Mid-September Update

Yay! My Paradise Garden is free of netting.

Hello everyone, it's been a month since I last posted and wanted to give an update on what's been happening in my gardens. After our usual intense summer heat, we had a couple weeks in which it rained almost every day -- I almost forgot what it was to water all my pots every day, since I didn't have to do it for two weeks. The cool weather and near-daily rain was welcome after we had been dry for while.

I also would like to give a recap about my Big Net, in case people are wondering how that worked out. As you might recall from my earlier posts, we've had a horrible Japanese beetle problem here, and they were destroying my roses, especially in my new Paradise Garden. So I came up with the idea of draping a Big Net over that entire garden:

Here's the PG a month ago. The Big Net actually worked very well, keeping the JBs off my roses, and I didn't mind the net at all.

But then disaster struck:
On August 28, a tornado warning, a ton of rain, and a huge windstorm with gusts recorded of up to 80 mph blew through here. I was home at the time, and I looked out the front windows and saw the net blowing straight out, horizontally (toward the viewer in the above photo), and saw that some of the garden was uncovered. After it was safe to come out of the basement, I went outside and saw that the net had been Torn Asunder:

Shredded. Back to the drawing board....

After this calamity, I was able to use paper binder clips to pin together the net in spots so it covered most of the garden again, although I had to keep a close eye on it on breezy days and re-adjust the net frequently.

During the cooler, rainy weeks, I hardly saw any JBs, so I finally took down the remains of the net a few days ago (I saved the two-thirds of it that wasn't shredded, to use on other shrubs or fruit trees next year). There are still a few remaining JBs now that it's turned warm and sunny again, but only a few -- not the mobs of them destroying my roses like before. I just go out a couple times a day and knock them into my soapy water cup, and the damage is quite limited. They'll likely be completely gone in another week or so.

The netting structure, partly disassembled. It's all packed away carefully for next year now.

Free at last! Filled with butterflies and hummingbirds, it really is a flower-filled Paradise.

The net really did help my roses avoid terrible damage -- they look great right now, as do the dahlias, marigolds and other flowers that JBs love to wreak destruction upon. I'm planning to buy another net next year and make a few engineering modifications to next year's edition:

1. I need to reinforce the net with some kind of weather-resistant tape where I attach the grommets along the sides (those hold the net in place during wind and make headroom to walk under the net along the sides. 
2. I need to cover the ends of the wood slats on the pergola at the back of the garden (maybe with tennis balls or something round and smooth), because their sharp ends were what caused most of the tearing of the net.
   

We'll give it another go next June, and see if it will work better, even in high winds.

These make all the trial and error worth it. If a Big Net is what I need to enjoy
my roses, that's what I'll use.

Still a lovely spot to sit and enjoy my flowers....

The Clematis paniculata is blooming incredibly generously, considering I just planted it in May, and you can see scented tuberoses and lavender at center, and lovely roses and sweet peas across the path. Heavenly scents all of them.

After the next few days of continuing warmer weather, it looks like it will cool down here and that might be the end of our summer weather. Hard to believe autumn is upon us. I've bought a few spring bulbs that are waiting to be planted, and there are still several improvements I need to make to garden areas this fall -- but it's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work once it's cooler.

I hope you are enjoying beautiful fall weather in your own gardens (and a few more warm summer days too!). Thanks for reading! -Beth

My latest (crazy?) defense against Japanese beetles

The butterflies are magical, but they're not my only garden visitors....

It's official: the Japanese beetles are out of control. They're ruining my roses, hollyhocks and other flowers. I know they'll be gone before too much longer, but they've been absolutely horrendous this year and I don't see them being any better in future years.

I didn't mind them so much when I had few roses near my house, but now when I sit in my new Paradise Garden each evening surrounded with roses and other flowers, seeing the damage and ugly clusters of beetles really bothers me. I think my new garden is probably the nicest garden I have ever made, and I'm not going to give it up or stop growing roses in it, so what to do?

It's magical in the evenings, filled with butterflies, hummingbirds and scented flowers. The JBs hadn't gotten this rosebud yet for some reason -- but the next day it was destroyed.

This climbing rose growing on the arch over my front gate was repulsive! This foul sight greeted me every time I came home until I pruned the plant down almost to the ground in disgust.

My 'Sharifa Asma' rose, known for its scent and
beauty, was utterly defiled by the disgusting beasts.

