Here’s how to accurately identify and successfully control four of the most common garden pests in the Pacific Northwest garden: slugs, cabbage moth caterpillar, leaf miner, and pea leaf weevil.
Pests
The Cabbageworm Caterpillar In Your Garden: How To Control It
You can always tell the non-gardeners. They’re the ones who see the bland white butterflies with the black spots on their wings fluttering over my cabbage plants and say things like, “Ohmygosh how pretty! Butterflies!” Poor, poor, misguided fools. They never go crazy, like I do, for the dive-bombing glint of dozens of dragonflies. They never…
Cross Dressing Fruit and Frustrated Apple Maggots
One of my readers, Robin, left this comment on the October Garden Tour post, where I showed my espaliered apple tree full of apples wrapped in pantyhose footies: I’m really curious about the cross dressing apples as well. I must’ve missed the post that explained it. Why the sexy legwear? And how big were they when…
The Only Good Fruit Fly Is A Dead Fruit Fly
Piles of ripening, and occasionally over-ripened, fruit, such as have been gracing my kitchen for about the last six weeks, bring with them fruit flies. Man I hate those little bastards. Fruit flies just…appear. And once you have some of them calling your kitchen or your peaches or your compost home, they will swell to disgusting proportions…
Midnight Marauders In Suburbia
I’ve had some people ask if maybe it wasn’t a wee bit overkill to enclose our chicken coop in 1/2-inch mesh hardware cloth. That stuff is expensive, after all. Here’s my answer: A few nights ago, as I was working on a blog post, Nick mindlessly said, “Hey, I’m going to go make sure the…
I've Become The Weirdo Wasp Lady
I have a wasp nest. I had a wasp nest. A wasp nest hangs in a tree in my yard. If may or may not contain wasps. I’ve been keeping my eye on this nest for several weeks. It’s the aerial home of a colony of bald-faced hornets (despite the name, a type of wasp)….
The Barrier Method Of Carrot Protection
We live in Carrot Fly country. I’m not sure why, but it is commonly accepted in Western Washington that you will not grow a decent crop of carrots without some sort of barrier to protect them. (Talking about barrier methods of carrot protection makes me snicker.) I’ve lost most of my unprotected carrot crops to…