New and Old Delights in the Garden

 Tachinids look like small houseflies.
They turn larvae into nurseries for their babies,
who eat their way out of childhood, to the everlasting
regret of the host.

I planted elderberries and saw them develop great umbrellas of compound flowers, which turned into tiny black berries. One reader wants to grow them on a large scale on his farm. This year they rose up like sunflowers, and their habit of sending up new shoots may turn the backyard into an elderberry plantation.

Elderflowers turn into elderberries.

I bought two Shasta Daisies because they are reputed to host a wide variety of beneficial insects. Soon after, I saw a "housefly" on one bloom. But lo, that is no housefly. Put down the insecticide. It is a Tachinid. Most of the clan lay eggs inside insect larvae, providing fresh food for the hatching babies.

Beneficial insect plants are significant in the garden and yard, because almost all good insects attack pests when hatching, but feed from flower nectar and pollen when adults. Ladybugs attack pests as adults, too, but that is relatively rare, so I want beneficial insect feeding stations for the parents.

That is a fun world to watch, as Jessica Walliser wrote in her book. On a still, sunny day, bend over close to the flowers (roses, daisies, etc) and look for the Tachinid flies and miniature wasps (Ichneumon) and midget bees (Flower Flies). They are gathering food for themselves and scouting locations for their eggs.

The tiny Ichneumon wasp is the often overlooked
drone that attacks our insect enemies.

Whenever I cut roses for inside, the beneficial insects hover around the vases I perch on the Town Car hood, continuing their work and sometimes coming inside the house.

As I have written too many times to remember, the famous plants for beneficial insects will immediately host them. Last year I showed Almost Eden my gigantic Poison Hemlock, which was in bloom. He said, "It is doing its job. Look at all the ladybug larvae on the blooms." He was right - baby ladybugs, looking like alligators, were all over the blooms - but I did not want to become the gardener who spread Poison Hemlock around the neighborhood.

I found my order for Feverfew, named for its medicine, not for its blooms. Nothing spreads around bare spots in the yard like Feverfew, which is also a favorite for beneficial insects. I bought 5,000 seeds, all inside a tiny glassing envelop in the paper envelop. I told Mrs. Ichabod that I sneezed and planted 500 at once.

I will drop by a feed store and get some buckwheat, one of my favorite beneficial plants. Buckwheat will grow anywhere and bloom quickly -without me doing more than sowing the seeds. Various insects enjoy the low growing white flowers. The plants are so vigorous during their short lives than they can push out unwanted weeds.

Buckwheat on the Net

The Benefits of Growing Buckwheat

1 April 2011, written by Barbara Pleasant 

One of the most important green manure crops is buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), which is not a grain but a fast-growing, semi-succulent plant that produces nutritious triangular seeds. Buckwheat deserves frequent sowing in any garden because it attracts hoverflies and other beneficial insects, suppresses weeds, and adds bulk to the compost pile. Small plantings of garden buckwheat are surprisingly easy to handle, too.

Battling Bugs with Buckwheat

Buckwheat flowers attract honeybees and other pollinators with their morning nectar flow, but they also support healthy populations of smaller beneficial insects. Mounting evidence suggests that blooming buckwheat give a significant boost to important beneficial species, particularly hoverflies (properly known as Syrphid flies but commonly called hoverflies because of their seemingly effortless ability to hover). On both sides of the Atlantic, researchers are finding that growing buckwheat nearby can deter pests of potato, broccoli, green beans, and other vegetable crops, in part by providing abundant food for female hoverflies. Most hoverfly larvae are too small to see without a magnifying glass, but they are voracious predators of aphids and other small, soft-bodied insects.

Organic growers who use buckwheat as a primary pest-prevention strategy have found that it’s important to grow buckwheat within about 20 feet (6 meters) of crop plants, which is easily done in a garden. Upright yet spindly, buckwheat plants have such shallow roots that they are easy to pull up with the flick of a wrist. A few buckwheat seeds sown among potatoes are known to confuse potential pests, and a broad band of buckwheat makes a fine beneficial backdrop for strawberries. Throughout the summer, I sow buckwheat in any spot bigger than a dinner plate that won’t be planted for a few weeks. With good weather, buckwheat can go from seed to bloom in a little over a month.

Growing Buckwheat to Control Weeds

Buckwheat’s fast germination makes it a top choice for smothering weeds. A few years ago, a section of my garden was home to a colony of field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), a formidable foe as weeds go. Field bindweed (often called creeping jenny) is a hardy perennial from Eurasia that winds itself around anything in its path and reproduces from root buds and seeds. But my field bindweed is now history thanks to a year of intensive cover cropping with buckwheat.

Taking Care of the New Crepe Myrtles

Crepe Myrtle - Queen's Lace Picotee

As I wrote before, I haul rainwater like a peasant. The best source is in the backyard, so I haul five-gallon buckets to the front where most of the roses are.

Today I visited the new Crepe Myrtles, pictured above. The first one is thriving. Two of the twigs were hard to spot. The last one was leafy but small. I knew they needed protection from me and others walking into them.

First I set up some cardboard squares around each stem. This blocks weed growth, holds in moisture, and helps mark them as future stars. Their big cousin is so heavily mulched that few weeds come up at all, and I have Lily-of-the-Valley and Calladiums for that area.

By weighing down the cardboard squares with little logs, I created a barrier for clumsy foot traffic - plus long term soil improvement. When I get shredded wood mulch for that last bit of lawn (now covered fitfully with cardboard pieces), I will sprinkle some on the cardboard squares.

Evaporation from the Wind
Using cardboard is an education in the effects of the wind. Naturally, every cardboard installment is followed by winds. But even when rain weighs down the cardboard, as I always hope, the cardboard dries out quickly from the wind and later from the sun. That is reason enough to mulch heavily, to hold in moisture and prevent soil erosion from the wind.

I have big fluffy, brilliantly colored blooms on the big Crepe Myrtle because I do not take its food and water needs for granted. The bush tolerates lack of rain - so does a cactus - but flourishes with extra water and thorough cold showers. A plant that sheds from a gardening hose spray needs the cold shower. No harm done and much appreciated. The same can be said for roses.

This is so common around town.
The Crepe Myrtle tolerates it, but that is no excuse.

The soaring branches and bright blooms tell me the bush needs food in the soil. I learned how much when I began putting extra manure (mushroom compost), grass clippings, and leaves underneath. Truly, the earth seemed to swallow the organic matter. So I feed the plant every winter, with the largest possible pile of wood mulch and autumn leaves on top of that, a pyramid of food for the cold season - snow, sleet, rain, and decomposition.

Since I had red wiggler earthworms at the base, the site attracted a mole last year. The feeding tunnels formed a perfect circle under the plant, the same zone where all the mulch was rotting down into the soil.

Natural Law
I am teaching graduate students in Old Testament about the Exodus this week.

The Ten Commandments are called Natural Law, because God commands what is good for us. These are universal truths found in all societies, all systems of law, based on Creation. In America's past, the law connected God and human behavior, but that has been removed by the activism of a few and the passivity of the majority.

The truly bad ideas about gardening are relatively new, also. I went to a gardening club where the speaker described how he spread pre-emergent toxins around his garden early each spring. He controlled weeds with poison, and the results probably look good to him. I did not want to sample his carrots or corn.

When gardening experts gave up on their modern cures, which always needed more expensive cures, they found that persistent problems simply went away.