I have heard about the bee shortage and was getting a bit worried about our strawberries, but have started seeing these tiny bees around in the past two weeks
And our strawberries are finally starting to strawberry!
The aphids are TERRIBLE this year. But they do seem to have attracted many ladybugs. I hope the ladybugs win!
A bit fuzzy, but the lady bug shedding its skin was kind of cool.
2 comments:
I can't believe how far ahead you are from us! Our daffodils just began popping out yesterday, and only the weeds are really burgeoning yet. I did see my lupins are coming back and are now about four or five inches tall, so it's all on the way.
I've been on a real gardening kick the past few days! All blogged, of course.
For aphids, try getting a spray bottle from the ¥100 shop and putting just a squirt of dishwashing liquid into a bottle full of water. Then give the plants a good dousing every other day or so. It should help a bit as the aphids have a waxy substance on them that the dishwashing soap dissolves. It shouldn't harm the rest of the wildlife though...
We only have a few very late bloomer daffodils left. I grew up in New England (CT) and am still having a hard time getting my head around gardening in Gifu. My internal planting schedule is all wrong. My dad says the ground is just starting to thaw at home. I am so envious of your Hokkaido weather, especially when it's 40 degrees here in the summer, but also when I see your boys jumping into enormous snow drifts in the winter. Okay, I know the shoveling probably isn't much fun, but it's easy to romanticize from a distance in rainy-biting-wind-but-no-snow Gifu winter. I am also having a hard time because many of the plants and strains I know can't make it through the summer here, especially since the girls and I are away for the worst of it and dh doesn't have the time to do tons of watering.
Thank you, for reminding me of dish soap! I was trying to remember what I sprayed them with last year, and had an idea that it was milk, but that would make the spray bottle all stinky, and I was sure that I had left them left overs in the bottle the whole season. So I painted my okra with milk yesterday, which seemed to kill the aphids, but I wasn't going to get far with a paintbrush for the rest of the garden. The weeds next to the neighbor's garden plot are solid aphids. Every day our dog's water dish is filled with drowned aphids. Yucko!
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