Aphids: The Bane of My Existence

Seriously. Fuck aphids. Every. Single. Garden. I've ever had has been overrun with those pesky bastards. I started out combatting them with the usual organic methods: a combination of garlic powder, black pepper and cayenne around the border to start. Did nothing. Then insecticidal soap. Did almost nothing. You have to apply it practically twice a day and make sure you saturate all the little buggers for it to be effective, so it isn't conducive to larger scale pest control (great for indoor plants though!). My last super effort was to cook up a huge pot of water with garlic, onions, hot peppers and neem oil. This was by far the most effective of my topical efforts, but still, the mixture needed to be applied at least twice a week. And I thought I was never, ever going to get the pungent smell out of my house.

I've heard about hanging banana peels in your plants to ward 'em off, but that seems to me like it would just invite a host of other, larger and possibly much more detrimental pests to the garden (think raccoons, rats, more filthy feral cats).

The only solution I have found that absolutely works is ladybugs. I haven't used them yet this year, because I was hopeful at the start of the season that it wouldn't be needed, but hot damn. My garden is under seige and I need to get some ladybugs stat! My artichokes seems to be a catch crop for the aphids.

Which would be fine, if I didn't love my chokes more than most of the other plants. Also, if it hadn't spiraled out of control seemingly overnight. The chokes in last year's garden were under an attack almost as vicious, but once I released my swarm of ladybugs, they had it under control in a day or 2.

Of course, then you have to deal with a sort of ladybug graveyard once all is said and done, but I don't stress on it. They lived a happy happy life in my garden, gorging on aphids and then hopefully laying eggs to repopulate my favourite aphid-assassin species. If you are going to use ladybugs to control your aphid or other pest problem, it is a good idea to become familiar with the ladybug life cycle. Eggs are laid on the underside of your plants, and the larvae look nothing like adult ladybugs. Even so, they can eat hundreds of aphids at that stage, so you want to make sure you know what they look like and aren't accidentally destroying these good guys.

Megablooms: Fused Tomato Blossoms

I posted a while back about how epic some of my tomato flowers are. Both of my Black Krim plants have these freaky huge blossoms. I noticed that they seemed to be some sort of 2-flower mutant, and one of them has started to fruit unevenly now. It’s weird though, because there is one mutant blossom per flower cluster – all of the other ones in each group seem normal. Turns out these big guys are ‘megablooms’ or fused blossoms, and are much more likely to happen on large varieties of tomatoes.

Megabloom on garden Black Krim.

 Container Black Krim megabloom

You are probably wondering, do these megablooms make megatomatoes? And the answer is yes! – if they are sufficiently pollinated. Since there is more than one flower, the blossoms need to be pollinated more than once, or the tomato will develop unevenly, and likely be cat-faced. Some people pinch off these blossoms, since the fruit will probably be undesireable to eat, but I’m too curious for that.

I am now very much looking forward to the forthcoming art tomatoes :)