The Good Guys

The aphids have been real bad lately, especially around the pumpkins lately, and between that and the powdery mildew, it been getting me concerned lately as to how much longer my pumpkin plants have.  Today I tried spraying a diluted milk mixture on the leaves as I read that helps with powdery mildew.  The aphids are just insane...there millions of them probably, and they seem to congregate mostly on the blossoms, so I guess that's not such a big deal.

But today looking around I did notice some good guys around...   I've seen this fly around quite a bit, its a small metallic green fly. Here is a pic I took today:

I looked it up on Google, and found that its a long-legged fly, a beneficial insect that eats aphids and spider mites...  Cool!  Here's some info on Long Legged Fly

And as I was looking under leaves, I would find this:

See those small tan balls?  Well I had no idea what those were, so I picked a few and looked at them under a magnifying glass. I then realized they are bloated dead aphids.  Doing more research I found out they are "mummy aphids", which have been parasitized by tiny wasps.  Awesome... I've seen many of these so hopefully when they mature, more wasps will come out and kill some more aphids.

And here is a traditional good guy, a ladybug, which I found hanging around:

I wish I could get more of these to show up. I read about how in some places they are almost pests as they swarm around.  It would take a swarm of these to wipe out my aphids.

And I also noticed these things... which I then identified as green lacewing larva:

Those guys are voracious aphid eaters.   So it seems I have some help.  Just need some more of it. I need to be careful when I spray soapy water, or blast with the hose, that I don't hurt the good guys too.  

Pumpkin Update 9/27

Two days ago I decided it was time to pick 2 of the pumpkins, which were almost completely orange, so we could use them as decorations for fall.  So my 2 girls, Elizabeth and Michelle went out and each picked their first pumpkins. I had them use pruning shears to cut them from the vine.  Yes, the pumpkins are pretty small but they are real cute.

Today, I decided to let Elizabeth pick another one of her pumpkins.  So we have three now that have been harvested, and there is a bigger one still on the vine that is about 70% orange now.   Here is a picture of them along with a nice acorn squash a harvested a couple weeks ago.

So there is one mostly orange, and 3 bigger green ones still growing on the vine, plus 2 small ones the size of a baseball, bringing me to a total of 9 pumpkins, if they all mature.  

I've been slightly disappointed because I've had 4 other potential pumpkins wither and die, even after the flowers and opened and been pollinated. I don't know why that's happened. Maybe because its gotten into the mid-90s again, or maybe the plants aren't healthy enough to support more than 1 fruit per vine?  Well I should thank God that we have some success.  The other disappointing thing has been the aphids and powdery mildew. The aphids have been going nuts, attacking especially the older leaves.  There don't seem to be many predators around, and soapy spray, or blasting them with the hose has not helped much.  Also I am seeing more powdery mildew now.  I need to figure out how to keep it at bay so it doesn't cut my season shorter than it could be.  I think part of the problem is that my plants aren't as healthy anymore because they just don't get as much sunlight anymore. With the lowering of the sun and the shorter days, I think only small portions of the plants get sun for more than 6 hrs a day. Pretty much the middle of the patch looks dead, with most of the older leaves dead or dying. The growing tips of the vines still look pretty good and vigorous.  I hope I can get a few more pumpkins before they are done.   The good news is that the SVB activity has diminished, and I have only seen a few eggs the past week. But I need to keep looking every few days to make sure.  

Pumpkin update 9/17

Here is an update on my small pumpkin patch.  So far I have 3 that are turning orange. Here's one:

This morning I had a large beautiful female flower open up:

And here is a male flower. You can see the this one has a bee inside it that came out totally covered in pollen.

Here is a picture of a one that set a few weeks ago and is my biggest so far:

And the past 2 days I have had 2 more fruit set.  Here is a pic of one of them.

My goal is to have at least 10 pumpkins.  Counting the 2 freshly set ones, and the flower that opened this morning, that makes it 7.  I see some more coming along too. Unfortunately it seems at least half the female flowers become yellow and die before even opening, but I find once they open, they usually survive.
I have been monitoring the vines for SVB eggs again, and have continued to bury more vines.  The past few day I have not found any SVB eggs, and this weekend I was out quite a bit and didnt see any moths. Hope they are done for the season.

Turnips

Probably one of the easiest things to grow here in Texas during cooler weather is turnips.  I like growing them for both the greens, and for the actual turnip too.   Here is my first section that I started from seed about 3 weeks ago.  They came up super fast, had no problem germinating in the heat.   Today I planted some more seeds next to it, and I might plant another set in a few weeks, to stage them into the late fall/early winter.  

