Problematic Pears

I'm not an orchardist. For Christmas, I received two books about orcharding, but neither prepared me for what has been happening to my pears.

I pruned the trees in February. The three trees had grown quite too tall for me to manage and so I did some drastic cutting. Perhaps I left some open wounds. Although the damage I am seeing hasn't been specifically around where I cut, but on a wide range of branches. Only two of the three trees have been affected. One theory I keep popping around in my head is that somehow, I ended up with a parasite. Or, it could me a number of problems.

I went out this evening and pruned off the branches that had dead leaves and shriveling fruit. Because I'm not skilled, I don't know what else I should be doing. I need to do some research about this.

Other than this, I actually have an abundance of fruit on all three pear trees. This is a very different situation than what I have found on my peaches and plums, which are almost bare.

Initial Peach Harvest

I have been watching the peaches on my trees. I don't remember the names of the varieties I planted (except for China Pearl, but this entry is not about them). I have six trees and three varieties, all free stone. Last year, I had very few peaches and those that did develop had black blotches and a lot of worms and other pests. So, this year, I decided that I needed to spray. I don't know why, but I had a lot of peaches develop. Jenna and I reduced the number by about a third a month and a half ago. I've heard that you need to thin the fruit, which drove this. Then, I sprayed. The product I bought said to spray no more often that every 11 days, to spray no more than 3 times, and to not spray 21 days before harvest. I have only sprayed twice so far.

I went to check the fruit last evening and pick one off the ground that looked good. Another truism, "When the fruit is ripe, it will fall." There was a worm in it. As I inspected the other fruit, I saw some that had developed some sort of a fungus, suggesting it might be over-ripe or that there was something that was about to spread. There weren't too many fruits that were like this, but enough that I decided to harvest this morning. (I've got a dental cleaning appointment, so I had some time.) So, I harvested the two trees that were ready to go. I suspect these peaches may need a day or so to further ripen; they seemed a bit hard. It's not a great harvest, but it will surely be sufficient for our current needs and resources. I'm not sure what to do with the peaches yet. I've canned before, but there are other things to do, like peach jam. Of course, just eating some is most interesting. The birds were starting (just starting) to pick some of the top fruit. (I ate one of these for breakfast.)

The peaches are small, but there are no black blotches this year. I'm not sure that I know at all what I am doing. Because the other two varieties are still very green, I gave them their last shot of spray. I also sprayed the apples and pears. They had the same blotches last year and a lot of worms.

Garden Friends and Onions

My activity this past week has involved getting the garden ready for fall planting and planting some onion seeds. I had Sam and Taylor come over and finish cleaning out the beds. It was well worth the cost for their three hours of work.

I planted some onion seeds. This year, I am planting 4 to a square foot. That will give them a little more room. I also planted in a bed that is easier to water. I want to give them a little more water next spring than the yellow of Parma got last year. Hopefully, it will keep them from going to bloom prematurely. I planted 48 seeds from a purplish yellow of Parma onion that I had saved. It will be interesting to see if they turn out to be purplish, too. Then I planted seeds in 136 spots for true yellow of Parma. I had plenty of seeds left over from last year, so I used those rather than the seeds I had gathered from this year. I double planted so that there were at least two seeds in every hole. A couple of years ago, I didn't plant deeply enough and the seeds either didn't sprout or died shortly after. This year, the holes were maybe a half an inch deep, but not fully filled in when I was done. I hope they sprout and that they weren't planted too deep.

The rest of this entry is just pictures of garden friends that I've seen around.

Honey Pests

It's yellow jackets. They are the pests.

I set the equipment and supers after extracting honey out into the yard. Bees immediately found the stuff and began cleaning it off. But I guess I left it too long, or maybe this is a normal part of the process, but I got hordes of yellow jackets, too. After the bees had long gone, the yellow jackets hung around.

I finally went out in the yard with my bee suit on to carry some of the equipment away. The yellow jackets followed and seemed to find me more interesting than the equipment. So I stood there for 30 minutes, waiting for them to get on my arm or belly where I could kill them. I probably got a couple of dozen. It didn't put a dent in their colony. It just felt good.

Now that the equipment is gone and the wax more or less cleaned up, I see just a few. It will help next year if I have a hive in my own yard again. Then I can put the supers back on the hives. I will remember (I hope) to move everything further away from the house.