Even the marigolds planted in my Paradise Garden weren't immune -- I was surprised, as they have long been thought to act as a repellent to other insects. But the JBs love them (although they don't seem to cause as much damage to the leaves and flowers as they do on roses).

Last month, I posted about the Japanese beetle problem, and at that point I felt pretty hopeful about my efforts to control them, but I think that was unrealistic:

1. Every evening I walk around with a container of warm soapy water and use a butter knife to knock off as many JBs as I can find into the container. This does seem to somewhat reduce the damage done by them, and it makes me feel better -- but this is not how I want to spend so much time in my gardens.

2. I don't want to use systemic insecticides because I don't want to hurt the bees, and they only reduce the problem anyway, not eliminate it. So instead, I sprayed an organic pyrethrin-based insecticide at dusk, after bees go to sleep. The pyrethrin did kill the JBs that were on the plants -- the ground under the roses was littered with their bodies the next day. But more showed up the next day and didn't seem to be affected by the residue. Also, it made my Paradise Garden smell like insecticide, not sweetly-scented flowers. Yuck.

3. I planned to treat my lawn for JB grubs this month to try to reduce their future numbers. But my two acres of lawn would have cost probably $150 to treat, twice a year, and I found out that the JBs can fly 3-5 miles, so more will simply come from miles away. Useless.

4. I treated my lawn with milky spore treatment about five years ago, but I've read that studies have shown it doesn't work very well. Ditto nematodes.

5. I wondered if a simple repellent existed, and I was excited to read that steeping red cedar planks in hot water would yield a spray that some people swore by -- free and easy! I tried it and I could certainly smell the cedar spray -- but the JBs didn't seem to mind it at all, and in fact the three test plants I sprayed had even more beetles the next day. Aaggh!

*****************************

I apologize for my pessimistic attitude, but the more I research Japanese beetles, the worse this story gets -- next year and every year after that will probably be just as bad, if not worse. And my aesthetic problems with them pale in comparison to others' more serious problems. They cause millions of dollars in damage to crops and ornamental plants; last year, an Iowa winery lost $20,000 of their grape crop to the buggers. They're also destroying milkweed habitats that monarch butterfly populations depend on to survive. They only arrived in my area about a decade ago, and didn't seem so bad a few years ago because the unusually cold winter of 2013-14 knocked back their numbers. But I think this rebound is the new normal.

And it's not just a problem for Northeasterners and Midwesterners; Portland, Oregon has been quarantining and desperately trying to eradicate a suburban infestation of Japanese beetles that threatens the Pacific Northwest's huge agricultural sector.

Steadily moving west....

And they've already spread to Europe too: JBs were found in a nature reserve in northern Italy near Milan in 2014, and by last year they had already spread to southern Switzerland. Etymologists believe most of continental Europe, the UK, Ireland, parts of Australia and New Zealand are all suitable habitats for them. The Netherlands has long been dreading their arrival; since the 1950s they've had Japanese beetle traps at the international airport in Amsterdam to monitor for them. English gardeners had better enjoy their national love affair with the rose while they can.

Their invasion is inevitable everywhere, except very dry and extremely cold areas  -- I only hope that someone really smart will figure out how to eradicate them easily and cheaply.  They're invasive pests that shouldn't even be here, and we should target them for total continent-wide eradication, if it can be done without harm to other species or the environment (genetic engineering to render them sterile may be the safest way to do this).

But back to my own (admittedly minor by comparison) problem right now....

My Latest Desperate (Crazy?) Idea

If insecticides, hand removal, grub treatments, milky spore and repellents don't work, what else? Some people have put netting and row covers over fruit trees, berry bushes and grape vines, but I don't want to have nets over each of my rose bushes and on every marigold and dahlia, preventing me from enjoying their beauty. How ugly would that be?

But then I started to wonder: Could I put a very big temporary net over my entire Paradise Garden? That's where most of my roses are and where the JB damage bothers me most. I looked this up online and couldn't find any examples of other gardeners who have done this -- maybe that should tell me something.... I saw pictures of bird netting enclosures, net cages for fruit gardens, and netted cat enclosures ("catios"), but no beetle-netted flower gardens.

I'd need a pretty big net to cover my roughly 24'x27' Paradise Garden. However, I looked around and found beetle net sold in rolls 100' long by 14' wide on Amazon.com.

