Weekly status of tyre garden - update 29

Slowly pruning out the dead stuff.

Contender bush beans flowering. Time to plant another batch?

Sweet potatoes...

Weekly status of tyre garden - update 28

Lots of rain early in the week, mild weather after that. Autumn is definitely here.

Overview - a lot of stuff has been ripped out because it finished producing. A few zucchini still coming along.

Contender bush beans are starting to bud. I'll plant another lot as soon as these start producing beans.

Globe artichokes regrowing from crowns.

At last - seeds of FC UC172 asparagus have sprouted.

More asparagus... last count there were 18 new miniature plants. Let's see how they do.

Weekly status of tyre garden - update 27

Lots of rain the past few days, and quite cool in the evenings.

Contender bush beans nearly flowering.

Globe artichoke crowns regrowing.

Strawberries - now up to 16 tyres of them.

Jerusalem artichokes.

White guavas.

Nu Mex Big Jim peppers.

Piquant peppers - Pepperdew.

Sweet potatoes.

More Jerusalem artichokes.

Pepperdews en masse.

Pecans, getting ready for early April harvest.

Grape vines and strawberries.

Thysanoptera damage to green peppers?

Most of my green pepper and chilli plants are showing signs of thrips damage - the new growth and flower buds are wrinkled and unhealthy looking, even though the rest of the plant looks OK. Any fruit that sets from the buds is misshape, with scars. This damage is probably due to thrips, but I'm not sure... and have no real idea what to do about it. Looking at Google images, there is only a partial match - there isn't any leaf "spotting" associated with the crinkling.

I thought I'd got away with no garden pests this season, as there were zero aphids to be seen the whole growing period. A few slugs in the early days, but they diminished over time.

Maybe all associated with growing tomatoes nearby? A virus?

Update 2016/04/27:

The C.F. Jacot-Guillarmod Thysanoptera collection. Boxes of microscope slides with the thrips mounted under cover slips in canada balsam.

The catalogue - these are mounted cuttings of journal/newspaper articles/snippets on A4 sheets in 3 ring binders. My dad had a formidable correspondence with entomologists from all over the world and exchanged articles with them. It mirrors the sort of thing he did with articles on Basutoland/Lesotho, which are in the Cory Library.

Thanks to John Midgley, the entomologist at the Albany Museum for showing me around. The top floor of the John Hewitt wing has changed since I was a youngster visiting my dad. Gone is the evocative smell of Ethyl Acetate, mothballs and Xylene. Closure of a sort, I suppose.

Weekly status of tyre garden - update 26

Scorcher of a day yesterday - 40c with not a breath of wind. Inside the house was cool, but going outside was like walking into an oven. Fortunately no humidity. Had to water the veggies at mid day.

6 months since starting this blog...

Overview - nothing special going on - most things in a sort of steady state.

Some of the strawberries in the foreground, bush beans - Contender - in the background.

White guavas getting bigger. They take quite a while to ripen, though.

Jerusalem artichoke flowering, which means it's getting close to dieback. The problem with this particular clump is that it's doing too well in a constrained space, so there will be overcrowding.

Orange sweet potato, creepering like crazy.



Autumn raspberry, escaped from its tyre. There's another, larger, escapee on the other side. This should make it easy to propagate. When?

Mary Washington Bed 2.

Mary Washington closeup. I need some sort of scale in there, like a matchbox. Although, I suppose, the 6mm black PVC pipe acts as one...

Mary Washington bed 1.

Patty pan II.