Hunting vine borers and pruning tomatoes

Vine borers, beware. There is nowhere you can hide where I won't find you.

Even if you hide in this bag.

Before I get to the vine borers, let me just mention the squash bugs. I think this was the first time this year they laid eggs on the top side of a leaf.

I think they like the underside better because it's shady and well hidden from egg predators. As in me, because I don't know what else would have a vested interest in destroying these things. Aside from Joe the spider, of course. (But he'd probably wait for them to hatch anyway.)

They also laid, like, twenty on the bottom of this baby leaf.

 

Okay. Serious time. Vine borers are not cool. While squash bugs are annoying as all get out, and are quite scary when gathered in large numbers (I would show you a picture, but every time I turn a leaf over and find twenty little blue adolescents hanging out, I go into battle-rage mode. Doesn't happen too often when I'm checking the leaves ever couple days)-- VINE BORERS are agents of evil. Their sole purpose is to lay their eggs on the stem of unsuspecting, innocent squash plants so that their larvae can hatch and burrow into the stem, devouring the main stem from the inside out.

Since the eggs are generally too small to spot (or at least too hard for me to distinguish from dirt), my mission is to protect the main stem and monitor the rest of the plant for this sawdust looking stuff called frass that marks the place where the larva burrowed in. 

Here is an example:

This is on a pumpkin leaf (the one climbing up the porch). I dusted the very base of the main stems on my biggest plants to protect them, and I haven't seen any evidence of attacks there. With that front covered, it seems like the fork of the leaves is the next best spot for these little buggers. (Or at least that's where I've found most of them.)

If you spot the frass, all you need to do is use a clean, sharp knife to slice open the stem and dig the sucker out. I've read online about other people using wire or toothpicks or something to kill them, but I like to know my enemy is completely dead.

So here I've sliced open the leaf stem. (The pumpkin handily provided its own tourniquet.) I usually just keep slicing until I find the larva, which is kind of graphic/drastic sounding, but it's better than having it working its way down to the stem and eating the plant from the inside, I figure.

This one's super tiny. (Also, my knife is neither sharp nor clean. I'm probably spreading some horrible kind of squash vine disease by doing this.) If the larva is bigger than this, that sucks because it means it's been growing fat and healthy on your pumpkins livelihood. They get to be like an inch long at least, fully grown. Think a stubby, glisteny-white grub/caterpillar. That's what they're like.

Anyways, here's another operation.

Is an excellent example of frass. I think it's the chewed up stuff the borer leaves behind as it burrows in. Anyway, it signifies its entry point.

I usually kind of stick my knifepoint in there to do my surgery. The stalks slice very neatly along the stripes.

 I kind of majorly mangled this one, hunting for this one, but it does show how sneaky they can be.

Yeah, that was my morning. I've found maybe five or six of these in the past week and a half or so. I read online somewhere the moth that lays these eggs is only around for a couple of weeks, so there's a possibility that this will be a short lived (if intense) battle. 

Other details, if you find a vine borer in the stem along the ground, you can slice in and get it and then bury that part of the stem and water it to see if it'll root. If you miss the frass, you may be toast. You'll know you have a problem when the leaves start to seriously wilt, but thaaaat means the borers have eaten away so much of the vine that water can't get from the roots to the leaves. Which means your plant is pretty much dead.

Prevention-wise, you can bury a few of the leaf nodes along the stem so the plant has multiple rooting-points. That way if a vine borer does some serious damage, say, to the base of the main stem, the rest of the vine is still rooted and can keep the water transport thing going.

I've taken this precaution with the plant growing the giant pumpkin, but the others have grown out into the grass where it's harder to bury them, so we'll see what happens.

 By the way, here's the big pumpkin.

 

It's looking pretty ready now that I look at this picture. I guess at the time I was still in vine borer destruction mode and didn't think about it.

Also, here's Little Mac.

He's about 22-23 inches now. Growing fast.

Rocky's got him beat at 30 inches, though.

Flower bed operations have been progressing nicely. I'm starting to think the spaghetti squash might have enough time to put out a squash or two, if it lives through the vine borers and all

Here's a picture of the whole bed (well, most of it):

The dark blue circle is the blueberry bush, the orange is a peony, the purple-magenta color are irises, and the blue is the spaghetti squash.