And how could I support the net over my garden, so that I could still go inside and enjoy my garden? I'd need some structure that's inexpensive, easy to set up and take down, and not hideously ugly. I hit on something that I hope will work:

It's not too ugly, I think, for a temporary structure. It's a 10x20-foot shade canopy or carport frame (it comes with a cloth roof, which I'm not using), that I found at a local home improvement store for only $80.

When the net arrived last Friday, I unrolled all 100 feet of it out in our big yard, and cut it into three sections, each 33 feet long and 14 feet wide. I then sewed those three sections together by hand using nylon twine, making a 42-foot long, 33-foot wide net.

Getting the net over the top of the structure all by myself (family's away camping) wasn't the hard part. After that was done, I spent two days attaching grommets to both sides of the net, so I could attach the net to wires strung in front of my house and along our front fence, so the net won't blow away when it's windy.

It could look worse. I like to think of it as being like a Bedouin tent, in keeping with the Islamic-style Paradise Garden theme.

I have no idea if this is going to work. I've read that JBs don't usually fly along the ground, but swoop down from up high when they smell pheromones emitted by female beetles already eating flowers and foliage. So having a net over the top of this garden may exclude new ones from entering.

There were still a fair number of them already in the garden though, so I've been working overtime with the soapy water bucket to eliminate as many as possible from inside the net. I have noticed a lot fewer of them inside the tent after several days, and I see some on the outside of the net that can't get in. :-)

Hah! You just stay out there!

I'll only have to put up this temporary net for 8-10 weeks, from mid-June until late August each year. Then, I'll pack it away carefully until next June.

I feel a bit bad keeping the butterflies and hummingbirds out (they were so magical!), but they'll have free rein in this garden all during autumn, and I have numerous zinnias, phlox and other nectar-rich plants in other parts of my garden for them to enjoy during mid-summer. If the JB's must have those plants too, it won't bother me so much, as long as I have my safe rose sanctuary in my netted Paradise Garden.

If this works, it could be the best way to protect roses in JB-infested regions:

• safe for the environment and other insects
• temporary
• less expensive than treating large areas of lawn for grubs
• more aesthetically attractive than netting that places a barrier between us and our plants 
• and effective!

Welcome inside the Bedouin tent.... I cut a door flap in the front of the net, to make it easier for people (not beetles) to enter.

I'll move a few more roses from other areas into the PG, and I think I'm just going to have to get rid of all my climbing roses, since needing to cut them back drastically each summer pretty much eliminates the entire purpose of climbing roses. I'll probably replace them with clematis or some other flowering vine that blooms before the buggers arrive.

I'll keep you posted about the effectiveness of my crazy big net.

Until then, I hope you have been enjoying lots of lovely summer flowers, not munched by insects, in your own gardens. Thanks for reading my very long post! -Beth

Look, no beetle clusters! Only lovely roses and sweet peas and petunias.
Maybe the net's not so crazy? :-)

The End of July, Already

Hello! It's hard to believe that July is nearly over and back-to-school is just around the corner already. It seems like this gardening season has simply flown by. But we did have a very late start to spring -- I wasn't able to do much work in our gardens until nearly the end of April -- so I guess that makes it seem like a shorter season. After a very hot June and early July, we're enjoying cooler weather the past couple of weeks, and that does make it seem like Fall is coming -- even though I know we'll have more days in the 90s before long.

At any rate, we've been enjoying our fall-like temperatures, and I've been able to do a bit of light work outside this past week in the pleasant evenings. And even though it feels like fall, the flowers we've been enjoying have definitely been high summer season flowers. Here are a few:

The new Paradise Garden is really filling in well, particularly the colorful annuals. I think that next spring I will remove the "stairway to nowhere" in front of the porch that is now enclosed into a sunroom. I'll probably lay paving stones on the ground where the stairs are and perhaps put another bench there. 

Another view of the garden from the other direction.

The 'Rooguchi' clematis I planted next to the pergola is blooming prettily.

This is the first time I've ever tried growing 'Sweet Sultan' Centaurea moschata, and the seeds I direct sowed in May have been blooming for the past few weeks. They're related to Bachelor Buttons, but are lightly scented and look a bit like thistles. 

Tall garden phlox along my front fence.

Self-seeded hollyhocks and pink flowering tobacco in the Front Border.

The Yellow Garden is looking golden in the setting sun.

Sunflowers romping away in the Kitchen Garden.

I had no luck growing gladiolus for cutting last year, but
these are looking better this year.

The gladiolus are certainly flamboyant, aren't they?

