Saturday, June 3, 2017

Garden Spring Issues



Blackberries!
Love that I already have a load of blackberries starting to grow!
Note the pale color of the leaves with the dark veins
The pale color is most likely because our soil is too alkaline.
The dark streaks are from my grandmothers treatment
(proven 100% effective)
of pouring coffee & coffee grinds on them.
With in a day the bottom of the plants were back to the beautiful dark green,
while the top parts have the strange streaks occurring.
Thankfully (for my plants)
I'm a coffee addict!
Soon the whole plant will be back to its dark green lush self!


Also my lovely Stanley Plum that we just planted started to come in with curled leaves.
Which is a sure sign of aphid infection.
Sad to say this plant most likely came infected from the store I bought it.
So we bought and night released 1500 Ladybugs onto the Plum, surrounding trees, berry plants and my mint garden.
I want as many of the lovely darling to take up residence in my yard full time as possible.
This fall we will treat the leaves with an insecticide soap.
If new leaves continue to grow in curled we will need to move up the treatments - soaps, neem oil ect.
However, I'm really praying my ladybugs are hungry and solve the problem.
Note: all currently curled leaves will not magically uncurl.
Thankfully my tree is small and half its leaves are healthy and beautiful 
we just want to nip this in the bud (gardening pun)
as quickly as we can.

So the Ladybugs ate and ate and ate, then only two were left after 48 hours.
There were still bugs and larva on my Plum.
Phase two yesterday morning involved soaping my tree's.
Recipe link HERE
This really worked but will need to be reapplied OFTEN.
I also soaped my other two tree's to keep the aphid infection from spreading.
Will keep you posted on how new leaves form when they arrive on my plum.

Also due to this crazy wet springtime the mosquitoes are taking over the world!
Okay, maybe not the world, but definitely the Salt Lake Valley!
Its so bad that in the 20 minutes it took us to release the Ladybugs
I got 7 bites and my husband 5!
Its getting hard to garden in the morning or evening due to the mosquitoes!
We are even thinking of building and putting in a bat house!
Long live hungry bats!
Eat the mosquitoes!


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