07.29.09
Photo: Sunflowers
I planted these on the side of my garage and the little bumble bees are lovin’ them. I left this picture large, so you’ll have to give it time to load.
06.19.09
Photo: Yellow Squash As An Ornamental Plant
Call me crazy, but some of the things we plant in our vegetable gardens are just too beautiful to be ignored, so sometimes I plant them in planters as a specimen ornamental. Of course that doesn’t mean I won’t also eat the veggies they produce. One of my favorite food plants to enjoy for beauty is squash. It’s hard to overlook the lovely green leaves and awesome deep yellow blooms.
I also like potted tomatoes.
Charlie, my garden helper. And no, we didn’t do that to his ears. They were done sometime in his past before we adopted him five years ago. Isn’t he a handsome fella? 
No veggies here. Although ornamental coleus does descend from coleus herb. I can’t think of any plant easier to grow, tolerates both shade and sun, and offers so much beauty in so many varieties. If you pinch the top little leaves from your coleus, they’ll bush up instead of being so leggy. And try the Kong Coleus. They are huge and the leaves are just like velvet. I don’t have any this year, but next year….
06.17.09
Vinegar and Water For Slugs
If you’ve read my previous post, you know I’ve been waging war on the slugs that have invaded my gardens last spring and again this year. I thought I’d heard everything, as far as remedies for getting rid of the voracious pests. But I guess not….I was watching a gardening show on TV the other day and the expert suggested the usual stuff that has very little effect on the slugs as a group. Yes, all these things work, but only on the individual slugs or small groups, but when you have literally millions, as I do, it’s an ongoing daily battle.
This expert gardener did suggest one thing I’d never heard before. Vinegar and water sprayed around the plants. I thought, why not? I’ve certainly tried everything else except the pesticide baits. I don’t want to use those because my neighbor has a cat that visits and I have a dog. I don’t want to poison them. And since I’m really tired of being out of salt for cooking because of using it every morning on the slugs, I figured I’d try this new method. I assume the gardener giving the advice was speaking of white vinegar, but all I had in the house this morning was the apple cider variety. I decided to try it until I could get to the store for the white.
When going after slugs, you have to go out early, before the sun warms things up too much. They are night feeders. If I get to my gardens by around seven or eight o’clock, they’re still feasting all over my plants and moving around on the ground. I went out this morning with my little spray bottle of vinegar and water and sprayed all around my plants and directly on all the slugs I could see. Well, I’ll have to wait and see what the results are as a preventative, but directly on the slugs, it seems to work almost as well as salt. I’ll get some white vinegar later today and spray around the plants again tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know if this works to help keep the slugs at bay.
If I could find a good deterrent for keeping slugs out of my gardens without having to kill so many, I’d be thrilled. Because believe it or not, slugs are a beneficial creature. They eat wood, lawn and garden debris. But I really don’t think my lawn and gardens need quite so many.
UPDATE: The vinegar and water DID NOT help with my slug problem. It did kill the slugs if put directly on them, but did nothing to keep them from eating my plants.
06.11.09
Photos: Gardens and Slugs
Has your garden ever been so infested with slugs that when you went out early in the morning not one inch of ground didn’t have one? That’s my garden nightmare….We had an incredibly wet spring last year and again this year. The slugs invaded, ranging in size from pin point to six or eight inches, and I’ve been waging war. I’m pretty much an organic gardener, so rarely resort to pesticides, but that doesn’t matter, as slugs seem resistent to most of those anyway. I’ve done everything else recommended for slugs–the egg shells, the beer, the asphalt shingles, the hot pepper, diatomaceous earth, and yes, I’ve even resorted to sprinkling salt on them every morning. I’ve reduced the population…or at least I don’t see as many as I had before. Thank goodness, this year I had enough sense to put in plants that are more slug resistent or I’d have no gardens at all. I hate the thought of digging and disgarding all my lovely hostas, and since the slugs have nibbled at my other plants–with the hostas gone, will they eat these others instead? They also shredded my Iris and Lily foliage. Below are some photos. I used thumbnails for faster loading–Click them for larger images.
Large green hosta with slug holes. Below this is one of the same variety and a varigated one that they almost ate to the ground and below that are photos of my gardens they haven’t bothered much.
Slugs don’t like like my wild daisies.
They nibble at my impatiens and begonias, but they’re doing okay so far.
A part of another garden the slugs haven’t bothered much.
Another part of the same garden. The hosta on the right of the blue festuca was damaged pretty badly by slugs, but they didn’t touch the coral bells on the left. See the strawberries in the back left. They eat the sides off the berries when about half ripe.
Although slugs eat some leaves off my larger sedums, they don’t touch this creeping variety, nor do they like geraniums.
04.30.09
Photo – Lilies in Bloom
My yellow lily along side a few other plants–strawberries, coral bells and blue festuca. Below is a burgundy/fuchsia colored lily. Click the images for a larger view. I’m thrilled to finally have some color in the garden.
burgundy lily