Seeds vs. Sets

I planted onion seeds for two varieties last autumn -- long red Florence and yellow of Parma. Rather than scattering seeds, I used my spacing template to plant 9 per square foot because the year before I tried to plant them close and found that it was too difficult to replant them later in the spring as sets. The Florence didn't come up as well this year as the Parma did. I attribute this primarily to voles or some other pest in the box where the Florence were planted.

But the bigger immediate question is how the seeds have fared so far when compared to sets. Because the Florence were spotty, I bought sets and planted them in the same raised bed. It allows me to make a direct comparison. The photo below compares the best Florence with 2 onions typical of those planted as sets. Not all the Florence are this big, but most are clearly larger than the onions planted from sets.


The Parma that were planted from seeds grew much more regularly and, overall, seem to be doing great. They are all tall and have developed nice thick stalks. It might be hard to make a direct comparison between the photos, but the Parma are uniformly as large as the Florence I captured above.


The conclusion is that I like seeds, at least so far. I have to figure out the pest problem and will move the bed where I plant next year if I can't kill the pests off.

Death to Fruit Flies

Beginning sometime in late December, we experienced an invasion of fruit flies. You never know where these things come from. As the name implies, you always expect they hitched a ride on a piece of fruit. But then they multiply. It wasn't clear where they were hatching their young, but by New Years, they were plentiful.

My first response was to try to kill them with a fly swatter. The problem is that this isn't a very efficient method and, small as they are and with a brain to match, they are actually pretty good at attack avoidance.

My next strategy involved using a small hand-held vaccuum. Our little Oreck came with a long tube and a narrow slot end piece. My method then became sneaking up on the fly -- rush to them and they would fly in a random direction -- and suck the little bugger up. Over the course of the last week, I plied my hunt three or four times a day, starting at first in the kitchen where they seemed to be most prevalent and then gradually expanding to all rooms. The long tube was especially helpful picking them off the ceiling.

Our final stroke of luck came from two sources. Lisa discovered a bunch of bad potatoes near the pantry where they had been laying eggs. Then, the Orkin man came by to treat the outside of the house and he suggested putting a cup of baking soda followed by a cup of vinegar in the kitchen sinks. He said that is where they are also probably laying eggs. (I've liked mixing baking soda and vinegar since I was a kid.)

I searched the house over to find a fly to include as a photo in the blog. This one was in the laundry room on a white plastic garbage can we use to store dog food. I need to find him again. I think there may be one or two more and the hunt will continue until they are completely exterminated. It's a strange sense of accomplishment to kill fruit flies, but there it is. Death to fruit flies! All of them!

Critters 2

I am now paying close attention to the bed in which I planted the garlic and Florence onion seed. Every morning, there is evidence of small critters burrowing just beneath the surface. I was careful to look for the animal's descending holes. There are more there than I originally thought. I'm not sure how many critters there might be, but I presume, given the distribution of evidence throughout the bed, that there must be several.

The photo below shows the size of the holes that go down into the bed. (That's a quarter next to the hole.) They are not large. I don't know what the animals might be living off of. I have had two garlic sprout. (The ones from the fridge.) That is all and those have been left alone.


If the onions will sprout and grow, I won't have a problem. My suspicion is that the critters are going to disrupt the bed enough, even if they don't consume the seeds, that sprouting will become a challenge. I planted a second bed with the Yellow of Parma seed. There has been no evidence of critters in that bed, so I may have something to compare productivity with.

I am getting myself prepared for a war. Right now I wish I had a pet black snake or something.

Critters

Every morning as I look at the bed in which I planted the garlic cloves and onion seeds last week, I see a strange pattern on the surface of the bed. I am guessing, but I think there are small animals that make foraging runs just under the surface of the bed, pushing the soil up slightly. As I water, I usually find a hole about half an inch in diameter on one end the goes back down underground.

I'm not sure my photography captures this well enough to see, but I think you can see one of the tracks I observed this morning. It goes from left to right from the top of the photo and then makes an abrupt turn that curves back to the left.

I thought initially that this might be evidence of a vole. We've seen voles in the yard before, mostly because of what the cats have dragged in. But voles are generally much larger. I can't imagine a cut worm that large. Whatever it is, I hope it is finding no food and decides to leave. I hope it isn't finding a meal on the garlic or clover.

