Desperate times

Welp, this week a thrip infestation got *too* bad and I (and my client) cut all of the leaves off of the strawberry plants in that garden bed, because they were all silver anyway, and it was impossible to spray the thrip away otherwise. We left the bed looking like this-

But then I was able to spray fully, properly, with a combination of hort soap, molasses and seaweed fertiliser- the absolute best thing for thrip- so I am looking forward to seeing the results when the leaves have all come back!

For those interested, I apply 2T molasses, about a cup of seasol and 2t plant soap per 2L water. You have to absolutely soak everywhere- both sides of the leaves, the centre of the plant where new leaves are sitting, and all of the plants about 1m away from the last noticed thrip bug (because they will all just move into the other part of the garden otherwise.

Here are the buggers on a rhododendron-

Yes, they are the reason your rhodo, viburnum, strawberries and azaleas go silver leaved…

And now is the time to spray for them, fortnightly, until you don’t see any more. I am doing a full writeup on thrip in the blog next week.

Excitement in spades

Every now and then, me and Jesse (staff member) will sit online and send each other pictures of our dream spades from the Sneeboer website, which has four pages of spades. At one point this was mentioned to Lesley, who has a dandelion-in-lawn problem and we finally bit the bullet and spent something like $460 on two dandelion spades. They took about 8 weeks to arrive because we had to put in a special order with Gubba, but who is counting days, or weeks, or hundreds of dollars…

Me spade!

Well, the first thing I can tell you is that the steps on that spade are too small, so the arch of my foot was hurting after 20 minutes on my dandelion spade. By the time Lesley asked how I was going, I was much less enthusiastic about the new purchase… but I do have a monstrous number of dandelions, full root, removed! So maybe not a daily spade, I thought. Until Friday.

Italian Arum lilies removed, with the corm, every time, with almost no clay attached. A Friday miracle!

I have found that the spade works really well as a sort of spear-fishing weeding device, where I throw it into the soil beside a plant and then lever the plant out, instead of standing on it like a regular spade. I can’t believe how well it worked on a bed which was almost entirely arums and oxalis- two famously hard to remove weeds. Woooo!

Hilariously in the same week I broke my planting spade, which retails for about $70, and now looks suspiciously like a dandelion spade with a better step in it…

Bamboo, and my jumping on a spade, are apparently two things stronger than the metal in this spade.

I am super tempted to angle grind off chunks of this spade to make another dandelion spade.

Figs are ready!

Because of the extreme heat this year, figs are ripening well on the tree in Wellington, not just the Hutt! Woo! I hope you have a fig tree nearby!

Alternately, coprosma berries are actually quite tasty. Coprosma rugosa berries taste a bit like lychee, but I get too bored trying to pick enough to sate my desire for lychee. A friend of a friend makes coprosma jam, which sounds delicious but I can’t help but wonder how long it takes her to acquire enough berries to do so.

Coprosma rugosa berries

No to do list this week, but I imagine that you are starting to find a lot of dead bits on your plants- cut em off!

I hope you had a lovely week, and have an even lovelier weekend :)