It's July Ramble Time

It’s been hot and it’s been cold. It’s been dry and it’s been wet. It’s been extremely dry and a few days later extremely humid.

The bugs and slugs are out but not when or where we’d expect. And everything is happening early. Or is it?

What does this all mean?

It means it’s time for my July ramble. So here we go.

Take A Picture, It Lasts Longer

First, some advice. But not about plants. It’s about pictures of plants.

Over the years I’ve mentioned a number of times how important I think it is to keep a record or diary of what you do with your plants and your garden and the importance of pictures of your garden. The pictures can give you an ongoing reference of what you did, where you did it and what it looked like at a particular moment in time.

Looking back on these pictures can be a real time saver in garden planning. It can also keep your memory fresh about what things looked like last year or 10 years ago.

How you organize your pictures and how you use them could be a whole column. I have about 25,000 images I work with (in Lightroom) and I can call them up and view them by simply typing in dates, names, locations or some other criteria.
Dates may be all you need, and that makes it really simple.

What might be daunting though is what camera to use. I shoot with three cameras and each has a different level of complexity, weight and cost.

My all-around favorite is the smallest, least expensive and easiest to use. It’s the Panasonic LX5. It’s been around for several years and the price has come down to around $375, which is about half its original price.

For a fixed-lens camera that can shoot in the jpeg or raw format and in automatic or manual modes, this camera has never failed me. It’s always in my truck and ready for action and I’m always amazed how it can shoot high-quality pictures with little to no effort.

The LX5 does wonders in low light. And the fast-zoom lens allows you to get in tight for flower and insect shots, then zoom out for distant shots and instantly right back for a wide landscape shot. So, if you’re in the market for a digital camera that you can easily carry and is very versatile in the garden, then take a look at this one.

Splendor In The Grass, Not So Much

On to the lawn.

For some reason my dog hates to walk on wet grass (she’s a desert-loving Basenji—a breed that originated in central Africa) so getting her out early in the morning on the dew-covered turf can be an ordeal. But one morning last week as we crossed the lawn, we stopped for what I first thought was a young snake only to realize it was a fully elongated

limax maximus

. In layman’s terms, that’s a leopard slug. At nearly 8 inches long, it was quite a surprise. And quite gross.

For some reason there have been very few slugs in my garden. On the other hand, I seem to be the local gathering place for snails. They’re on hosta, daylilies, hibiscus, ligularia and a host of other plants.

I don’t care where they came from but getting rid of them is high on my to-do list. Early on I used the organic iron phosphate products and all the saved ashes from my wood stove, but each spring rain thwarted those efforts so I finally resorted to chemical slug bait containing metaldehyde.

Two applications a week apart cut the snail population to a point where I could easily pick off the remaining few. And since most of them will have been eradicated early in the summer, I know that the population will stay low, thus few will be around next year.

The treatment for slugs and snails is the same. But what you use in terms of baits, ashes, coffee grinds or diatomaceous earth is a very personal decision. My mode of attack is always to start with the least environmentally offensive, only moving on to the more controversial chemicals as a last resort when my plants are in serious jeopardy.

Which brings me back to neem oil and columbines. I mentioned early in the season that I was going to use neem oil, an organic extract of the neem seed, to see if it would be effective in repelling and/or stopping the fly of the columbine leaf miner from attacking my aquilegia.

I sprayed a 70-percent neem oil product on about 50 columbine plants every two weeks for about two months. The long and short of it is that these plants had no leaf miner. Only about 10 leaves on 50 plants had any damage.

Obviously this is not a scientific test and is somewhat anecdotal since there was no control group but it’s interesting nonetheless. I did get one researcher interested, so a true scientific trial may be in the offing for next year.

The Danger Zone

Which brings me to my big and wonderful blueberry bush at the front of the property. As I drove by in late June I noticed some webbing in a couple of the upper branches, only to discover an infestation of fall webworms about eight weeks too early. And on blueberries?

They were easily done in with some insecticidal soap but the mystery is why on earth this bush and why in June?

I can’t tell you why they were on the blueberry, but they were eight weeks early because of the weird spring weather. Insect growth cycles are primarily driven by temperature. The extremely warm start to the spring got them into motion very, very early and they just didn’t stop.

Which brings me to the privet scale. It’s still a big problem out here in the Hamptons but I did note one interesting control strategy. I saw a long line of privet being sheered on a Southampton street. And as soon as the sheering was done, a crew followed with an insecticidal spray.

The rationale is that the sheering opens up the plants and exposes the stems, where the scale is most populous. Spraying at this point gives great penetration and coverage, and thus the potential for better control.

This brings me to spinosad. Spino what? Spinosad is an insecticide that was developed in the 1970s and became commercially available in 1997 and is now available to gardeners.

Yes, it’s an organic and it’s Organic Materials Review Institute accepted—but it’s a broad-spectrum insecticide, so it will kill a wide range of insects and potentially the good ones as well as the bad ones. It’s derived from a bacteria that was discovered in an old sugar cane mill and it’s now being used throughout the world.

Spinosad is safe on vegetables and fruits and I’ve been hearing some pretty good reports on its effectiveness. It has two modes of action: insects can be killed by ingesting it while eating your plants or when they come in contact with it from sprays.

When dried on your plants, it is not toxic to honeybees. But it can kill them if sprayed when they are active.

You can find spinosad products in most larger local garden centers and you’ll see it as an active ingredient. I used it last week for spider mites on a phlox paniculata. Stay tuned.

And now on to impatiens. If you’ve bought bedding impatiens (NOT New Guinea impatiens) and they’ve suddenly wilted, yellowed and defoliated, it’s not your fault.

These impatiens have had a serious issue with a downy mildew (

plasmopara obducens

) since last year. And because the disease, referred to as a water mold, can remain in the soil for up to five years the problem has become somewhat rampant. Again, the New Guinea types are not affected.

So far there have been no reports on Long Island of the boxwood blight. But several cases have been discovered in Connecticut and a large nursery in Ohio had to destroy 10,000 plants when it was discovered on the property.

You may have been reading lately about the onslaught of the army worms that have wiped out farms in western New York and in some New England areas. Army worms can decimate a corn or grain farm in days, then move to nearby lawns and eat them bare in just hours. The good news though is that only a handful have been found on Long Island and an outbreak is not expected—thanks to that natural barrier, the Long Island Sound. Army worms don’t swim.

Keep growing.