I made friends with my next door neighbor's cat, it spends more time in my back yard than theirs, then goes home to eat... a perfect arrangement!
We don't have much of a problem with the skunks or squirrels otherwise because they have alternate food sources, aren't going to battle a cat to...
There are certain types of ants that will even "farm" aphids, herding them, or taking eggs to plants, so they can harvest the honeydew produced... or they might have been drawn to an existing population of aphids instead.
Oddly I have a couple of plants that some type of large ant really likes...
I would check under that paper mulch for fungus growth, if it stays damp you might be growing quite a bit of it. Try to avoid getting the leaves frequently wet if that is happening. It may just be too hot right now for your tomatoes.
Since I don't see stuff growing on the soil or wood around...
In 10a you should have a fair amount of time to grow whatever you want, though I suspect you'll be seeing temperatures hot enough that some things may not like direct afternoon sun.
When is your first hard frost, sometime in November? If so pick things which fruit within this ~ 150 day...
Aphids are funny or I should write "random", one will come along and lay eggs and one plant will be swarming with them while one a few inches away won't have many if any on it yet - if you kill them soon enough.
I don't think you can really draw a conclusion about sprouting your own versus...
I'm lucky, the few times I get these worms they are pretty easy to see and short lived because we have a fair number of wasps around which make them look like they are growing cotton on their backs. Doubly fortunate is that since we have barely any wild bees around here anymore, wasps are...
At some point, someone told me you're supposed to bury them deep enough that the soil covers everything up to the first set of leaves so that's always how I do it, but I also bury them in a concave depressed soil area so I can conserve water a little having it pool around the stem, but after a...
^ Absolutely, then there's the other experiment, how long you leave the fruit ripening on the plant vs stimulating new blooms by picking fruit off. To me some things just have to stay on till they're fully ripe but others like hungarian waxed peppers, green bells or jalapenos, you aren't...
I thought I was behind this year too, having only had mine outside for a couple of weeks now due to the late frost then rain and strong wind, but coincidentally I made a post a year and a day ago, http://www.theeasygarden.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=28928 showing last year's plants were only...
I was lazy/busy and didn't harden most of my peppers at all this year and none seem to have had a problem with the 90F+ temperatures they saw the first few days outside.
I would guess the reason why is they had plenty of light indoors under some 6K color temp fluorescent light bulbs, that I let...
I do it both ways. When they are under 1 foot tall I pick off most of the blooms on all plants but leave a small # of blooms, then when a little over a foot tall I leave some with all the blooms they can make and others I keep picking blooms off of so they get a bit larger with bigger late yield.
When a local electronics superstore nearby decided to remodel, they were throwing out a large (tractor-trailer sized) dumpster worth of shelving and misc hardware. Among what they threw out were ~ foot long metal posts like you see blister carded merchandise hanging from in stores, with a 90'...
You can use any size container you want, but if the size is below roughly 20 gallons and it's not meant to be a dwarf plant, it will be root bound fairly significantly reducing size and yield, BUT any plant that a smaller pot allows you to grow is more than having one less plant! You can still...
I start some seeds in Jiffy and other peat pots. Roots not only break through easily, they already had with the seedlings only a few weeks old.
They do lose water faster for sure, but it just means I give them more water (daily watering cycle scaled back to every other day if in close quarters...
Same problem here, standing water in the back yard. What's even worse is unusually strong wind for this area, it was blowing 80-120 MPH, turning over parked tractor trailers a couple days ago, then the tornado warnings were separate events. At 80+ MPH rain is more like a fire hose than rain...
That may be what happened till I stepped up my watering cycle but that was right after the first of the hot spell and more than two months later all new peppers since then have had about the same ratio of good to moldy. I suspect it's probably the split stems, we've had some unusually large...
I examined them and saw nothing different on the outside about the ones that molded... but if the critters boring in are too small to see, maybe the hole would be too if at the bloom end.
Good tip about leaving the stem on, I find they start shriveling within a couple days here if I pick it...