These I planted from seeds that I saved last year.   I originally bought a packet of the standard Purple Top White Globe Turnips a few  years ago, and I have not had to buy any since.   Each year I let some of the plants flower, and they produced lots of seed pods. I let them dry out, and open the pods, and collect the small poppyseed looking seeds.  

If you mainly want to eat the greens, they are just as good planted in the spring or fall but you get the best turnips in the fall, when they mature as the weather gets cold.   In the mild winter we had last year, my turnips survived through the winter.  They are pretty cold hardy, but when it gets below 20 they die.  Last winter it was really mild and some of my other plants, including spinach, and some sweet peas, survived the winter.   Those turnips were about baseball size, and tasted good.  The spring turnips that mature in the summer are usually smaller, woodier, and hotter.  

Once I get enough greens growing, I will go out regularly and pick some of the bigger leaves to make turnip greens.  My wife and even the kids like turnip greens.  When some  of the turnips are big enough, I will dig some out, and chop them up and cook them with the greens.  

These will probably be ready for the first harvest in a couple week.  To feed six people I need to pick quite a bit of leaves, since they boil down a lot. 

Acorn squash

A big part of my gardening adventures this year was growing Acorn squash.  Here is the fruit of my labor, some baked acorn squash stuffed with rice/sausage mixture. It was really good!

  As I mentioned earlier in my Squash Vine Borer (SVB) post, planting this is how I got introduced to these pests.  I planted my first batch in late April, and they grew very nicely and quickly outgrew the bed they were planted in.  They seed packet said they were semi-compact, but I didn't realize they would grow so big!

 I got about 6 squash in late May, but then the vines started wilting, and I noticed they were rotting from the base.  I just pulled up all the vines and planted again.   Then I read about the SVB and by the time I had my next set of plants going, some of the plants in my next batch  were infected too. ( I saw some frass, which looks like wet sawdust,  by the base of the plants.)

After reading as much as I could about the SVB, I tried a number of things.  I'll detail my SVB battle plan in my SVB post on this blog.  But I think with a combination of BT injections, and burying vine, I was able to salvage my next set of plants and the grew very nicely.  Here are what they looked like on July 31st. Plants looked very healthy.  I would go out most every morning, before work and look for SVB eggs. Some days I would pick  like 20 eggs off the plants.

I had lots of male flowers, but no female flower. When they finally appeared, the would wilt and die.  I think the problem was the intense heat.  We had a very hot end of July and early August, where we had  days and days of 100+ temperatures.  Squash fruit will not set in these hot conditions.  But the plants kept growing.  I had removed the fencing by now, and just let them spill over.

The above pic was from 8/17.  The weather was about to moderate, and I started having some female flowers show up. I finally got some fruit to set, but seemed to keep losing female flowers, many which would wither before they even opened.  The plant kept growing.  Here is from 8/24

By this time, the egg picking was becoming quite a task, as I had to inspect a lot of vines, plus also tend to my pumpkin vines.   I kept burying the vines whenever I got the chance.    So I had 3 nice fruit growing. Here is the first one:

Around the end of August the vine started declining.  I discovered some SVB damage in various places and was able to extract the larva, but by this time I think many of the vines decided the had born their one fruit, and then just gave up.  Here is what it looked like on Aug 29th :

It looks even worse today.


I already harvested and we ate 3 (see above dish), and there are 4 more on the vine that are almost ready. Those vine have quit growing. Their growing tips have died, and the plants have not produced any side-runners.

As of today, I only have one growing vine left.  Its actually totally severed from the main vine due to SVB but has survived because I had buried it as it grew.  It decided to go nuts producing female flowers recently, and  yesterday and today 2 fruit set on it, and I can see more female flowers forming.  I hope they don't wither and die, and I hope the poor vine can support them... We'll see.

So looking back on this experience, next year I will do the following:
1. Maybe still plant an early crop (April) and plant seeds again in early August.  Starting them in early July meant that when they were ready to produce fruit, it was WAY TO HOT!! and I missed the best window of opportunity.  If I start in early August, I think the fruit will form in late Sept, which will be perfect.
2. Cover my plants with netting to keep the SVB off of them. I can remove the covers to hand pollinate, or just remove them when I have enough female flower, and I should be able to harvest before the SVB do the plants in.
3. Bury in vines more, so they produce more roots. Try to plant them less crowded, and plan for their growth.  My vines were way too close together.

PUMPKINS

This summer I decided it might be fun to try and grow pumpkins.  I was more interested in a smaller pumpkin, one that would be good for eating.  I picked up a packet of these seeds at Home Depot: Small Sugar Pumpkin, an heirloom variety that produces small pumpkins around 4-5lbs each (so they say) that are good for baking.