It was cloudy and even a little drizzly, so I only weeded a little. Patch helped.

She was actually very excited about helping.

Rainbow, our gray cat, also "helped". Or rather waged chemical warfare on the weeds.

And that was when I stopped weeding for the day.

Speaking of chemical warfare, the strawberries are getting along after all and are, for the most part "plague"-less.

Remember when I mentioned re-staking the tomatoes? That also happened, the result being that instead of being a three-foot high mess of vines and leaves, I now have a five-foot high mess of vines and leaves.

The little okra plant is still chilling there with his forcefield.

While seeking wisdom on the internet, I stumbled across a discussion of how to prune tomatoes. All I gathered from skimming the page was that it was a good idea, helped the plants produce more delicious tomatoes (which may or may not be impossible, considering how amazing the ones I've already had are), and... this is how you do it.

See that little circled sucker? It's actually called a sucker! They grow out of the joint where a tomato leaf meets the vine, and if left alone turn into another huge vine. That's great if you want ten foot tall tomatoes, but if they're already rivaling the size of your back porch you can pinch them off to encourage the plant to put more effort into making tomatoes.

In theory, it makes sense. If I were a tomato and something kept pinching off little pieces of me, I'd go, "Oh, man! Better put out more tomatoes so whatever's eating me at least eats the part with seeds so I can spread to the world!"

Also, the pumpkins in the corner were climbing each other, so I hauled out one of the pallets we had leaning against a phone pole and converted it into a trellis. A... sad trellis right now, but I think it has potential.

It's totally going to look better when the leaves realize they're facing the wrong direction.

So yeah. This is the garden. Why all the pumpkins decided to ditch this perfectly good dirt and head for the yard, I do not know. But it's left lots of light for the later batch of okra, (which you can kind of see is flagged with little red flags. I made them so my dad wouldn't step on the plants by accident).

Also, here is a baby cucumber.

Grow, cucumber, grow. I don't really like cucumbers, but whatever. I've never grown them before.

Here's another pic of the grape tomatoes. You can't tell at all, but I weeded like crazy underneath them. The mint was trying to take over-- I must have pulled up, like, thirty stalks of it.

In other news, one of the pumpkins that was getting ready to be ripe turned out to have some kind of creepy mold growing on it.

 

I have no idea what this stuff is. Only thing I know is when I tried to wipe it off, the pumpkin's outer skin came off with it. Super gross. I think this one's history.

Better fated pumpkins exist, though. Not too long ago, I looked out into the yard at the decomposing haybales I use for archery practice.

See them?

At one point, I smashed a leftover pumpkin from last Halloween out there (after shooting it with arrows, which was gross but fun), and now this is growing.

The P stands for Pumpkin.

Please note, while this plant has been completely unbothered by squash bugs and vine borers so far, it's in a pretty dangerous place. Whenever Dad mows, it's delicate life hangs in the balance. Cross your fingers as to whether it lives to put out a pumpkin or not.

My final order of business was the crepe myrtle. It's safely planted and looking quite good, if I do say so myself.

That's it, if you can tell it from the grass and weeds. It's a lot greener now, at least. We'll see how it comes along in the next couple of weeks.

Cats.

Look at this strawberry plant.

 Looks diseased. That's what my first thought was, actually. "Bummer. My strawberries have caught the dreaded spotted-strawberry-leaf plague and are going to die."

I keep them in pots on the porch right next to each other, but this one had the worst spots.

So I went the whole day thinking they were going to shrivel up and die, repeatedly making a mental note to look this up online to see what was going on (and forgetting to look it up). Then mom came along and told me she was pretty sure our cat had sprayed them. Yeah.

Here's a picture of the lovely strawberries on the not-dying plant.

It would have been nice to know the cat had peed on the plant before I ate these, but I haven't died, so whatever.

Anyway... NEWSFLASH:

It's true.

 

If you were color blind, you could play Russian Roulette, except with fruit.

In general, the grape tomato plants (I think there are three of them, but more could have volunteered when I wasn't looking) are crazy.

