Autumn Flowers and clearance plants

County Fair Zinnias and Autumn Beauty Sunflowers are beginning to bloom.

 

My rattlesnake pole beans are suffering from spider mites and some sort of chewing insect. I'm planning on making an onion and soap spray to try to deal with them.

In spite of the bugs, they continue to grow and are even putting out little green beans. Maybe I'll have enough for thanksgiving!

These were all on the clearance rack at Lowes for just $3 each! From the left there are two Ischia Green Figs (supposedly a very heat hardy slightly smaller variety with very sweet figs), a Sunshine Blue Blueberry bush (self pollinating, compact 3' bushy plant with excellent blueberries), and two Dwarf Everbearing Black Mulberry bushes.

You can see the difference unrestricted growth in good dirt makes for the mulberries. These are the two I potted up about a month ago. They are fast growers and I'm hoping that the new ones bounce back quickly.

The new mulberries were seriously root bound, so I used a clean sharp knife to cut off about the bottom two inches of thick roots circling the pot. The picture above is after the trim. The photo below is what I removed.

I potted them in larger two gallon pots with mushroom compost and sand from my garden. With the roots trimmed up they now have plenty of room to grow until the new garden bed is ready. I also pruned off any dead or poorly placed branches from all the plants.

 

Sometimes Florida Sucks.

The title pretty much says it all. Sometimes gardening in Florida just sucks. Our growing seasons are hot and long and winters very mild and usually frost free which allows for the often unchecked growth of the appropriate tropical hardy plants and fruit trees. We can have bananas, papayas, oranges, sweet potatoes, hot peppers and tomatoes growing almost year round. The nearly limitless amount of things we can grow is definitely a plus. But with these tropical conditions come some serious disadvantages too, namely in the form of pests and humidity. Folks from up north feel like they can't hardly breathe when they come down here for the 98% humidity in the middle of a summer day. They describe it as breathing water. It can be oppressive for many plants too and a transmitter of a host of problems. I'm pretty sure that the high humidity is why my poblano pepper is still dropping its tiny pepper buds.

But on this 85 degree fall day, the thing that has me in near tears are the pests. I lost my corn to army worms a few weeks ago. My peach tree has been seriously attacked by weevils, a non native species that has been introduced and gaining ground here over the last few years. None of our native or localized predators seem to like the Sri Lanka Weevil and it is carving a path through just about everything. It's food list is as long as my arm. So my poor peach tree has deep chew marks on nearly every leaf. I'm trying desperately to save it and am this. close. to breaking out the hard synthetic pesticides.

I lost half my cucumbers to root knot nematodes at the same time my corn went kaput. My Nevada lettuce transplants that I started from seed and wrote about a couple weeks ago were completely mowed down two days ago in the garden, maybe from snails, maybe something else. Something chewed through and killed a couple of my sugar pumpkin vines, but I cut them open and didn't see any vine borers.

My pole beans are suffering from spider mites, and now my remaining cucumbers are being attacked by them as well.

In spite of it all, I was remaining optimistic. I bought a four pack of Celebrity Hybrid tomatoes this morning. They are resistant to darn near every wilt, virus, and even nematodes. So I planned on putting them in the garden an hour ago. But then I saw even more damage.

Overnight, my hybrid sangria ornamental pepper seedling which had been thriving and was a bushy 2" tall was chewed to a stem. My ornamental 2 yr old Purple Flash pepper (see pic) which was filling out really nicely was completely defoliated. And the larger of my two Black Krim tomato seedlings, a nice 3" tall healthy plant yesterday, is now a .5" leafless stub. It wasn't even planted yet. It was just sitting in a nursery pot in the garden.

I am so disheartened. I looked around in the garden and tilled the soil a bit around the purple flash pepper but didn't find the culprit, just some nice looking earthworms. The lack of pest indicates that the cutworms are most likely the culprit and that without the corn to entertain them, they have moved on to my Nightshades.

I'll be spreading diatomaceous earth over the soil at dusk since they tend to come out at night and hope that I can get them under control in the next couple days so I can plant my Celebrity tomatoes. If the DE doesn't take out the cutworms, I will have to look for a bottle of Bt, like Thuricide to fight them.

I don't even have the hope of winter killing back the pests for an early start next year because winter doesn't usually go below 45 degrees here. And the last several years it hasn't even gone that low. That means a wonky season for my peach tree and possibly too few chill hours. And the cool season veggies are quite susceptible to damage from pests like cutworms and nematodes. So, I don't know quite what to do next.

