras tree (a female tree, if I'm not mistaken).
Monday, January13 - Only after taking the sassafras cuttings, did I bother to look up whether or not they can actually be started from stem cuttings. Turns out, no. So Monday after I got off work, I went back and took some root cuttings. We'll see what happens. I also learned that some of the other plants don't root well from cuttings either, including the Aronia berry and the hazelnut. Oh well. Aronia berry is supposed to root readily from stems buried in the dirt so I'll try that this summer. The hazelnut has put out some root suckers so I'll dig one of those up this spring when the ground starts to warm up and move it.
Tuesday, January 14 - Pruned the apple trees and the concord grape. This year, the apple trees only needed minimal pruning, just removal of a few branches that were pointing down or growing into the center of the tree, as well as a few on the Gala tree that were competing with the new central leader.
Wednesday, January 15 - With more cold weather on the way (maybe the coldest we've had this winter) I decided I wasn't going to take a chance of busting the valve on the IBC tanks. I hooked a garden hose to one of the tanks at noon on my lunch break and started draining the water out into the garden. By the time I got off work, it was empty. I moved the hose to the second tank and had it down to only 3/4 full by dark.
Thursday, January 16 - The second IBC tank was drained. I've decided I am going to move them over to the west side of the shop so they'll be closer to the garden. I hope to build a lean-to greenhouse onto the shop someday, but until then, I'll just rig up something with a gutter to catch the water coming off the shop to fill the tanks.
As for the snow, it had pretty much melted except where it was in the shade (north side of the house and shop, north sides of the raised rows, etc.)
Saturday, January 18 - Saturday was a fine winter day. It was a bit chilly and the wind made the chill worse. But what better way to warm up than to take the little cart out into the field and haul in loads of waste straw! Some of the hay my dad fed earlier on in the winter was very "stemmy" and the cows just picked through it, eating the good stuff, but leaving all the stems. Since that hay had been put out a couple of weeks before the snow, I don't think the cows ever plan on coming back to eat the stems. (Do cows plan??? Hmmmm....) So I carted in about seven loads of that waste straw from the field, which was enough to cover the ground west of last year's potato rows, mulch around the grapes and mulch around almost all of the blackberries.
And while I didn't get a chance to cut any privet in the woods, I did make it down there on Saturday to set out a black cherry tree and a willow oak tree that had languished in small pots all through last summer. I piled branches and sticks all around them to try to keep the cows from stepping on them. I think they'll both be Ok.
The two little redbud trees? I'm pretty sure they are dead, but I set them out anyway. Maybe they'll surprise me. In case not, I scattered several handfuls of redbud seed pods down there too. I also had a BUNCH of Sweet Joe Pye weed seeds that I saved from the one I started from a plant down on the creek. I say a bunch...maybe thousands! Hopefully at least a few of them will make it. It's a perfect spot for them, I must say.
Sunday, January 19 - The bitter cold is here, and since I couldn't be outside, I couldn't help myself...I went ahead and planted several different types of cold hardy plant seeds:
According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, the last frost for our area is April 1. That's just a little over 10 weeks away! I've planted my brassicas too early by at least a couple of weeks based on what the almanac says, but I kind of think it's a gamble either way. If you plant them too early, they have to be protected from late freezes, but if you plant them too late, the weather gets too hot before they can produce anything. So this year, I'm gambling on planting them earlier rather than later.
[Assuming I can get any of the brassicas to come up,] I think I'll put them at the south ends of the rows where the potatoes were last year. They'll get morning and late afternoon sun, but will be shaded by the pecan tree during the afternoon. Those rows were topped up with more cow manure/spent hay/straw in the fall, so they should be nice and rich by time to set out the plants. I need to try something different because my brassicas have just not done well in other parts of the garden.
The bed where I tried to grow broccoli last year...I think I'll top it off with another load of cow manure/spent hay/straw and maybe grow my potatoes there this year. But I'll need to wait until the weather warms back up before I'm out in the field with my cart again! After a morning low of 18.9° F, our high today was only 29.1° F with wind gusts as high as 16 mph...it was COLD out there! It's going to be even colder in the morning. The lows may be in the single digits. BRRRR!!!
But warmer weather will get here eventually. Unless the forecast changes again, by this time next week we should be back to highs in the upper 40s/low 50s, with lows right at, or above freezing. So what do I want to do in the garden next weekend if it does warm up a bit?
As suggested by Angela from Parkrose Permaculture, I want to get back down in the woods where I've been cutting privet and bring back some of the rotted pine logs to bury in the ground where I'm going to plant my new blueberry plants. I have noticed how water-logged (no pun intended!) the rotting pine logs are, and I think it will be a perfect way to help keep the blueberry plants happy during the hot dry summer.
I want to put some logs around the existing blueberry plants, but I don't think I can bury them without disturbing their roots. I guess I can just try sort of squishing the logs down in the dirt around the plants then mulch around and over them. Maybe I can use the logs to make a "moat" around the plants so when I water them, the water doesn't run off, but instead is held back by the logs so it can soak into the ground and into the logs. We'll see if that helps. Last year, the blueberries got very, very dry a couple of times and I'm pretty sure that's why they're not going to make any berries this year. Bummer. I do so love blueberries.
I might also try burying some of those logs at the west end of one of the blackberry rows for a new fruit bush I'm going to try. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pink champagne current. Why? I have no idea! But I'm looking forward to giving it a go. A pink current needs to be somewhere where it will get sun, but not too much sun and where it has rich, well-draining soil. The light should be good there because the plant will be shaded by the big pecan tree during the heat of the day. The soil isn't very good though, so I may be making a mistake. I'll probably need to work some organic matter into the soil there because it's pretty silty right now. But I think that's where I'll start it, and if it doesn't do well, I'll try to start some more from cuttings and/or move the plant next winter. They're supposed to be easy to start. Both of those fallback plans are assuming I don't kill the plant first....
I may bury another log by the wellhouse. That's where I'm planning to put the single Jostaberry cutting that survived last year's disaster with the old carpet. Again, if it doesn't like it there, I should be able to start another one from cuttings. Jostaberries are a cross between a gooseberry and a current, so they're supposed to root easily just like those two plants do. And if I can't get any cuttings of the Jostaberry or pink current to root, then I will probably have to admit defeat in my quest to propagate things by cuttings and finally, once and for all, GIVE UP!
To end the week, a confession...I was bad this afternoon. I ordered some new seed trays from All About the Garden (allaboutthegarden.com). I spent $35.22 ($11.24 of that was shipping!) for two 28-cell seed propagation trays. They have a volume of 7 cubic inches, so they should be really good for the brassicas. I hope I like them.
Hope - it springs eternal for people hooked on gardening, doesn't it.