That huge tangle up there is all grape tomato plants, climbing up on sticks and pumpkin leaves. I desperately need to re-stake them, which is what this weekend is for!

Moving on, these were the spaghetti squash plants as of last week:

 Tomorrow I'll get pics of how they're doing now. If they're still alive. (Did I mention vine boring moths? They're here, and their larvae could probably eat these whole. Unless they're too small to bother tunneling into. Spare the baby squash plants, vine borers! And then forget to come back for them.)

Also, last week pics of the okra. This is Lil Mac, measuring 17 inches.

I wonder where that meter stick came from...?

And here's Rocky, at 26 inches.

Okra is awesome. Nothing touches it. Not deer, not too many bugs... it's, like, the perfect vegetable. Too bad it's slimy and gross if you don't fry the heck out of it. 

I also measured the patty-pan squash plants-- they're about fifteen inches. 

 

 Let me also take a second to say that I hadn't the foggiest idea these squash were called "patty-pan" squash. I thought "patapan" or "padapan" or something. At least that's what I've been calling them. I had to look the spelling up online, and it's "patty-pan". Who knew. 

They were kind of lying down in this picture, so it was harder to get a good measurement. (Too much beer? Ha. Really, I accidentally blasted them with the hose when I was watering.)   

In other squash news, the zucchini has so far resisted the attacks of the squash bugs and vine borers by being less appetizing than the pumpkins. At least, that's all I can figure-- I've cleaned eggs off of their leaves maybe once or twice all summer, as opposed to the five or six bi-weekly cleanings the pumpkin leaves get.

The picture's upside down, but I thought it looked kind of cool, so I left it this way. 

Wouldn't it be neat if zucchini could grow on the ceiling? If I ever live in space, I'm going to have a zero gravity garden so I can do that.

I have harvested two pumpkins to date.

These two, to be exact. They are the most beautiful pumpkins ever, except for this one that's growing on the corner of the porch.

A perhaps precarious perch for a pumpkin, but possibly impervious to persnickety pests.

 (Not true. Also, ouch. But the alliteration was too good to pass up.)

And this particular vine DOES have a Joe-esque guardian, only on a larger scale.

Praying mantises are the ninjas of the garden.

Right, one more pumpkin picture.

Dun dun DUN.

If this one keeps till October, I'm set.

Also, tomatoes!

The red and yellow streaks are to show how crazy they are. The blue circle is the force field the okra plant has put up in case things get out of hand.

This is a pumpkin bloom.

Like a starfish, but with bees and it's not in the water.

Sneaky little cantaloupe, growing down in the shade of the pumpkins.

Baby cantaloupe! It's super fuzzy and cute. 

Also growing in the shade...

... soon they will be pulled...if I can reach them without trampling the tomatoes, cantaloupe, and pumpkin vines. You chose your hideout wisely, weeds, but your days are still numbered.

Really, I was focusing on pulling weeds in the flower garden that day, which, thanks to my cat Patch, was an incredibly productive venture.

I forgot to take a picture of how awesome and clear it looks now. (At least, the front of it's alright, and there are no more horse nettles.)

We also had a garlic plant growing in there, so I harvested it! It's decidedly delicious, and here's a picture of the cloves.

I planted all but two of these, so we'll hopefully have three garlic plants come next spring. Or four. A super tiny clove fell off when I pulled up the plant, so four is my guess.

There's another new addition to the gardening area, too. (Well, the far edge, anyway.)

 Crepe Myrtle. It's been chilling on the front porch since mom brought it home, and all of its leaves have fallen off. Probably not a great sign, but it's still alive and it's in the ground now, so we'll see what happens. Maybe it'll be so happy, I'll go back tomorrow and find a giant crepe myrtle towering over the house!

The shade would be welcome. A break from the crazy heat in the middle of the day would be excellent.

 

You know it's a Virginia summer when your rubber wrist band melts to your stick shift. It's too bad I took it off of there, come to think of it. I could have left it there for good and had a melty smear of red with the words "Go for it!" maybe still intact. Maybe. 

Fortunately, there's always the indoors, where cats and tigers can co-exist in mutual coolness.