Yardening June 2014 #3 into July

Ric, speaking of stink bugs, a way to instantly remove the smell from your hands:

Rub a cut lemon on the smelly area.

The smelly principal is an amine, an organic base, and the acid in the lemon reacts with it. Similar principle as with vinegar, but smells and tastes better.

David--
Here is another quick remedy when you get bit or stung...have you tried this?

Moisten your finger and dip it into some meat tenderizer (MSG) and rub it into the bite.
The meat tenderizer acts on the protein in the venom and lessens its impact.

I keep a small spice bottle of it outside just in case....

Gita

EEWWW....a stinkbug in your mouth?

Thanks for the tips about the stumps. Burning isn't a problem, here. I'll try to bbq some stumps this weekend!

Do you bring your lemon grass plants inside for the winter or start new plants each year?

Sweet, let me know how it works out as I've only read about it and never tried it.

I'll take pictures of the stump wars. Hope it works, it would certainly be easier than trying to pull them out.

Funny cat picture!!!!

David, you're a wealth of info!

I might try that stump thing myself. Mark has been whittling away at it for months, with little effect.

I will be sure to remember from now on to keep my mouth SHUT when any stink bugs are around... eewwwww!

GQ, I just buy new Lemon Grass plants each year; they are too cheap not to. :)

Good grief, what a bunch of cats! That must have been feeding time at a feral cat colony.

Thanks for the tips, David. One of my daughters has strong reactions to mosquito bites, so I'll suggest she try it.

I was wondering what was chowing down on my goldenrods, and last night I saw that May Beetles/June Bugs are to blame. Last year they almost destroyed my Joe Pye Weeds, but I planted lavender next to them this year and they're doing much better. So, I bought more lavender today to plant near the goldenrods. I bought some basil to try as well. I hope they work. It's hard to hand pick those pests because they come out after dark.

LOL on the cat photo--that is too funny!

I think I'm better off not knowing any further about the stink bug incident.. ewww... ;-)

Thanks for the tip on the mosquito remedy, Greenthumb!

LOL I certainly hope I never have to try that remedy for accidental-stinkbug-in-mouth!

Muddy, I've only seen a couple of JBs this year. I may need to get up earlier to see where they've been hiding/feasting.

Great yardening weather tomorrow! So many pokeweed seedlings to pull!

Muddy, glad to hear the lavender is doing its job! I really love lavender... Maybe I need to plant more of it! :-)

Hm Muddy, you reminded me that last two summers, my Montauk daisies were totally chewed up by small brown night feeding beetles. This year, so far, none!

TOns of weedy Carex to pull here.

I have a puzzling "weed" popping up all over my back yard this year: some kind of Senna, hopefully Maryland Senna or another native kind. I've never had it in my yard before, and I'm wondering whether it came from mixed bird seed.

Okay, time to go out and see how many June Bugs I can kill.

The new Lavender plants I just bought don't seem to repel June beetles. I just remembered that one of the plants near my Joe Pye Weeds might be Russian Sage, not lavender. So, it could be the Sage, or it might just be that the beetles would rather eat my Goldenrods.

We have a bit of Maryland Senna, I'm wondering if the birds carry it along. When immature I thought it was mimosa, but some became more herbaceous as it grew. I just love Russian sage and need more, Holly dug ours out to move and it got lost in the shuffle. We are both such AAD gardeners, it's almost frightening.

I'm still pruning the 30 year in the making, yew hedge out front that was damaged by the snow and ice. It's almost painful to chop it hard enough to get it back to shape. The west and north sides aren't too bad, but Golly, the rest is gonna' be sticks.

This message was edited Jul 4, 2014 8:56 AM

I've had Cassia marilandica (Senna) from Buttonneer for several years. It dropped seeds under itself but they haven't wandered at all. ID time- can you post a picture?

I'm a Russian sage fan, too--I've managed to collect 3 different cultivars of it now and try to show restraint whenever I walk past it in the nursery aisle... ;-)

Muddy, I can't say for sure whether it's the sage or the lavender that's helping with the June bugs. However, I found this info about lavender http://ferncreekdesign.org/beneficialinsects.pdf : "Attracts hoverflies. Repels moths, flies." For Russian sage, in one of my pollinator handbooks I found a notation that it 'attracts bees'. :-)

LOL, Russian sage is like heroine to bees!

