The Grandson and I went down to the garden this morning to poke 20-gauge pure copper wire through the tomato stems. It's supposed to keep down fungus.
It's SUPPOSED to be done when the plant stems are about as big around as a pencil; mine were thicker. And tough. There may also have been some window of time (not sure how long, or why) between planting and poking that I missed. The wire bent like crazy; it was hard to get it in. But we did it. I just hope we didn't kill the plants.
Two of my pepper plants and one of the tomato plants are just gone. Not even a shriveled stem where they were.
The okra has come up, is about 2-3" tall. I thinned it and replanted some of it the skips. The ground around some of them was like . . . chocolate pudding. I just mushed 'em in with my thumb.
The Grandson and I washed our crocks off with the waterhose by the back porch. I noticed that the inside of my left ankle was bright red, angry. Ants, most likely. They're all over the place.
Last weekend, I tried an ant-killer recipe of 3 oz. orange oil, 6 oz. Dawn dishwashing liquid, and 1 gallon of water. Poured a whole gallon straight down into the mound across the road from our house. Ants came pouring out when the water hit. I did not hang around long to see what happened. Yesterday, I poked that mound with a stick. It's still full of ants.
On Mother's Day, while we were visiting at Nanny's, I set fire to two ant mounds at the north end of the garden. Two weeks earlier, I had piled up okra stems and weeds on top of the mounds, just to piss them off. A third mound, just a few feet away, had popped up during the interim. I lit the two piles and went back to the porch for a while, and when I went out to check the situation a few minutes later, the ants from the burning mound were moving over to the new mound, entering the mound at ground level, not from the top. I did not get close enough to get a good look, but it almost looked like the ants on the inside of the mound had knocked out part of the dirt at the base of the mound to welcome the new-comers. Or maybe the mound defenders were busting out to meet the new-comers and run them off.
In any case, the experiment tends to prove that roasting an ant hill does not work.
No comments:
Post a Comment