Speed Bump

I haven't posted for awhile. What's my excuse? A combination of things. I hesitate to write when all I have to write about is bad news.

Bad luck with the beehives in my yard is one frustration. Both hive were attacked by wax moths. I need to do a postmortem to be fair. Both colonies were weak. When they split earlier and when one didn't have a queen, I should have just recombined them. But, having not done that, they both limped along. At the least, I should have put an entrance reducer on to give them a fighting chance. But, in the end, they both died. Fortunately, the hive in Clarence's yard was strong. We harvested a gallon and a half of honey from it; enough for the family for the rest of the year, but not enough to give much away. (Clarence got a quart, of course.)

The failure of the tomatoes has been another issue. Lately, they have been doing much better. I think the weather has helped; enough rain and cooler temperatures. They are still ripening slowly. We have made some dried tomato but have not canned anything yet.

The zucchini and yellow squash were another disaster. The squash bugs just massacred the plants. We got 6 or 7 fruits and I think that will be it. Pretty disastrous!

The other part of the speed bump has been work (what I do for a living). I am grateful to be fully self-employed. We put out two new grant proposals last week and the prep time kept me exhausted into the evening hours. There were other tasks at work as well. We leased a new printer that requires some attention to learn how to use and to get our materials ready for production.

Finally, I spent a little time with the boy scouts and family sailing. Honestly, if you had to choose between sailing and writing about the disaster occurring in your garden, which would you pick?

I Hate July

I hate July for gardening.

I've lost one of the yellow squash plants already. I presume to squash bugs. When the squash plants go, they just die quickly. I have 4 zucchini and 3 yellow squash left to go. No harvest from any of them yet.

About 3/4 of the tomatoes (at least) have blossom end rot. Next year, I will plant from other seed. I will also plant further apart. (The plants seem healthy with plenty of stocks.) I may even try staking them like my elders do. Of course, this calls for a lot more lime, but I'm not so sure that water or lack of it doesn't also play a role. I haven't harvested from the newest plants yet, so there may yet be hope.

The bean are up but a goodly proportion have had their first real leaves nibbled away. The crop was just planted to keep the ground occupied, so it isn't a great loss. I expect to harvest all we can use eventually, even if it isn't much.

I harvested grapes. I really don't like the variety (Mars) I planted. I was late and didn't get everything I should have, but I'm not sure what we will do with them anyway.

I just feel that failure is all around me out there.

July Is Slow

We finally got rain yesterday. A lot of rain; about 2 inches. It knocked over some tomato plants, but other than that, everything just seemed to really thrive. It seemed that the zucchini and yellow squash added two or three leaves per plant over night. July is slow, but the zucchini and squash are taking off. I noticed today that I had squash bugs on every plant. They aren't very fast or clever, so they are easy to catch and destroy. But every time I looked, I saw 2 or 3 more, mostly in the mating position. I know the odds of outwitting them totally is low, and I don't plan any extravagant pest control applications, but I am dedicated to killing them whenever I can. There are also some little yellow and black striped beetles I haven't identified yet. They seem plentiful.


The cucumbers really liked the rain. I picked a bunch today. There has been a bumper crop all season.

I decided to plant some green beans today as well. It may be a little late in the season, but I have an empty bed. I had a mixture of seeds, so I dumped them out on the table, counted 196 out (8 rows 12 deep) and put them in the open bed. We are expecting more rain later. It seems like a good time to get them in the ground.

Other Potatoes

I harvested the other potato bed this morning before it got too hot. There were half as many potatoes by weight (about 20 pounds total) from this bed and many of the potatoes were quite small. I thought I had planted Yukon Gold, but it turns out I think I planted Russets. This is the bed where the Yukon Gold I had bought failed to sprout once in the ground and I had grabbed potatoes that had sprouted from the garage.

This is a bit disappointing, but I suspect I should try to learn from it. Things to remember for next year include making sure I sprout the seed indoors instead of in the greenhouse. This bed also lacked the same friability that the other bed had. The soil was just a bit more compact and needs a fair amount of compost. This bed had more Colorado Potato Beetles and the plants didn't grow as vigorously, suggesting either deficiency in nutrients or poor seed to start with. So, there is a combination of factors.

