Holy samoleans have we had snakes in abundance this year!
I've been approaching the patch with real apprehension.
What makes them all of a sudden appear in such numbers?
Those are some awesome looking tomatoes both quality and quantity. The only thing left growing in my garden is Asian Long beans, eggplant and okra. Tomato production was poor this year. I had good luck with my Cherokee Purple early on getting eight or nine nice big tomatoes but the vine cracked badly during a wind storm and the plant died. Cherry tomatoes never seemed to get going. On the good news side, yellow squash and zucchini had tremendous production.
Bob Green
Holy samoleans have we had snakes in abundance this year!
I've been approaching the patch with real apprehension.
What makes them all of a sudden appear in such numbers?
Nothing incites bodily violence quicker than a Duke fan turning in your direction and saying 'scoreboard.'
Some of you may remember the greenhouse that I built in the winter, with the intention of turning it into a butterfly house in the summer. I planted lots of milkweed around the garden, and last week noticed that the garden fencing and the roof of the greenhouse were covered in monarch chrysalises. I carefully removed those and put them inside.
MonarchChrysalis.jpg
Today I opened the door to this scene.
EmergingMonarchs.jpg
There are over 20 chrysalises inside the butterfly house, I'm guessing they will have all emerged in the next couple days. After I take photos, each emerging batch gets to fly free through the open door.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
That is awesome! Great job!
Morning harvest of grey zucchini and straight neck yellow squash. I grew the zucchini from seed while the squash came from a starter plant I bought at Norfolk County Feed and Seed:
IMG_3437.jpg
Bob Green
My backyard squash patch:
IMG_3421.jpg
This photo is from a couple weeks ago. The plants are much larger now.
Bob Green
Last year, I had a lot of problems with my tomatoes. One of the big ones was gophers so this year I have them all in gopher baskets.
Looking good so far, especially because I got lucky and killed a big fat gopher with a shovel.
https://gopherbasket.com/
Turns out it is a local company. I guess maybe we are the epicenter for gophers in addition to the 1989 quake.
I'm using the gallon size ones for the tomatoes and the quart size ones for basil, padron peppers, and japanese eggplant.
Zucchini is left unprotected as they have not seemed to be targeted by the gophers.
The gopher did suck down some unprotected pole beans and chives before I got it.
^ from our deck I can watch various gophers at work in three different yards, sometimes our own.
Rather than killing gophers with a shovel, try planting marigolds on the edges of your garden. The smell of the flowers repels rodents: rabbits gophers, etc. We have used this technique for many years and have watched rabbits hop right up to a bed of lettuce and then hop away.
The only creature that isn't bothered by marigolds apparently are bears:
bear in garden.jpg
If I could repeatedly kill gophers with a shovel, I would be a rich man. I just got lucky he was where I was digging.
Marigold trick won't really work here. It usually doesn't rain here from some time in May until the first rain in October, though it shockingly did this morning. All of my tomatoes are on drip systems where only the tomato plant gets watered.
Best tool I have found is the gopher hawk. Took me a while to figure out how to place it correctly, but have unfortunately had a fair bit of practice.
gopherhawk.jpg
Tomato planted in gopher basket:
tomato_gopher.jpg
Yea, we're plagued with woodchucks (or gophers, as some people call them) on our property. I HATE those animals - they destroy the vegetable and flower gardens. You would not believe how much time I have spent over the years trying to get rid of them. I feel like Bill Murray in the movie Caddy Shack. I've tried trapping them in Hav-a-heart traps over the years but it is not that easy to catch them on those traps and, if you do manage to trap them, they are NOT happy campers and will try to attack you through the trap. I keep telling my wife that I need a 22 rifle to "exterminate" them but she (rightly) thinks I should not own a gun.