Hows Your Garden

Here's some info on blight that I dug up. Cornell University is a very good source for gardening info.

http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/NewsAr ... une09.html

Jeff

Just wanted to bump this and see how others made out for summer 2010.

Our garden did VERY well this year. We did less tomatoes because of the blight last year and wouldn't ya know it, tomatoes did great this year. I think my wife and her sister canned like 25 quarts and that was after eating them for a solid couple of weeks. Almost to the point of not wanting them anymore.

Peppers, cucumbers, and beans did great also. Just went out today and dug potatoes and found a monster the size of a softball. Dug all of the taters cause we let the weeds go and lost control. Gotta be 50 lbs of potatoes.

Also canned 24 qts. of cherry peppers yesterday.(bought peppers, not grown.) These are great sliced and eaten plain or on sanwiches.

Hope everyone else did well also.

Never put one in this year, had that blight last year & with the amt. of business we had this summer I had no time. Spent most of the summer in Pittsburgh working but still got some lettuce & potatoes that came back from last year, now that I`m reminded maybe I`ll go dig a little & see whats there besides weeds.

Excellent year, I must say.

Bad season here for tomatoes. Eaten on the vine by slugs and tomato horn worms. The photo shows a tomato worm on one of our plants after being attacked by parasitic wasp. The white cocoons are the pupae of the Braconid Wasp. These wasps are parasitic insects that prey on hornworms. The wasps hunt down the hornworm inject their eggs into their prey where the eggs hatch into larvae and begin eating the internal organs of the hornworm.

That's very interesting about the wasps. My wife has been killing them right along complaining they make a gooey mess when squished Last couple days she has brought over a couple with the eggs on them and I threw them right on top of the old EFM burn pot. Probly would have been better to let them hatch and give the garden a little of the beneficial parasite control. The things you learn on a coal forum Priceless!

stokerscot wrote:That's very interesting about the wasps. My wife has been killing them right along complaining they make a gooey mess when squished Last couple days she has brought over a couple with the eggs on them and I threw them right on top of the old EFM burn pot. Probly would have been better to let them hatch and give the garden a little of the beneficial parasite control. The things you learn on a coal forum Priceless!

Leave the ones covered with eggs alive, they are dying anyway and will provide a herd of wasps to destroy all your horn worms. If you kill them, no wasps, more horn worms.

Just to show what happens to the tomato worm after the Braconid Wasp pupae finish having dinner. That dead black worm was once the same green color as the tomato plant. It's not the same worm as my photo in my previous post.

Those nasty beasts can get very big. Did you notice they look like something from a 1950s Japanese horror film?

The deer savaged mine yesterday, got a few squash plants, a tomato plant and a piece of my one white eggplant. Caught him looking over the stonewall at the garden this morning. Anyone up for venison?

Yanche wrote:Just to show what happens to the tomato worm after the Braconid Wasp pupae finish having dinner. That dead black worm was once the same green color as the tomato plant. It's not the same worm as my photo in my previous post.

Tomato_Worm_2.jpg

Looks like all the little wasps hatched by the look of all those open hatch doors. I've never seen as many hornworms as I have this year. Two can clean of a tomato plant in short order if you don't interupt their intent. I found only one catapillar as fed upon by the Braconid larva and that one got place in a special place im my garden so they could finish their dinner. All others become disabled and put on the driveway for bird food.