|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ON THE GARDEN PATH by Carolyn Herriot
On the Garden Path began a year ago with Greetings From the Garden Path, a weekly email newsletter sent to customers of The Garden Path Organic Plant Nursery in Victoria. Each week Carolyn wrote about what she was doing in the garden, the orchard, the greenhouse, with seed saving and soil building, with the intention of helping gardeners of all levels realize they can have the most healthy, productive and beautiful garden without resorting to substances harmful to humans, animals, wildlife, plants, worms or the myriad of soil-dwelling organisms. This is a new column full of seasonally-relevant, practical information, which can be picked up on any day of the year to help you in your garden – organically.
Sweet strawberries
Nothing invokes the pleasure of summer more than a bowl of sweet, sun-ripened strawberries. If you are growing June-bearing varieties, such as Royal Sovereign or Totem, then bountiful harvests of juicy berries will be yours. If you’re growing day neutral, everbearing varieties, such as Tristar, you’ll be picking luscious, ripe-red berries until the end of August.
If it’s jam you’re after, choose June-bearing varieties for larger yields at the same time. If you want to enjoy occasional berries throughout the summer, plant ever-bearing varieties. Better yet, grow both.
The only downside to growing strawberries is that they only bear well for two to three years, so you need to plan for three or four years ahead. Here’s how:
Renew your strawberry patch every year by replanting strawberry runners called offsets. Leave runners attached to the parent plant, as long as it is disease-free, and pegged down in the garden or into pots sunk into the soil. Once rooted, offsets can be cut off and replanted elsewhere. Do this no later than the end of August, or they may not produce a good crop next season.
Replant rooted offsets in well-drained, slightly acidic soil in full sun, spaced 12 inches (30 cm) apart in rows 30 inches (75 cm) apart. Cover the roots but not the crowns when transplanting. Water well to help new plants establish.
Once fruit production has stopped, cut the foliage down to the ground to keep your strawberry patch disease-free. Hedge trimmers work fine for this. The first time I did this my heart was in my mouth, but when I saw the vigorous regrowth of healthy new leaves, I felt reassured that this was a good idea.
After fruiting, clear straw and other debris from around the plants to get rid of any diseased and pest-damaged material. If there’s any sign of disease in your strawberry patch, start a new one elsewhere, preferably not where potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant or peppers (Solanaceae family) have been growing, which may encourage verticillium wilt.
The beneficial ladybug
One of the best natural predators for aphids are the little black-spotted red beetles in the garden, Hippodamia convergens, the native ladybug. Ladybugs in both their adult and larval stage eat aphids; adults consuming up to 5,000 aphids during their lifetime. As well as keeping a check on aphids, they also eat other wide-bodied, slow-moving plant pests. Adults depend on a diet of pollen and nectar for maturation, but a supply of aphids or other prey is needed for egg production.
In winter, ladybugs hibernate under loose bark, in rock crevices and in nooks and crannies. They wake up in March or April, mate and lay their eggs in clusters of three to 20 on lower leaf surfaces. After two to five days the eggs hatch into larvae. It’s important to recognize the larval stage of the ladybug so it is not mistaken for a pest. Larvae look like six-legged crocodiles, dark brown in colour with bright-orange spots on the back of their lumpy bodies.
A mature larva can eat as many as 50 aphids a day, and between 200-500 aphids total. After 21 days the larvae pupate, attaching themselves to the undersides of leaves by their tails. After two to five days the adults emerge and continue to feed. Ladybugs produce up to six generations a year, which accounts for a lot of aphid control.
As long as there is prey and a source of water there’s no reason for a ladybug to “fly away home” and it will stick around in the garden. Broad-spectrum insecticides are usually fatal to these beneficial beetles, but encouraging healthy populations of ladybugs and other beneficial insects in the garden should make it unnecessary to use such products. No wonder we consider the ladybug to be lucky.
From A Year on the Garden Path, A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide by Carolyn Herriot. $29.95. Earthfuture Publications, Victoria, BC. Available from Banyen Books and Duthie Books or
www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath
Carolyn Herriot has been operating The Garden Path Organic Plant Nursery in Victoria since 1989, from which grew her organic seed business, Seeds of Victoria. Carolyn shares her passion for gardening by way of lectures and as a garden writer, and appears weekly on Get Up and Grow and the Go show on Global and CHTV.
 Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