So I made 2 small hills, and had each of my daughters, Elizabeth and Michelle (9 & 6), help me prepare the hill and they planted the seeds and watered them.  I wanted to make it fun for them to see the pumpkins grow.

I planted then in early July, and the started growing fast.  Here is what they looked like on July 21st.

I used the tomato cage in order to keep our dog Maggie from digging there or laying on top of the plants and killing them.  It was stinkin' hot at the end of July and early August.  It was over 100 degrees for over 2 weeks, some days  hitting 106, but the plant handled the heat really well. They just kept on growing.


And here is what they looked like on August 4th.  As you can see, the vine were starting to lay on the ground and run.

After a few more weeks, on Aug 17th, they really started spreading out and flowering too. At this time, I had read how it really helps to dig in pumpkin vines, both to encourage secondary roots on the leaf nodes, and to help protect the vine against SVB (squash vine borers, see my other post below), which I know I had a lot of in the area.

  The thought is that if a vine rooted along many points, it would be able to withstand an attack much better, and even if the vine got cut off from main root it might survive since it already has roots elsewhere.  Since my plants were growing over grass now, the morning dew encouraged a lot of small roots on the nodes.  So I started digging small shallow  trenches along the grass and laying the vines in them, and covering them with dirt.

On August 23rd, I noticed my first female flower.  We had a break in the heat wave in the second half of August, and that I believe that helped some of the pumpkins set.  I heard that much above 90 degrees, the fruit will not set, and had definitely noticed that also with the Acorn squash I had growing on the other part of the yard.

So here is the first pumpkin, and shortly afterwards, 2 more fruit set.   But I could not get any more female flowers to appear, and some withered, and then later the heat returned.   But these 3 pumpkins started growing.

And in the meantime I had lots of male flowers, they are big and beautiful.

I read how you can eat them, and so one day I picked about 12 of them, and found a recipe for stuffing them with ricotta cheese, dipping them in batter, and frying them. So we had them for dinner one night. That was fun and the kids and my wife Deanna enjoyed that.

Here is one of the pumpkins on Sept 13th.  Its starting to turn orange. But its pretty small.  I'm not sure why it didn't grow that much.  Oh well.  Its about the size of a small cantaloupe.

In the meantime, another vine finally produced a female flower which set, and this one has grown very quickly. I expect it to easily surpass the size of the other 3 pumpkins.  I think part of the problem with the other 3 is that as the summer is ending, that specific area they are in is getting a lot less sunlight now.  But here is a pic of the newest one:

The vine are pretty big now. Many secondary runner vines are showing up too.   Here is a pic from Sept 13th.  As you can see, I have now fenced them in.  My wierd dog discovered that squash/pumpkin leaves taste good, and I wanted to make sure she doesn't start eating the leaves.  Dogs are so weird. They just hate dog food. They will eat anything, I mean ANYTHING before they eat dog food. Even bird seed is preferable to them.

I am really hoping to get at least 10 pumpkins from this patch. So far 4 are growing well, and another one set this morning. And there are at least 3 other females that looks like they might set soon.  I have been hand pollinating them just to make sure.  

Squash Vine Borers

In Texas, we are lucky enough to have 2 species of squash vine borer (SVB), southwestern squash vine borer, Melittia calabaza  , and the plain old regular  squash vine borer, M. cucurbitae.   (picture below not mine, copied from web search)

 I don't know which has been plaguing me, but I am wondering if its the southwestern one, because some of the things I read about them on the web are not true.

 Here are some things I have determined to either be myths or maybe specific to the other species:
1. They lay eggs on the base of the vine.  Not true. The lay them everywhere, at the tip of the vine, leaf stems, on top of leaves, everywhere!
2. They come out early morning or evening.  Not true. I have mostly seen them when I am home on the weekends, usually between 10AM and 2PM is when they seem most active.
3. They have 2 generations in the south- Now many folks say there is 1 generation up north, and 2 or 3 in the south.  In my experience, its been a continuous deal... they don't take much of a break down here.  

The eggs are small, reddish brown disks.  Here is a pic: (picture below not mine, copied from web search)

These eggs hatch into larva that burrow into the plant, and eat it from the inside, and can kill the plant if eats enough to cut off the water/nutrients to the rest of the plant.  Its truly a terrible pest, because you often cannot see the damage until it becomes extensive.  

