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altivoWell, the Japanese beetles are still here, though I've finally made major dents in their ranks. After filling two traps with corpses, they were still chowing down heavily on my pole beans, turning the leaves into skeletal remnants. Following advice from the local Master Gardeners group, I filled a plastic container from cottage cheese about half full of hot water with a couple of drops of dish detergent in it. Then I went and held this under each infested leaf and brushed the bugs downward. They are incredibly clumsy, and usually take flight by dropping and spreading their wings until the air catches under them and lets them rise back up, flapping furiously. That means that when disturbed, they fall straight down for a foot or more. All that land in the hot soapy water sink like pebbles.
After repeating this process on two consecutive days, there are only a dozen or so beetles on the leaves tonight. There won't be new ones born until next year, and these are lame ducks who have already laid their eggs as I understand it, but they'll go on munching up my garden until the frost unless I stop them somehow. One more trip with the soapy water should pretty well take care of it.
Otherwise things are looking good. I posted a photo of the first squash harvest yesterday. Another zucchini arrived yesterday and more will be ready tomorrow. Hot peppers are blooming, tomatoes are producing green fruit furiously though none have ripened yet, beans and snow peas are blooming and starting to set fruit. I need to thin the lettuce and beets again, and use some basil before it grows into a tree.
Also debugging a new Linux installation. I emptied out my FreeBSD partition at home and loaded Wolvix into it. Since Wolvix is Slackware based, I could just add soft links to many files and applications on my existing Slackware 10.2 partition and they are working just fine. Wolvix Hunter is Slackware 11, with a v2.6 kernel, so it's a nice step up using a fairly simple install. Did the same to my desktop machine at work this morning, cleaning out the 8 Gb Windows XP partition to make way for Wolvix. I'm going to try using Wolvix exclusively for a while and see if I should just replace my older Slackware entirely. So far, it seems just fine, with the advantage of the newer kernel and a new improved version of XFCE. Besides, the pawprints and howling wolf logo are so appropriate for furry use. ;p
After repeating this process on two consecutive days, there are only a dozen or so beetles on the leaves tonight. There won't be new ones born until next year, and these are lame ducks who have already laid their eggs as I understand it, but they'll go on munching up my garden until the frost unless I stop them somehow. One more trip with the soapy water should pretty well take care of it.
Otherwise things are looking good. I posted a photo of the first squash harvest yesterday. Another zucchini arrived yesterday and more will be ready tomorrow. Hot peppers are blooming, tomatoes are producing green fruit furiously though none have ripened yet, beans and snow peas are blooming and starting to set fruit. I need to thin the lettuce and beets again, and use some basil before it grows into a tree.
Also debugging a new Linux installation. I emptied out my FreeBSD partition at home and loaded Wolvix into it. Since Wolvix is Slackware based, I could just add soft links to many files and applications on my existing Slackware 10.2 partition and they are working just fine. Wolvix Hunter is Slackware 11, with a v2.6 kernel, so it's a nice step up using a fairly simple install. Did the same to my desktop machine at work this morning, cleaning out the 8 Gb Windows XP partition to make way for Wolvix. I'm going to try using Wolvix exclusively for a while and see if I should just replace my older Slackware entirely. So far, it seems just fine, with the advantage of the newer kernel and a new improved version of XFCE. Besides, the pawprints and howling wolf logo are so appropriate for furry use. ;p
