The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

October 19, 2018

Saving an heirloom zinnia

This gardening season, I adopted another unique heirloom seed to try to save from extinction.  Currently, I’m saving four dry bean varieties that are not available commercially plus my own heirloom variety of tomato.

Now I’m adding the first flower to my growing collection of heirlooms, a variety of zinnia. It was given to me by a gardener who I lost contact with. She never said what the variety name was; only that she had been saving them for many years. I believe she is no longer able to garden so it’s now up to me to keep the strain going.

This variety has all pink flowers and is not a mix of colors. It probably started out that way a long time ago.

The blossoms were about 4 inches across.

The blossoms were about 4 inches across.

I like to wait until the flowers are well dried before harvesting the seeds.

I like to wait until the flowers are well dried before harvesting the seeds.

The plants eventually grew to nearly four feet tall despite the fact that I sowed the seeds very thickly. I didn’t know what the germination rate would be but as it turned out, just about every seed germinated. I transplanted a lot of them into new rows. I eventually gave up on trying spacing them out since there were so many plants that I ran out of room. The remaining ones grew up to form a dense stand, almost like a hedge.

Seeds are produced at both ray flowers (edge)and disk flowers (center)

Seeds are produced at both ray flowers (edge) and disk flowers (center)

Once dried, the seeds easily separate from the petals.

Once dried, the seeds easily separate from the petals.

Like other zinnias, they responded well to cutting, the more I cut, the more flowers grew to take their place.

I plan to keep the strain going and eventually give away seeds to other gardeners.

Bob

October 5, 2018

Insect pest look alikes

Filed under: Insects — bob @ 8:20 am

This week while scouting for garden for pests, I came across an interesting coincidence. Two look-alike, but completely unrelated, insect pests showed up at the same time. They were in the same general area but on different plants in nearby gardens.

The first insect I spotted was rose sawfly larvae feeding on the roses. There were quite a few of them and were pretty big by the time I saw them.  They had eaten quite a bit of the foliage. If I hadn’t spotted them, they would have completely defoliated the bushes.

The other insect I came across, just minutes after seeing the sawflies, was cross-striped cabbage worms feeding on some cauliflower plants. It struck me how similar the sawflies and cross-striped caterpillars look. At that stage in their particular lifecycles, they were nearly the same size.

At this stage of development, this rose sawfly larva looks like a caterpillar but is not.

At this stage of development, this rose sawfly larva looks like a caterpillar but is not.

This cross-striped caterpillar is a true caterpillar.

This cross-striped caterpillar is a true caterpillar.

Even though they were each feeding on their preferred food, if you didn’t know better, you could easily confuse the two. However, cross-striped cabbage worms would never be found on roses and like-wise, rose sawflies would turn up their noses at cauliflower.

Both of these insects eat leaves and the damage they do is quite similar looking too as they both chew holes. That’s where the similarities end. They are unrelated species. The rose sawfly belongs to the wasp family while the cross-striped caterpillar is in the butterfly/moth family (Lepodoptera). About the only thing you can say about them is they are both insects.

That doesn’t make too much difference when it comes to killing them with chemical insecticides, but if you are an organic gardener, it can make a huge difference. For example the biological insecticide Bt (Bacillus thuringensis) infects butterflies and moths so will kill cross-striped caterpillars. But rose sawflies, because they are wasps and not Lepodoptera, are un-phased by Bt spores. They can eat Bt all day long and not be affected in the least.

I see cases of mistaken identity all the time. This is a good example of how easy it is to misidentify something if you’re not careful.

Bob

 

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