Earlier in the spring, my first run-in with these was with my acorn squash plants. Since I planted them early, I was able to harvest a good 5 or 6 squash before the plants died, but I was not sure why their vine rotted away causing them an early death.  I also planted some yellow squash but those were quickly infested and I lost all the plants.  So I did research and found it it was the SVB.  At that time I had replanted more acorn squash, and found out those got infected too, but having more knowledge now, I was able to fight them for a while.  

Here is my battle plan that I drew up back in late July, based on what I had read online about them. I wanted to stay organic, because I didn't want to harm bees or beneficial insects, like the assasin bugs that I had a lot of, and wasps too.  I even had an anole and a toad that hung around too.

My initial SVB Battle Plan:
1. Every day go out and pick off all the SVB eggs I can find. 
2. As the plant grows, pile up more dirt around the stem, to encourage more root growth. 
3. Spray with NEEM oil, once a week. I read its supposed to build up in the plant and act like a systemic insecticide.
4. As the plants get bigger, monitor for holes with frass coming out. Then inject BT (
Bacillus Thuringensis) solution above the holes. I might just inject anyway periodically for good measure. 
5. Go out at night and flash a light on the stem, and spot the worms, and stab them to death with a needle.

OK, so its 9/14 now,  how did it go?  Well season's not over yet but I have a good idea of what has worked and what has not.

Item #1:  - This is very time consuming.  Its effective if you can find all the eggs and pick them off.  What helps is that they take a number of days to hatch, and they are pretty conspicuous. But what makes it hard is that they sometimes lay eggs under vines where its hard to see. They can lay them anywhere! So its easy to miss a few eggs.  As the plant vines get long, this becomes an even harder task.

Item #2: That works good in encouraging roots, and can save a plant. But a big drawback is the if they lay eggs on the leaf stems and you miss them, they will bore down the stem into the buried vine. Then that portion of the vine might start dying, and you cannot see it.   What I did with my pumpkins that I think helps is whenver I see stems with signs of damage, I inject BT into those stems, and let the BT run down inside into the vine.

Item #3: The Neem product I tried was pretty ineffective, as it didn't discourage any egg laying, and the plants got attacked, even by aphids.  I later found out I didn't really use pure neem oil. My product, Fertiloam Triple Action Plus, actually only had "Clarified hydrophobic extract of neem" which has had the most important ingredient, azidaractin, removed and sold as a separate product.  What a rip!  So my experiment is inconclusive. I may try again next year with real "100% pure cold-pressed" neem oil.

Item #4: This seemed to work, but the problem is that the vines grow very long, and proactively injecting the vines every few inches is a lot of work!!  So I decided to wait until I see damage and them inject. But the problem is by the time you see damage, the plant has suffered. But overall I'd say BT injections are worth the effort, and I'll keep using it.  I used the liquid concentrate and diluted it about half as much as the directions.

Item #5 - That didn't work. Vines were too numerous, and since my plants were to cramped together it was too hard to do.  This would be way too time consuming.


OK so given what I know now, here is my plan for next year:
1. Cover all squash/pumpkins with tulle netting.  Keep the cover on until I have a good number of female flowers.
2. As they are covered, remove the covers periodically to dig in vines under dirt, and quickly replace cover.  Keep doing this as they grow to form stronger vines.
3. Uncover and hand-pollinate at first.  Then when sufficient female flowers appear, remove the covers.
4. Start the egg patrol.  Remove all eggs I see.  Keep burying vines.  Inject BT when I see any sign of damage.

Hopefully this plan will allow me to have a much better harvest before my plants eventually succumb, whether to the heat or cold, or aphids, or powdery mildew, or  the SVB.

Intro

Decided to start blogging my gardening adventures in my back yard of our house in Garland, TX. 
Now, its not a very big area I have for gardening, but I love trying to grow a variety of things. The picture below shows our house, and the green area I have highlighted is the small area I have to garden, next to the fence. But due to its direction it gets a good amount of sunlight. The rest of the yard is heavily shaded by trees.

Now its the beginning of the fall but lets recap this year so far...
 This year has been fairly good.  In the early spring I successfully grew spinach, lettuce, green beans, turnips.  Then my tomatoes and cucumbers did real well.
Here is a picture of my main garden area in late May

I had a lot of wildflowers growing next to the garden.  My spinach had bolted, but I got lazy and didn't pull it out, and my pole beans were doing very nicely.

  The  corn was a flop, as I only got a few ears.  I also grew some acorn squash, but the Squash vine borers did them in, but fortunately not before I was able to harvest some fruit.  Since then I have taken on a personal challenge to defeat those buggers.   Doubtlessly you'll be reading much about that battle, as well as other gardening adventures, victories, and defeats.