What have you done today in the Garden?

Still cleaning up after the hurricane.

Also dealing with Golden Digger Wasps. They are destroying out brick terrace.

 

It's just one natural challenge after another isn't it.
I would like to see piccies of those golden digger wasps. We have something similar over here.
Here's wishing you strength dealing with those burrowers.

 

I found two more potatoes with a couple teeth scrapes out of it. The last three will bags will harvested tomorrow. I have my watermelons in slings (my granddaughter's old leggings) and I will harvest my first one tomorrow.

 

A lot of rearranging of the deck chairs, metaphorically. I am trying to find the right flow in the kitchen garden, and get the plants in their optimal locations. At least I got all the starts planted!! (Well, except for the bush beans, who aren't old enough yet.)

 

Cayuga, like all except the poison ivy.
Spector, I love your dogs!
No gardening today. I'm resting.

 

I got into the far corner of the garden. I'd finished and done, came indoors and had my second shower of the day by noon.
We have a supposedly black bamboo behind the pagoda that likes to grow out sideways rather than upwards. It doesn't spread, just sends out a lot of thin foliage. if I don't remove some of it, it obscures the spotlight that shines up the back of the pagoda.

So I stripped a lot of it off. I have a wire around it about four feet up to stop the top spreading or flopping over. It must be twenty years old





I attached another wire from the top of the corner post to the top of the post next to the tea-house, just for good measure, these stop our bamboo forest against the back fence from falling forward.







The canopy is huge and without the wires if the wind got at it it'd be a real problem. You can't actually see them.
It's a constant battle to keep on top of the fallen leaves each year. They don't rot, I just have to vac them up, those I can get at.

Our three ornamental quinces on the side fence are producing a lot of fruit as usual. There'll be over 100 fruits.
I never do anything with them. They're just a pain to pick up and put in the bin each year.

 

Here's some photos of Golden Digger Wasps.

Above are two shots of Golden Digger Wasps. Can you see them? They move about a lot, so it was hard to catch them, let alone enlarge the frame so you could see them better. They are actually a lot bigger than they look in the photos.... At least an inch long. They are solitary wasps and non- aggressive. We have never been stung by one, even though our pool deck becomes their nursery every July- August.

I have an ambivalent relationship with them: they are good pollinators, and rid my perennial
garden of all kinds of insects, & like I said, they are surprisingly gentle. But, oh my!! This year they have taken over 3/4 of the pool deck and have moved to our front walk as well! They make a mess, digging holes in the sand between the bricks, undermining the bricks and strewing sand everywhere. Even in the pool.

I have begin covering the brick terraces with whatever I have:. Tarps, row covers, flattened cardboard boxes. Even beach towels and two yoga mats. I wish I had a photo of all that. It looked ridiculous.

Above all this were the ladies, swarming about, clearly wondering how to find their priceless nursery holes in which to lay their eggs & stuff with nursery food (paralyzed insects).

They seem to have finally given up. So I am gradually pulling up the tarps and beach towels and trying to refill the holes. It's going to take me days.

@Sjoerd you said you had something similar in the Netherlands. Are yours like what I have shown?
Does anyone else have these wasps?

 

we have dirt daubers that do the same thing ! not sure what the correct name is ! non agressive little critters that just flit about !

 

Thanks for your piccies of the gold-digger wasps. They make quite a mess, don't they. Your ones do not resemble ours at all. Ours are much stubbier and thicker...but the mess they can make is just as bad. I did not put a bed of sand under the couple of paved garden paths that we have, it was way more work to lay the tiles on the soil, so perhaps it is why we do not have them in the flower garden. It was alarming to read that they were flicking their diggings into your pool. Gadzooks !! It is a pity that you have to lay all manner of things on your lovely brick walking paths, but must needs be, eh?

I have seen our wasps digging outside various public places here and there. Here is a foto taken off Wikipedia of our zandbij:

 

Container tomatoes were sacrificed today. Two were pretty much done for the season and one (Ruby's German Green) never gave me a single tomato, so I had the last laugh today as I stuffed it in the compost bin. (Contrarily, the same variety planted out in the garden is going gangbusters.) I am debating whether to repot something into the emptied containers (well, already put a zucchini in one) or just let them sit with a nice pile of rotting compost on them until next year.

 

Spector. are you in California?

 

Yes, in the north/central area.

 

Harvested courgettes, two bean sorts and sweet peas for at home. Also watered in the greenhouse.
I discovered that the bin liner that I was keeping some old frames in to melt for the wax was full of wax moth larvae. What an absolute mess this was, and not something that I was looking forward to sorting in this heat. Bah ! It took me almost an hour.
Further, I fed the birdies and refreshed their bird baths.

Then back home to take a shower and hang-out on the balcony.
The Bride takes a nap now and I shall wake her with tea and bikkies very soon.

 

Yesterday, I transplanted my mini-roses out of what I am now calling the "kitchen/transition" garden and next to my pasture fence to make room for more veggies in there. I repotted my bell pepper and basil. I am hoping to save both over the winter by bringing them inside. I am starting a small water garden as well, moving some of my pond plants closer to the house and adding a couple for interest. I have parrots feather and horsetail reed growing in there now, as well as an unidentified lotus (I think), but I added arrowhead (edible kind) and a cattail rhizome, as well as a small pot of decorative grass. (I had to pot it because I made the mistake of putting it out in the pond with no pot and it went "kudzu" on me.)

I need to get out into the main garden and do some major clean-up out there, because the other night, when I was out checking on a transplant, I startled a rattlesnake out there (or it startled me, or mutual startling happening). It was too dark to see where it was, so I had to move away based on where the buzz was coming from, and of course, I was out there in shower shoes. I think it has become far too comfortable for critters to hide out there, because I usually don't try to trek too far into the masses of tomato plants, overgrown lavender, and blackberry bushes that have taken over. The asparagus bed is right next to the gate, so that is often as far as I get.

Working through 98F+ weather, unfortunately, so there is a lot of 15-20 minutes of work followed by half an hour in the house, drinking water and trying to rehydrate. It took me most of the day to transplant the roses, because the ground (which is mostly clay) was baked into solid rock.

 

We had rain yesterday. I love thunder storms. Growing up in Washington state we had very few, but I still loved them, when they came. In Texas we had them all the time, I taught my granddaughter to watch them. We'd turn off the lights (at night) and lay down so she'd fall asleep watching the light "show". I had a friend, in grade school, who was deathly afraid of thunder storms, so I wanted to make sure my granddaughter wasn't like that.
It's a little cooler today, I'm going to go set up my back garden (where the pickles were) and plant a row of beets. I'm looking for heirloom cabbage and parsnip seeds and I'll try planting one or two cabbage plants and a row of parsnips. So now my question is; do I get hollow crown? What does that even mean? This is my first time planting parsnips....or cabbage.
Cayuga, the wings on that wasp are very pretty. Mart I have a couple mud dauber nests. Once they're abandoned they're great for a science table in the classroom. I had those, cotton, and a bird's nest. The kids loved it.