Aphids, for one. Black bean aphids are being farmed by some ants on my fava beans. Here’s a photo:
You know, not like you can see or anything (my camera phone doesn’t have a zoom lens), but there are little black aphids all over these plants. I’ve seen aphids before, but not black ones. I looked them up on the interweb and found out they especially like beans, which makes sense. I also found out that the females can have babies without mating, and that the babies are BORN ALREADY PREGNANT with new babies. Wow! That’s some kind of evolutionary strategy. There are lots of recommendations about how to deal with aphids. As a first try, I’m spraying them with a solution of Dr. Brommer’s liquid soap, which I used kind of successfully on my brussels sprouts last year. If that doesn’t work, I might move on to garlic and cayenne spray, or maybe invest in some lacewing larvae.
Who else is eating my beans? Some really mean little creatures, I don’t know who they are. They are digging up bean seeds before they have a chance to sprout, and they are even chomping on the sprouts! How frustrating and sad, to go to my garden and check on the beans, only to find them very recently chopped off, with their barely emerged leaves laying in the dirt, not even eaten! Damn. I don’t know what kind of beast is doing this, probably squirrels, maybe birds, maybe even rats. And I don’t have a plan for dealing with it. Right now I’m just hoping they leave some for me. Beans in the Oakdale garden are getting eaten worse than those in the BUG garden, and all the beans I planted at Oakdale I have more of if I want to try again…
In other news:
Irises and peonies are blooming. Actually, they’re almost done doing
their thing. Here are some in my kitchen. Next to them in the vase are my sweet potato slips, waiting patiently to get into some dirt. Behind them, in the white pot, you can just make out a strangled little sweet potato slip that’s been waiting patiently since last spring!!
Lilies of the Valley are past. Fruit is starting to come
out, like on this cherry tree in the BUG garden:
The first strawberries are ripening, I ate the first ones this week. The garlic is scaping – I cut some scapes tonight. Onions are still looking good like little troopers, but they have a long way to grow before the solstice, which is less than three weeks away. Shallots are looking like champs, red onions less so. Yellow onions somewhere in between. In my backyard, spinach is getting huge, I’m ready to pull up all the plants and give the beets I interplanted with them a chance. First cilantro is bolting and I haven’t even started the second batch! Broccoli that stayed too long in too small a pot is making heads, they’re maybe an inch across now. Broccoli that had enough room is not heading yet. Ditto for tomatoes – the rootbound ones are making flowers, but the ones that got potted up in time are still concentrating on roots and leaves. I have a LOT of plants to pot up, still. Only the tomatoes have made it out on the roof yet. And tonight is supposed to be below 50 degrees! Fortunately I haven’t potted up the eggplants yet so they can come in for the night, but the tomatoes are on their own – their pots are too big to bring inside. Let’s see… Thyme has been flowering, I don’t know if I was supposed to let it, or pinch it back. Chive flowers are on their way out. I’ve kind of emotionally given up on the peas. Remember I had one pea plant that was all yellow? Well that one died, a long time ago when it was only 2 inches tall or something. But now the one living next to where the yellow one was is also turning yellow. Hmm. I still have not trellised them. I did, however, harvest a crop of purslane from the window boxes where the peas were supposed to be growing from. The purslane gives a mucus-y feel to the salad, it’s actually kind of gross. In the places where the peas were supposed to be growing I planted parsley instead. Corn is looking OK – about 6-8 inches tall but slightly yellow, I wonder if I should give it some fertilizer or something. A few scarlet runner beans are sprouting around them, which gives me hope I will have at least a few vines of those, if the beasts don’t eat them first, curse them. My rooftop tomatoes look fantastic so far, but it won’t be too long before horrible things start happening to them, like fusarium wilt and black end rot. Today I was at Whole Foods and they were selling tomatoes in 2 gallon buckets for 15 bucks! Which is kind of crazy to pay for one little tomato plant, but really if you’re buying seedlings at this time of year, they should be in 2 gallon buckets. My new roommate Tressa has been bringing home tons of seedlings from ReVision House, where she works, including the parsley and lots of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes! My favorite! I didn’t buy any seeds of those this year because I puritanically stuck to only open pollinated, and Sun Gold is a hybrid. But it’s not like I’m going to save the seeds anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter. The sungolds are nearly a foot tall and suffering badly in little two inch cell packs. I don’t have the dirt or the pots to plant them in, not just yet. I am wondering whether to pinch the flowers off of root-bound tomatoes until after they are in the ground and have enough room to do their thing. Don’t know.
