The Backyard Gardener

Since we've been having unseasonably warm weather here in the mid-Atlantic, I decided to put some Milky spore that I've been meaning to spread for a while. Milky spore is a bacteria, bacillus thuringiensis, which will cause the grubs in my soil, and in particular Japanese beetle grubs to be killed. I've had a pretty bad infestation of Japanese beetles every year on my raspberries where they attack the leaves and the flowers, cherry trees where they skeletonize the leaves, and roses where they attack the flowers. Since they're a non-native pest to begin with, I don't feel any remorse on killing them off. If I understand the issue, Japanese beetles taste bad to most animals in North America, so their population is out of control.

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Posted by Chris at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This time of year our mailboxes will often get flooded with garden catalogs. For those of us planning to plant some kind of fruit, we can get in a quandry of what to plant. The catalogs can make us want it all, but we need to balance what we want, with what we have reasonable time to take care of, and be able to handle the harvest (which depending on what it is, can be overwhelming.). I suggest on anything you plant, that you start slow, and increase your plantings gradually (not that I necessarily followed my own advice.). I would recommend you also consider the following things:

What is my Location Like?
What do I like?
How much effort will the plant take?
Where am I going to get the plant from?
How long will it take to get a crop?
How perishable is the crop?
How much processing does the crop take?

In the rest of my entry, I'll discuss these topics.

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Posted by Chris at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)