Pacific Northwest Gardening: Garden pests, 1 by NoH2O

NoH2O wrote:
No pictures of the hollyhocks. They were a light yellow powderpuff, very pretty but the leaves were covered in rust. The plants I thought they were were infecting were snapdragons. I grow a lot of dahlias (100 this year because my neighbor\'s daughter is getting married) and a dahlia/flower farmer on the Cubits dahlia forum just told me that the rust on snapdragons is specific to snaps only so I guess I could have kept the hollyhocks. I can always get more.

My nasturtiums get black aphids. They are ugly. When they start arriving the whole plant goes in the trash. The only other plants that get the black aphids are the annual poppies. I get grey aphids on my lupines but I love the lupines so much I keep spraying the aphids off. I just use water from the hose. On some lupines one round of hard spray is enough; on others I have to do it repeatedly. I have tried using ladybugs but they fly away. Next time I get them I am going to spray them with a dilute solution of soda pop or sugar water. I read that it makes their wings stick closed for about a week so they stay put, eat aphids, mate and lay eggs. After about a week the stickiness is gone and they can fly away.

Your soil sounds horrendous. I can\'t even imagine having to use a pickaxe to dig a hole for planting. The soil around Everson is interesting. I am not far from the Nooksack River and I have heavy clay soil. Other places just a few miles from me will be solid sand. There are a lot of sand and gravel pits in the area. I get about 10 yards of composted dairy manure each year. It is great stuff - it looks like dark chocolate cake crumbs and there are no weed seeds at all. When I lived in Ohio I had potters clay. It was horrible. When it was wet you could twist it into a rope and it wouldn\'t break but when it was dry it was like cement and would have cracks over an inch wide and 8 plus inches deep. It was also zone 5b so temperatures could range from minus 30° not counting windchill to over 100° not counting humidity. It was definitely a challenging place to garden! I could grow delicious tomatoes there though.

This is me with some annual poppies before the black aphids arrived. LOL They were spectacular this year and I have no idea why.