ID is a very good idea - I've done enough googling to determine that it isn't Cassia marilandica (Maryland Senna). I'll post some photos later - I haven't taken the time to learn how to upload photos and so must wait for a family member to help!

LOL SSG funny image of all the bees lying under the Russian sage completely stoned... :-D

haha!
. Asclepias syriaca common milkweed, has every bumblebee in the county on it when it blooms. and Maypops-. bumblebees sit on them and dig in, you can almost hear the 'nom, nom, nom...'

Well, a bit of 'buyer beware', in that any plant that can be remotely called beneficial, bee attracting, butterfly plant, etc, is now being described as that. I find the ones with compound florets of many tiny flower are often covered with many tiny insects too. All the family of herbs like fennels, parsley etc, and garlic chives, for example. Goldenrod and those with spikes of many tiny flowers. My Yarrow hardly seemed to have much action, maybe it was the time of year.

Sally, I've been noting that on plant ID tags, too. As with most things, I've found it useful to rely on multiple sources. ;-)

My yarrow is one of the biggest pollinator magnets in my garden, for whatever reason. Yes, mostly the tiny bees (and other small beneficial insects)-- I agree about different sized bees and the particular blossoms they're attracted too. Also it apparently has to do with how long the tongue is in a particular bee species, with longer-tongued bees preferring more tubular blossoms.

My salvia 'May Night' and agastache 'Purple Haze' attract huge bees--e.g. the great big carpenter bees that lumber clumsily around the garden looking for just the right blossom.

Part of me would love to get out there and enjoy being in the garden on this beautiful day, but another part of me feels incredibly sluggish after a night of poor sleep in a hotel bed...

This message was edited Jul 4, 2014 10:52 AM

Not butterflies or bees--but, at the house on the river we were at tonight,
Someone spotted this huge beetle in the mulch. It was almost 2" long
and 1" across.

Anyone know the name? David? I promised to find out...

Thanks--G.

I'm not sure any amount of vinegar or lemon wedges would get the taste of that one out of your mouth...

It looks like a female dynastus tityus (Eastern Hercules Beetle) - they don't have horns, unlike the males.

If you google "dynastus tityus", one of the first results should be photos of these beetles. One looks just like your photo, Gita.

This message was edited Jul 4, 2014 9:12 PM

Gita, I think Muddy has it. It is a leaf chafer beetle, which puts it in the subfamily of scarab beetles.

Thank you Muddy and David..... It is the largest beetle I have ever seen...
My friends live right by the water. There are HUGE old Oaks all around.

Does this beetle do any particular damage to Oaks? They were worried
as one of their HUGE Oaks has some kind of leaf issues.

Will let my friends that held the 4th cook out know the name of this beetle.

Gita

I have a question for those of you who put down cardboard as a weed barrier in your gardens: How long does it take to break down? My landlord Steve purchased a rototiller yesterday (he watches Craigslist like a hawk) and tilled up the ground between the ponds and the stockade fence. Kind of my fault, we had talked about doing something there this fall, Santa Rosa had their sale going on, I ordered plants and they arrived, etc (darn Bec No Va for posting about her plants from SR last year). I have corrugated cardboard boxes at work that I was going to put in the empty areas with mulch on top.

Put the cardboard down so that there is overlapping. With mulch on top the cardboard will take till next spring to fully break down, suppressing weeds very effectively all season.

Catbird, If you wanted to plant thru the cardboard it is pretty easy to cut and bend it when you are ready to plant even if the cardboard isn't completely deteriorated. Ric and I use it quite a bit when extending or making new beds.

That's just what I wanted to hear! Thank you. :^)

Yeah, Robin,then you can go on the What Ya' Got Cookin' thread and say you spent the day making lasagna. LOL The stuff I've been reading lately, say to put down a layer of branches and scrap wood a few inches thick to build a self sustaining bed. Look up permaculture on ATP. If you don't belong , join it also great, fun, and free.

Using cardboard sounds like a better idea than doing what I have done, which was use newspaper. Even with 8 or more sheets and mulch, sometimes the grass breaks through. One time I dug up the grass and turned it over before covering it up. That was a lot more work but worked out better.

Cardboard worked great for my veg garden paths. But I left plastic tape on it and now have strips of cellophane popping up, so its a small annoyance.