So, all together, I harvested about 56 pounds of potatoes. That would translate to about a pound per week if Kathy and I tried to live off them. That is not sufficient. Next year, I will double the area devoted to potatoes (at least 4 beds). Assuming I get seed that will grow at the rate of the Pontiac Red's bed, I would expect 144 pounds, which is almost 2 pounds per week, much closer to what the two of us would actually consume. Ultimately, I probably need to double that, assuming I will have more than just the two of us to feed.

Blue Hive Under Attack

The blue hive is under attack!

I noticed yesterday that there were larger bees going into and out of the blue hive. I checked it again today and got stung away from the hive. The bees are definitely still not happy. This is the one that we just requeened. It has plenty of honey, but also has the weakest defenses. The yellow hive next to it has no honey to speak of and is much stronger with an active queen.

I got some old queen excluder from Doug Shaw, who bought some from someone going out of the business. It is old and metal, so it has little practical value (we both like the newer plastic type much better). He was willing to sacrifice it for me to see if it would work keeping the other species out.

I put it up, sticking it to the front of the hive with old wax. It is definitely working keeping the invaders out. (The hive body that has the excluder on it is yellow, but this is the blue hive.) The invaders are dark and have no stripes. You can see in the photo that they are much larger than the honeybees from the hive.

Small Things

It's that time of the season when you mostly watch and wait. And I haven't done much. So there has been little for me to report about.

My tomatoes are looking weak. I expected them to start growing vigorously once planted in their beds, but they are, generally speaking, just limping along. There are a few that have started to grow a little. Several have started looking very spindly. One was so bad off that I replaced it with a new seedling from the greenhouse. I don't understand the problem. There are a lot of things that I could have done wrong and I have thought extensively about it. I have no answers yet.

The potatoes are, for the most part, doing well. I still pick off Colorado Potato Beetles every day. There are some plants, maybe six or seven of the Yukon Gold, that have not thrived. The Pontiac Red all seem to be doing quite well.

The onions are growing well. I haven't seen them start to bulb yet, but I have a month left to go.

I started turning the compost. I have added a significant amount of water to keep the composting going. In two of the three bins at least, that seems to be helping.

I transplanted three of the cucumber plants I started from seed into a strawberry patch where strawberry plants hadn't made it. The strawberries are starting to develop. I am plucking off any flowers I see until they get well established.

Colorado Potato Beetle

I'm just keeping track of pests on this entry. The only thing I have seen so far this year are Colorado Potato Beetles. They are slow, but they do spawn.

I caught a number of them early and even found where they had laid their eggs on the bottom side of leaves.


My solution, because I only have two raised beds devoted to potatoes is to squash them. It takes daily vigilance and the tolerance of messy fingers. So far they haven't done all that much damage.

Moths Aplenty

I've tried swatting at them and putting all our food in sealed containers, but the moths persist. However, I noticed the other day that there was a bug trap in the top of the pantry. It was very old, but it looked like it had done a decent job at catching things, so I ordered some new ones through Amazon.com. The traps (Xlure R.T.U.) come in six packs and aren't necessarily cheap.

The lures come in a resealable package, a necessity because it they operate by releasing pheromones that attract moths who think they are going to get free sex. I thought I would have just a few moths that would immediately swarm to the lure, and that would be that. What happened instead was that I had about 20 moths immediately start swarming, but none went to the lure; they just came out in the open. So, the first thing I learned here was that I had a lot bigger moth problem than I imagined and that I would probably need to let the lure just sit there for a while. My presumption was that the pheromones were so strong that they actually disoriented the moths and that they couldn't follow the scent. I figured that was still OK because being disoriented may have meant that they weren't going to jump at each other and reproduce.

So, I waited a few days before I looked inside the trap again. (The trap is a box that has four interior sides that are coated with sticky areas to hold the moths who venture inside.) There were moths stuck to the bottom interior surface; maybe 20. So I rotated the lure so that what had been the ceiling now became the floor and waited a few more days. Again, about 20 moths were stuck to the bottom surface. Next, I put one of the sides on the bottom and after a few days rotated it one more time.

Each lure is supposed to work for about eight weeks. After looking at it, however, I decided to just get rid of this one and start a new one. So, as you can see in the photo, I caught between 60 and 80 moths. (Each little blip on the surface is a moth.) I hope this is getting rid of them faster than they can reproduce. It is certainly getting rid of them faster than my swatting.

