I’ve been gardening for over 20 years now, and I can safely say this is my worst gardening year ever.
Spring began very early this year, and at first it was exciting to see Asiatic lilies and daylilies blooming a month early. Then the bugs arrived. In fact, the cicadas starting “singing” on the first day of spring. Usually they are the soundtrack of late summer and a reminder that it’s time to shop for school supplies.
I should have paid more attention to the foreshadowing because soon I was inundated with bugs, especially earwigs. They are everywhere. A pile of them even tumbled out of my garage door code box one morning. I screamed like a girl.
Earwigs love annuals, especially marigolds. I don’t have any marigolds in my garden so they settled for my zinnias and rudbeckias instead. I fought them off for awhile with Sluggo Plus, but we’ve had so much rain lately that I’ve fallen behind in the battle. Now that my daylilies are blooming like crazy, the earwigs have new blossoms to hide in every morning. I wouldn’t mind so much if they didn’t poop all over them and ruin my photo opportunities.
Next came the rabbits. I have at least three youngsters hanging out in my gardens. They are systematically leveling my rudbeckia and lavatera plants.
I’ve had great luck with Liquid Fence in the past, but these baby bunnies seem immune to the smell. Late one morning I sprayed some vulnerable plants and went inside for lunch. Not 20 minutes later I looked out the window to see my lavatera plants waving unnaturally back and forth. I ran outside, but it was too late. Baby bunny had already chewed off several 2-foot-tall stalks just loaded with flowers. I could still smell the remnants of Liquid Fence. Within the next 2 weeks the bunnies managed to destroy all of my lavatera plants and a handful of rudbeckias.
I was happy when my tall zinnias began blooming despite all the earwig attacks. But soon I noticed petals were missing from the flowers. It got worse each day.
Once again I was eating lunch when I spied the perpetrators. Two goldfinches landed on a plump zinnia flower and took turns yanking out the petals. I have no idea if they were eating them, enjoying a sport, or using them for nesting material. I was not amused.
Goldfinches aren’t my only avian attackers. The chickadees are seed-caching machines this summer. In many cases they are drilling those seeds into my unopened daylily blossoms. Similar to the effect you get when making designs in a valentine from folded layers of paper, shoving a seed deep into an unopened blossom results in symmetrical holes when the flowers unfurl. Not the look I was going for with my daylilies and another reason why I’m strugging to get any decent photographs from my flowerbeds this summer. Usually the evidence is still in the flowers when they open (notice the white safflower seed sticking out of the flower below):
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the Japanese Beetles arrived. There weren’t as many last year, and I was hoping their numbers were finally leveling off. The other day I made the mistake of suggesting to my mother-in-law that perhaps we were finally getting a reprieve. The beetles clearly heard me and plotted their revenge. Literally 4 hours later they arrived with a vengeance. I arrived home from a July 4th celebration to find my roses, butterfly bushes and already-battered zinnias ravaged. The next morning I was pulling up to 20 of the beetles from what was left of each of my zinnia plants. That’s more beetles in one day than I saw all last year. So much for a respite.
At this point all I’m missing is a family of hungry deer, a plague of locusts and a really good hailstorm. I’m officially throwing in the towel and mustering some optimism for next year.