I think I'm going to have to give this a try in my Big Bed.. I've got one certain area that tends to be more prolifically weedy than in any other part of the bed, and no matter what I do I can't seem to get 'em to stop!! Of course, this is where most of my plants are growing as well (doesn't it just figure!); behind the mint and around/behind the newly-installed Daylily. Will probably have to do some creative cutting of the cardboard, but thank you guys for mentioning this again, I guess it's time for me to try it! =)

Based on the good advice of fellow DGers like Holly & Greenthumb, last summer I used cardboard to 'lasagna' my new sun space into existence. This spring when I went to transplant emerging perennials into the new space, I did not find any evidence of the cardboard when I dug in with my shovel. Sally, you are so right about that tape! I do my best to tear it all off before laying the cardboard down. (I'm currently creating new space with cardboard for next year--looks like a total mess right now--LOL.)

Speedie, there is a space under my back porch that is full of weeds (a lot of clover and other plants pollinators love, so I let it be). However, I noticed the weeds never seemed to escape into the bed next to it, and it was hard to believe the block of wood separating the 2 was that effective. Well, yesterday I was digging closer to the block of wood than I usually do and discovered that under about 3-4 inches of rich soil was a thick piece of plastic that had been laid all along the edge of the bed, separating it from the weedy area. Ding ding ding! No *wonder* the weeds stayed nicely in their place! The previous owner--she was a smart gardener, that's for sure! Wish I could contact her and thank her...

I like to leave the clover blooming in one section of my front "lawn" 'cause we have a LOT of rabbit activity in our yard... wanna give 'em something they like to eat. :) But, the biggest "weed" problem we have, mostly in our side yard and across the back, is wild strawberry - it all comes from next door and it's horribly out of control. In fact, so much comes from over there into the 'driveway side bed' that's beside the fence that separates our properties that I'm seriously contemplating using Round-Up this Fall in that bed, digging about 2 inches deep, and spreading rock all along there and not planting it anymore. Just too darned much crap crawls/falls/creeps its way into that bed, it's almost not worth trying to grow anything in there anymore, and there's NO way to block it.

I have some wild strawberry as well. Speaking of stones--another thing my smart-gardener previous owner did: the sweet elderly neighbor next door also has a lovely garden (she's the one who has the pink LOV I shared at the swap), but she has a lot of--er--'vigorous' groundcovers along the edge of the fence that separates our yards. (This neighbor and the previous owner gardened in their separate yards together for 50+ years, and it's interesting to hear from her the history of e.g. my red bud or the rose bushes.) Well, the previous owner laid quite a lot of stones all along the fence line and voila -- the ground covers *do not* creep over! Unfortunately, there are so many stones that I cannot plant anything along that fence line. So, I would say stones (lots of them) can definitely be an effective barrier.

It's good to hear that about the stones because I have a similar 'ground cover face-off' with one neighbor. Her vinca creeps to me, my lamium creeps to her. But i could see both of them sending arching stems right over six inches of stone. Seems like we could both do six inches on each side, then we might have enough of a bare area....Sadly her health has declined and she has no energy for enjoying the garden, so it's just not going to happen.

We have a ton of clover all over the lawn, not really a question of letting it bloom, lol...

FWIW, the wild strawberry that you guys are plagued with is most likely Duchesnea, the same barren strawberry that is one of my enemies also. Those tiny wiry stems go everywhere, then root!

Yes Sally, that's just what they do!! I will start pulling on a stem, tug out some roots and think "Ah-HA!"... only to be followed by more vine.. then root, ... then more vine.. then another root.. when will the darned thing end!?!? (the answer, invariably, is always "his side of the fence"). Sometimes I think, if I keep pulling and pulling, his whole house is gonna just cave in, LOL!!!!!

Well, now that we are finally starting to be on friendly gardening chatting terms (long story, won't go into it), I'm thinking I will try to strike up a conversation about the stuff, see if maybe it bugs him as much as it bugs me.. maybe we could come to a working-together arrangement. :) I'm pretty sure he won't want to use any major chemical war-fare, he's got the Hydrangea right-smack-dab up against the fence (near my driveway), and a gorgeous Buddleiah farther back into the back yard right up against the fence.... among other things along there that I'm sure he won't want to kill off. Any suggestions on what we might use as a collaborative effort?