Pantry

Yesterday was a cold and dreary Saturday. Cold rainy days are not conducive to working in the yard, no matter how diligent. Last night we hoped for snow, but when it finally got cold enough (the low last night was 21F), it quit raining.

Kathy is visiting her parents in California, which, oddly enough, gave me license to tackle the pantry. I don't know what other people's pantries are like. They aren't usually featured on home tours, unless they have been emptied of everything that functionally makes them a pantry. Ours was expanded when we redid our kitchen. We added about a foot to the port side, the benefit being that we also added a wall full of shelves that increased our storage capacity by about 40%.

The problem we have had has been moths. This has been a somewhat enduring problem, almost since the day we moved in. It seems that, no matter what we do, we eventually see the little creatures flitting around in the room. I have refused to fumigate. Mostly, we try to catch and kill. The biology/ecology has to be pretty easy to understand. Moths are attracted to food and spawn. So, there must be food that they can get to. We have taken to storing opened cereals -- both the contents of boxes as well as rolled oats -- in gallon sized containers with tight lids. We have tried to put as many other things in containers as well. But, there are things that are hard to store that way -- chips, saltine crackers, and cookies, for instance.

One of the big culprits this time was a sealed container of split peas and other beans. It was so loaded with vermin that I opened it outside before I put it into the compost pile. Sort of hate to see things like that go, but when they are bad, they are bad and there is no use trying to save them. What is telling is that the inside of the container was loaded with moths, many of which had already died. So, basically, the container worked, but in the wrong direction. Somehow moths had infested the contents when it was opened and then were trapped inside. It suggests we need to figure out how to be more efficient at keeping things free when we are storing things the first time.

My strategy was to pull out everything that was on a shelf and sort through it, cleaning up as I went. That meant that the kitchen became a temporary pantry. But it allowed me to sort things and get rid of things that no longer needed to be kept. I was able to clean up and organize the spice racks and put things back in a more organized way. There are lots of some things -- cereals, mixes, soups, canned and bottled fruits, cookbooks, pasta, oils, sweeteners, and, in our case, chocolate -- that can all be grouped. But then there are odd things like seaweed for sushi and samples of jams that we have just a little of.



No pantry that we have managed has ever been totally organized. I don't think it is possible. The second law of thermodynamics applies. All systems tend to entropy and disorganization over time. The other truth is that, when you clean up one mess, you almost always make another. The pantry is clean but the kitchen has suffered some and still needs some further cleaning, which will create a mess some where else, ad nauseam.

Dead Hive

Doug Shaw and I went into the two hives that are on my property this afternoon. The primary purpose was to take off the top feeders. But, as soon as we got into the one hive, I could see that I had real problems. In fact, the ultimate problem. The hive was dead -- d.e.d. dead. Wax moths had totally destroyed everything inside. There wasn't a honeybee alive.

This is the same hive in which I had noticed deformed wing earlier. I had treated it with api-life, but evidently (and this is just the post-mortem done on the spot by Doug and me) the deformed wing was a marker of varroa mite infestation. The treatment evidently didn't work or didn't work well enough. Weakened by the mites, the bees were not able to fend off the moths and the moth larvae. Strong hives don't let this sort of thing happen. So this hive must have grown weak. It's sort of sad. There should be a lesson in this. I think I will try some Russian bees next.

The other hive had no sign of any issues whatsoever. There was a nice cluster of bees in the brood frame and they had stored quite a bit of honey (I judge by weight when I pick up the back of the hive). In fact, I am now wondering if the healthy hive didn't rob from the weak one when they sensed what was going on.

Doug took the frames and boxes to his chickens to clean them up. Evidently, they really did a nice job and enjoyed the feast. Glad that something could benefit.

November Cutworm?

I went out this morning to just look around. Daylight savings is gone and that gives me time in the morning and I doubt I will have any in the evening when I get home from work.

Most things looked good, but I need to do some clean up. The tops of plants that have been harvested haven't yet been put into the compost. There are small weeds poking up where the carrots and sweet potatoes grew, and some larger weeds in areas that I neglected.

Looking around was what I expected until I examined the cauliflower closely. One looked like it had fallen over because of the rain. But a closer inspection revealed a severed stem.



I didn't think I would have to deal with cutworms at this time of the year. I guess little collars are in the making for this evening. Of the 18 plants I put in, 1 died at the outset (the top growth had been pinched) and it looks like 3 will go from cut worm damage. Damage!