Hope you are enjoying many summer flowers in your own gardens these days, and that pleasant temperatures are in your forecast too. Thanks for reading! -Beth

Rain and glorious roses -- and Japanese Beetles!

A deep pink rose (possibly Buck rose 'Hi Neighbor') planted with dianthus in my Paradise Garden.

Hello! The good news this week is that we've finally gotten some significant rain, after a month of zero rainfall. Thursday we got more than two inches, which, with the 3/4" we got a few days before, means we're back to normal precipitation for this time of year. A great relief -- I don't even have to water my numerous potted plants for a couple of days!

Everything looks fresh and green after the rain, and we've been enjoying lovely roses, lilies and other flowers the past few weeks. Here's a selection:

'The Fawn' rose and pink flowering tobacco against my front porch, on the edge of the Paradise Garden.

Another rose. I've moved my roses around so many times that I'm afraid I can't identify this one, despite efforts to keep track of them when moving them. This is probably a a Griffith Buck rose though.

The bubbling fountain with orange marigolds in the Paradise Garden.

But all is not perfect in my Paradise Garden.... we've been INVADED! Yes, by the same Japanese Beetles that have been wreaking increasing havoc in the Midwest in recent years. They've been observed in the United States for more than a century, but have been present in Iowa for only the past decade -- and last year was the worst infestation of them on record. I don't know how this year compares scientifically yet, but by my own observation and the many news stories appearing across the Midwest such as "The bug that ate Omaha," I'd say that they're pretty prevalent this summer.

They've clustered on my roses, devouring the flowers and leaving the leaves as skeletonized webs. They've done the same to our lovely hollyhocks, and even chawed down on marigold flowers and foliage (I'm quite surprised any insect likes such strongly-scented foliage).

Six or eight years ago, I treated our lawn with milky spore powder (a bacterium that is toxic to JB grubs), but I'm not sure that it has done much to help, since I still see plenty of grubs (one of the stages of Japanese Beetle life) under our turf in the areas I treated. But other than that effort, I've done little to battle them, mostly trying to ignore them and the damage they leave in their wake.

Until now.

This is only one Japanese Beetle -- usually a rose is covered in a large cluster of the buggers.

Puppy knows there are moles under our lawn, and the moles are there because they like to eat the JB grubs. This part of our lawn isn't too chewed up yet, compared to some other areas that I'll spare you from seeing.

Until now I've mostly tried to ignore the JBs, but last week I decided that, now that most of my two dozen or so rose plants have been moved to my Paradise Garden right next to the house and I can see how much damage the Japanese Beetles are causing, that it's just not acceptable if I can do something about it. It's not just the ugly clusters of beetles covering my rose flowers, but the unsightly skeletonized leaves of the roses bushes and hollyhocks. Enough.

My strategy is a four-pronged one:

1. Every evening when the JBs have settled down on my plants and are less likely to buzz around, I walk around with a container of warm soapy water and a butter knife. I use the knife to knock off as many JBs into the container as I can find (some evenings I've done away with 100+ of them). I've been doing this for about a week now, and I'm certainly seeing a lot fewer of them than when I started. It could be that their active phase, usually only 6-8 weeks, is nearly at an end, or perhaps the big rain we got the other day knocked them all to the ground (where they are busy laying their dastardly eggs...), or because of the cooler weather we're enjoying after the rain. Removing them by hand does help though, because when feeding on plants the JBs emit a pheromone that attracts even more beetles to the plant -- each one you remove prevents several more from being attracted to the same plant. It's important not to squish them though, because that releases even more pheromones. (And it would have been better if I'd started doing this as soon as they first started appearing -- but it wasn't until last week that I'd had enough of them.)

2. I sprayed an organic pyrethrin-based insecticide on my roses, hollyhocks and marigolds. I did this at dusk, after the bees go to sleep, to avoid harming them (there is no residual effect on bees, but it can harm them if they visit just-sprayed plants, so late dusk is the safest time to do this).

3. I am planning to treat my lawn for grubs in the next month, to try to knock back the future numbers of JBs, as well as reduce the mole (and dog) damage to our lawn. Because there are no neighboring lawns near me (my property is surrounded by corn fields) this may be more effective than for gardens in cities or towns.

4. I may try another milky spore treatment of my lawn, for the same reason.

Next summer, I will keep my eye out and start the soapy water treatment as soon as I see the first JBs, to get a good start on them before they attract large numbers. 