Hopefully the tiny top bunch collards that have just sprouted in the garden don't get leveled by the cutworms tonight, but I won't count on it.

I watered my remaining plants with a strong vermicompost tea that I've been brewing the last few days and will put some in a spray bottle to try to deal with the spider mites tonight also. Maybe it will give the purple flash pepper the needed verve to bounce back.

 

 

The demise of Corn, Root Knot Nematodes (RKN) and Cucumbers

A couple days ago I decided to pull out my corn plants. I had lost several already and the crop was in decline.

Corn dusted with DE

Army worm damage

I had applied at least three dustings of diatomaceous earth (DE) to try to kill of the army worm larva that were hiding in the whorls of the plant and in the soil during the day then would come out and munch the leaves at night.

Tiny destructive army worm

All that trouble was caused by tiny army worms just a 1/4 to a half inch long. So I pulled the plants, tilled the soil, added vermicompost and planted some top bunch collards in the four square feet.

This morning I was checking on the garden and noticed what appeared to be powdery mildew on some of Sumter Cucumbers. I immediately pulled the plant out instead of trying to save the stunted plant.

Probably Powdery Mildew

In spite of having planted the Sumter Cucumbers only a weekish after the Russian Cucumbers, the Sumters were less than a third of the Russians and clearly failing to thrive.

This little cucumber with the yellowish leaves is a Sumter. It only has three large leaves and is only up to the second rung of the tomato cage. It was the largest of my Sumters.

These big healthy cucumber plants are the Russians. You can see they have grown taller than the tomato cages, even outgrowing the vigorous sunflowers, and they are setting flowers.

A closer inspection of the plants roots reveals the reason for the Sumters failing health.

The root system is barely developed. The squash family (cucurbits) are prolific rooters to feed the large plants so this again signals a problem.

Root Galling from RKN

An even closer look shows why. Notice the round bumpy nodule like roots? Those bumps are called galls. They are caused by the plant trying to protect itself from the infamous pest of sandy soils, the Root Knot Nematode (RKN). Most vegetables are susceptible to injury from this bugger. I would say the Nightshades (tomatoes, Eggplant, Peppers, white Potatoes) are the most susceptible, but Cucurbits are also affected. The RKN is a microscopic soil dwelling round worm that feeds off the juices in the roots of plants. Plants form galls in an attempt to isolate the RKN, but ultimately the roots are damaged and stunted. This leaves the plant malnourished, thirsty and vulnerable to attack from disease and other pests that an otherwise healthy plant may be able to cope with.

Root Galling from RKN

The Sumter variety of cucumbers must be particularly vulnerable to attack. The last three or four times I've attempted to grow them I haven't had good results and only a couple, if any, cucumbers. Thinking back to the first time I grew them and was rewarded with dozens of cucumbers from just a few lively plants, I can easily pin point the reason for my success.

I had just made a brand new square foot garden following the Mel Bartholomew's method exactly. I had made 6" deep beds set on top of plastic landscape fabric and filled with NEW dirt made of 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite and 1/3 compost and started the garden in early Spring. So guess what that meant? There were NO RKNs hiding in my garden soil. Of course inevitably they did migrate in and that soil began yielding poorer and poorer results. I blamed this on the shallow soils inability to hold water in our sunny hot humid climate. This I'm sure was partially true. But the constant decline of my plants was surely due to RKN damage.

I fear that I have greatly underestimated this nemesis over the years and may have blamed some of my garden's troubles too much on other problems. I will not be making that mistake again.

So where to go from here?

Well, I will be focussing my efforts on plant varieties that are RKN resistant in the future. This will be an all around boon as the plants will need less water and less fertilizer to compensate for the damaged roots. So no more Sumter Cucumbers. I am curious to see if at the end of the season my Russian Pickling Cucumbers have less galling of the roots and may be a RKN resistant variety. Their vigor suggests this may be the case.

Will I toss all my seeds that aren't RKN resistant? No. But if I really want to grow them, I'm going to have to look at container gardening with fresh store bought dirt every growing season (big sigh). So I'll limit myself to just a couple crops that I really want, but need the special treatment. This will probably be my Nightshades. And I may transition some of them out when I run out of seeds and in the future use RKN resistant varieties only.