Garden update : August 2010

Well, it's the time of year when the garden is in full bloom. Since I normally post a garden update every year, why should this year be any different?

First, the bean and tomato jungle:

What happened here was that I planted beans in some of my garden beds and a bunch of tomatoes self-seeded from last year's terrible tomato season (when a lot of tomatoes fell to the ground prematurely) and the tomato plants grew in between the bean plants. It'll be a challenge to pick, but they seem to complement each other nicely:

Next is corn. This was an experiment, since I've never planted it before. Some stalks are doing better than others and I'm not sure if any of them will produce large corn cobs. I didn't use any fertilizer, but it was good weather for corn -- hot and humid all summer -- if not for people:

And here we have a cucumber growing in a tree. Of course, cucumbers don't grow on trees. But the cucumber vine climbed the tree and it definitely looks that way!

Although the red tomatoes indicate to the contrary, the health of the plants doesn't. My tomatoes did poorly this year. It looks like an infection of some kind, but some of the smaller plants were eaten through by insects. I don't really have any excuses because I don't think it was a bad year for tomatoes:

The hardest work of the year was planting this hedge row of cedars, which are doing very well as far as I can tell:

Oregano interspersed with weeds:

The patio, which I also finished off this year -- surrounded with cedars, planted annuals, and mulched around the edges:

One of three or four pumpkins I've spotted in the undergrowth so far:

Pumpkins 2 and 3:

Raspberry (a new plant this year):

And a zucchini or squash -- not sure yet. I've only found one so far, but most of my squash plants were eaten by something when they were very young. Only one survived. Since I had planted both squash and pumpkin and they look very similar, I wasn't sure whether the squash or pumpkin had survived. It turned out to be the pumpkins.

Well, that's it for another year!

Garden vegetables: not doing too badly, considering the cooler growing weather this year

The yellow tomatoes are heirlooms and the others are hybrids. The beans are from the one bean seed that wasn't eaten by animals shortly after planting!

Also, one of my tomato beds mostly died off for some reason, while the one directly opposite looks like a jungle.

Ants in the garden: looking beyond the obvious and why not to kill them

This morning, I was sitting under the shade of a burdock plant that I've let grow far beyond what a lot of people would tolerate (these start out as small rhubarb-like "weeds" but will grow to human-height very quickly if allowed, and throw out huge umbrella-like leaves that are quite nice to sit under in the absence of other shade. Also, you can eat the roots.

I noticed ants crawling up and down the stem, onto each leaf, and around the perimeter of the top and underside of each leaf, as if they were on a racing circuit. They didn't seem to be eating the leaves at all, more like doing some kind of security surveillance. When I looked a bit further, I noticed a gathering near the top of the plant attacking (eating, presumably) what looked like a group of small black eggs that some other parasite had laid near the top of the plant. They were slowly eliminating this parasite.

In another spot in my garden, ants show up in large quantities. Whenever you walk nearby and just slightly disturb the soil, swams of them are apparent. It's actually quite worrying at first because the sight of so many in one place can be surprising. Since these ants tunnel into the soil and make mounds of decompacted soil that develop over time as the ants come and go from the surface, they had pretty much buried an entire rock border in my garden. Rocks that used to be on top of the soil were now underneath it. When I set about correcting this situation by levering the rocks up to re-seat them, underneath I noticed that the ants were voraciosly devouring what looked like maggot larvae. In the centre of the small garden surrounded by the rocks is an old tree stump on which a whiskey barrel planter sits. My guess is that the maggots are attracted to the decaying wood from the old tree under the soil, and that the ants are attacking the maggots.

I have no idea what type of maggots they are, but I know that some maggots can eat the roots of plants, but ants generally don't. They must have been in "attack" mode when I disturbed them because a bunch of them tried to eat my legs. My legs do look a bit like maggots, colour-wise.

In both cases, the ants are doing a good and positive job. and they are a symptom of a deeper problem and aren't a problem in themselves. When their job is done, they'll move on to something else. True to their reputation as hard and organized workers, it seems like they only really stay around as long as necessary and then move onto something else.