I may be fooling myself into thinking that I can do anything to eliminate this serious pest, but even if I can reduce their damage by 50% or so, that's still something, especially in my Paradise Garden, in which roses are one of the starring plants.



But enough about the Japanese Beetle scourge -- luckily, they don't seem to have developed a taste for many other flowers (yet...). Here are a few others:

We haven't yet had to deal with the dreaded Lily Beetles that have ruined these amazing plants for our British gardening friends (and I pray that we won't have to for some time yet). They sure are looking nice this time of year, and smell wonderful.

After my potted jasmine plant (Jasminum sambac) died this spring, I was on the lookout for a replacement. I found two -- a regular single-flowered form like I had, as well as this new double-flowered one, 'Summer Soul." A wonderful scent....

I'm never failed to be amazed by the size of the flowers on hardy hibiscus plants -- they really do look tropical!

A pelargonium I ordered for the first time this year called Geranium 'Appleblossom Rosebud,' an older heirloom variety, c1870, that is said to have been Queen Victoria's favorite geranium. If the story's true, I can see why.

It looks like we'll be enjoying cooler weather here for the next week or so, which is a relief after our usual summer heat. It's been pleasant to work outside, and I've actually been able to keep reasonably on top of the weeds this week, which is a great improvement over last year's weed-fest, and makes me feel a lot better about my gardens in general.

Hope you are enjoying beautiful weather and adequate rain, and that your gardens are not too terribly plagued by pests of any sort. Thanks for reading! -Beth

Mid-July Scenes

An unidentified (but beautiful) pink rose in the Paradise Garden.

Greetings from the peak of summer! We finally got a bit rain last night after nearly a month without any at all -- which is strange, because other parts of Iowa have had so much rain that they have suffered serious floods. The forecast calls for a few more rainy days next week, so I hope we're getting back to normal amounts of precipitation and not heading into a drought.

It's been a couple of weeks since I have been able to post, mostly because I bought a new computer last weekend (the old one was making ominous grinding noises that I don't think were merely coming from a clogged fan). It's taken nearly a week to get my files transferred and software installed -- and I still haven't been able to successfully install Photoshop, which I used to edit my photos, despite a number of tries and much time wasted chatting with Adobe help.

But apparently Microsoft's photo editor can do basic editing (and is quite easy and quick to use as well), so that's what I've used for this post. I hope the photos will look OK.

Anyway, I wanted to share a few pictures of what's been looking nice around here, especially an update of what's been happening in my new Paradise Garden:

The Paradise Garden at dusk, when this garden is most beautiful and inviting.

The plants are starting to fill in a bit, especially the annuals and dahlias.

Vibrant colors of Wave petunias, marigolds and dahlias.

I've been impressed by the growth rate and rapid bloom of this bush-type dahlia 'Jaipur'. 

The Persian carpet colors of the annuals were a big part of my design for this exotic garden.

Exotic fruits are another key feature of this garden. I'm so excited that there are figs on my new fig tree! (Chicago Hardy)

Orien-pet lilies and pink flowering tobacco, each one vying with the other to release the most intoxicating scents in the evenings. These are planted against the front porch/sunroom, on the edge of the Paradise Garden.

Yellow orien-pet lilies in my front border, on the outside of the fence. I moved these here in May, which I worried wasn't a good time to do so, but they don't seem to have minded in the least, except for being a bit shorter than last year.

Around the corner on yet another side of the fence is this Rose of Sharon
that I planted about six years ago. It's never looked as good as it does this year.

One of my favorite self-seeding annuals, snapdragons -- I'm never sorry to see these popping up anywhere
in my gardens!

Every year, I usually experience a period of blahs during July, probably due to the days starting to become shorter -- I know I'm not the only gardener to feel this. Also, most of my planned garden projects are usually wrapped up by this time, and often it's too hot and muggy outside to do much of anything anyway (and weeds tend to take over during such periods, which is discouraging too).

But we're predicted to have a few cooler days this coming week, and I still have some small projects that I want to get done this year, so maybe I'll be able to work on a few this week.

And I feel pretty good about the improvements that I've made to my gardens this year, so this July seems like it's OK. Hard to believe back-to-school is just around the corner already, but that happens every summer (and undoubtedly feels much worse for kids!).

Hope you are enjoying a few cool days during the height of summer, and that your own gardens are filled with beautiful flowers and foliage. Thanks for reading! -Beth