The flooding rains have caused every mosquito egg that’s been lying in the ditch for the last 5 years to hatch all at once. And they are an angry bunch! If I step outside right now, it takes less than 2 seconds for one of the little monsters to latch onto me. Within 10 seconds I look like I’m in one of those Off! television commercials where the people stick their arms into the box of mosquitoes to prove how well the repellent works. Imagine my yard is that box.
This makes it a bit difficult to do maintenance around the garden. The weeds are mocking me from the window. It hasn’t rained for about two weeks now, and things are getting a little dry out there. In the time it would take to water all my flowerbeds I would be eaten alive, so I’m holding out for today’s storm system to do the work for me.
During a very brisk jog around the garden with my accompanying cloud of mosquitoes, I noticed my Phlox ‘David’s Lavender’ plant is in trouble. I wanted to love this plant. It’s a lilac version of Phlox ‘David’ and it’s supposed to share the same attributes like great powdery mildew resistance. There’s not a lot to love right now (the above photo is from my pathetic plant). My ‘David’ plants, however, look terrific.
I’m pretty certain it was earwigs that devastated my pepper crop earlier this month. I have some roses growing nearby and I cut a bloom to bring inside yesterday. Earwigs started falling out of it like clowns from a Volkswagen.
After about a week, I couldn’t stand looking at the naked little pepper stems any more, and I pulled them out. I had some annual salvias that I haphazardly stuck in my perennial bed and I was able to dig those up and plant them where the peppers had been. Salvias must not be tasty to earwigs because they’ve left them alone.
My instincts about my eggplant were correct. I resisted the urge to yank it out and now it’s sprouting leaves again. Who knows if I’ll get any fruit on it. At least it’s not just a stem anymore:
Things are rough in the garden right now. I’ve noticed that quite a few of my home-grown annuals have been chewed to skeletons (earwigs again), and several others have some sort of strange wilt (fungal disease?). The other night when I looked out the window, a gigantic rabbit was sitting in the middle of one of my flowerbeds enjoying a meal. We are also just days away from the arrival of the Japanese Beetles, and my friend who lives 6 blocks away from me in the city just informed me she had a deer in her garden last night. Could a plague of locusts be far behind?
My mom and I always joke about that time of year when it’s best to view the garden from afar. That way you can’t see all the pests and diseases making a mess out there. Usually that time comes in early August, but I think we’re “celebrating” it a little early this year.