Patio Gardening 2010: Week 13 – Cutworm Invasion?
The plants seemed to survive our week long vacation. I don’t know how the weather was here in Chicago (I heard it rained) but where we were in New Hampshire it was hot, hot, hot!
Unfortunately, my digital camera did not survive the trip. It had a nasty fall on our last day of vacation, so the lens is messed up. I am stuck using my older camera until I get a replacement, so I apologize for crappy pictures with weird colors.
Our first cherry tomatoes appeared this week. We are extremely excited abut that. There are more blossoms on the plants and we hope to be up to our necks in cherry tomatoes soon.
I’ve found 9 more of the caterpillar type bugs I discovered eating the cherry tomato plants last week. I think they may be cutworms, though I’m not entirely sure. They completely pigged out on the pepper plants while we were gone and are much bigger now (about 1-2 inches–you can see them in this week’s video).
They’ve also started eating the new tomatoes.
They hide in the soil during the day. When I water the plants in the morning and the evening, they come crawling out and I just scoop them out and relocate them to the yard. I hope to eventually get them all and not have to resort to pesticides. We are a little worried about the pepper plants. Hopefully they will recover.
Our friend who was house sitting for us didn’t harvest anything while we were gone, so we came home to 2 bloated and yellow looking cucumbers. We’ll attempt to eat them, but we assume they look like this because they were on the plant too long.
The powdery mildew has continued to flourish since we left, so I will resume my treatments of the 10% milk 90% water solution and hopefully we can keep it in check. The cucumber plant that has it the worst has 3 cucumbers growing on it right now and we’d hate to lose them.
Otherwise, I’m back to my regular routine of watering the plants twice daily and fertilizing once a week.
Here’s the video for the week:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.