Mid Summer Wonders
Mid Summer Wonders
Interesting summer. In our little micro climate, we are still having really cool weather for this time of year, so most of our veggies are slow to grow. I’m glad we’ve had some early starters this year with tomatoes and zucchini. We are being blessed with really good sized squash (the best I’ve grown so far and managed to avoid the usual June gloom mildew), and the ever bearing strawberries are astonishingly large. Our June bearing strawberries are only just starting to bear fruit. We still have sweet peas blooming and gifting us with their beautiful scent, but they are way beyond their normal season, as are our jasmine. We do not have many bees this year. I am seeing only one or two on occasion, this is most disturbing. There has been a large black bumble bee that seems to be doing most of the pollinating, and we also have some beautiful humming birds that must live close by and love the flowers from the catmint, catnip, and the brilliant texas hummingbird sage.
Rox, I was really happy to discover a man at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market who has local beneficial bugs for the garden. He is also at the big Santa Monica market on Wednesday mornings. It had been on my mind all weekend to try and find a local supplier of ladybugs and beneficial nematodes (not from the “usual” stores, where the bugs are usually dead upon arrival). I took a turn at the market that I don’t normally take, and lo and behold was my dream come true. My strawberry patch needed some cleaning up, those little ladybugs are like vacuum cleaners, they are amazing. I also wanted to let you know about beneficial nematodes as they are wonderful gardener helpers which eat up about 250 different varieties of veggie eating bugs. We do not need pesticides at all, nature has its own way of keeping in balance.
Friday, July 9, 2010