Caterpillars are Coming

 

 

 

 

We warned you in an earlier post to be on your guard against invaders who believe they have more right than you to the fresh and juicy produce you’ve so lovingly cultivated and nurtured, and here’s the proof. 

We can see a caterpillar cunningly camouflaged on this plant by mimicking the curve of the stem while leeching the nutrients out of the flower.

 

 

 

But read on for a sinister spectral story of creepy crawlies that’s almost as shocking.

 

We took a morning off from our arduous regime of sowing, growing, hoeing and mowing, seeding, feeding and weeding at the USG-Plot to bring you some bang up to date spooktastic news from Northants of a caterstrophic spectacle.

 

If this were April Fools’ Day or Halloween you could be forgiven for thinking that you were being pranked but this is an actual thing which looks like an ectoplasmic paranormal phenomena but is actually a horticultural horror.

 

 

 

The caterpillars of someone called an Ermine Moth have colonised a line of 15 erstwhile cherry trees. 

 

 

 

These caterpillars produce some kind of excessive cohesive webbing, in their cycle to pupate, which clings around the tree like a giant surgical stocking, while the hundreds of thousands of little caterpillars, about an inch long, are very busy going about their activities. 

 

 

   

 

 

The web is a layer of protection for themselves and their food to insulate against predators. 

 

 

 

 

   

There are so many of them that they’re even covering the ground in a continuous web spreading between the trees. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The trees are 100% defoliated and appear sucked dry of all forms of life, except when you look closer they are writhing.  The denuded trees are ghostly white and from a distance appear as though they’re frost covered or doused in talcum powder. 

 

This is a catertasrophy for the trees which will now be felled to eradicate the caterpillars and stop future infestations.   

 

   

 

 

Ghostly

 

 

   

 

 

Eerie                                   

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

Supernatural Phantasmal

 

 

 

   

 

 

Bush Tucker Trial

Caterpillar Style

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terrifically

Terrifying Truncated TuTu

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

You’ve gotta' be a special kind of someone to pull off the surgical stocking look and these guys, I’m afraid, are no shoo-in. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scary Stuff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

This web’s been damaged by interfering sightseers. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All branches completely covered in webbing and a little catercluster dangling at the end of each branch. 

 

That’s times thousands and thousands of branches. 

 

(This is actually worse than when my second husband’s family all came round one Christmas; laughing and shrieking and enjoying themselves – that was the former in-laws that were “laughing and shrieking” - we cannot accurately relate that these tiny creatures were known to be caterwauling).   

How Grows It? (June) The Sequel

 

 

A week past the end of May; step into June and suddenly The Big Chill is over and it's all Mr Blue Sky.

The sun has got his hat on,

hip, hip, hip, hip, hurray.

 

Everything’s suddenly pushed on through a major growth spurt and all are looking proper lush.

 

The cherry tomatoes are putting on some good growth now.  When planting your young plants and can put them quite deep into the soil.  If you include the first pair of leaves below the compost these leaves will actually develop as a root system and act as anchors to stabilise the plant(s) and stop them rocking about in any high winds. 

 

Monty revealed his own plants from the Tomato Trial on Gardeners’ World last week and for the benefit of being a couple of weeks ahead of ours', and having enjoyed more time inside, they are looking in decidedly better nick than these. 

Anyway, we’ve planted out the only 3 we got (from the original six seeds) into their final position and they are now, finally, beginning to grow away. 

Best keep an eye on them.

 

The runners, though they took a proper battering from the rain, hail and winds are really robust and have put on the best growth, which they usually tend to do, in fact we have a bit of a beanstalk situation.

You can almost see them running up the poles – so we should have plenty of flowers to show, for both these and the tomatoes by the next diary post.

 

The deep troughs we planted as an afterthought with carrots, radish and a few spring onions.  The radishes are firing up a storm, but a word of caution here as radish can be all leafy lovelies on the top to lull you into a false sense of security, but very little development below.  So you pull them, expecting a scrumptiously bulbous radish underneath and all you get is a mangy skinny root. 

 

It might be best to gloss over the carrots and spring onions as when peering into the tubs it’s hard to distinguish between the veg and the weeds that have voraciously appeared.  We don’t want to be hoiking anything out for fear of grabbing the wrong stalk and losing some of the miniscule crop.  This has kind of backfired as we thought it was a pretty inspired use of the deep pots to utilise them for a flower/veg combo but it’s starting to look remarkably like dandelion salad for tea sometime soon.

 

We’ve got a couple of courgettes too.  Not had a lot of luck with these in the past as they have a male/female flower and pollination system.  However, last time this wasn’t the problem as the fruit developed, it just failed to mature and rotted off on the plant.  Anyway it’s worth growing them if just for the flowers which are delicious to look at and also good to eat, so it's win win - worth giving it a go. 

 

OK you guys scootch in. 

 

Huddle up now because I want to say a big "THANK YOU". 

 

What? 

 

"Thank you" to all of you our loyal readers; for turning up every week to offer us your backing and messages of support for our efforts here? 

 

Noooooo, silly; thank you to those exquisite little cut-and-come-again micro lettuces who grow, you chop them off at the knees and then they just go right ahead and grow all over again.  They just reinvigorate and rejuvenate the hell out of themselves and in next to no time you have another crop to harvest all over again and again and ………………………
well you get the idea there.

 

Lovin’ your work my little lettuce compadres.  

 

These are £1 each from Lidl – Sainsbury’s are doing some too at the same price, but a smaller pack size.  You could if you like replant them into a larger home to give the root system a chance for development.

 

These are our own micro lettuce and chard.

Looks like maybe something else self seeded in there too????

How Grows It? (June)

 

 

Here comes the rain again

Falling on my head like a memory

Falling on my head like a .............................. 

Hhmmm, wonder if Annie Lennox had advance warning of what May 2015 would be like when she sang that?  It seems likely as on the last day of the month the weather forecaster told us May had been:

• wetter than average,
• cooler than average and
• below average level of sunshine

 

To be fair I could have saved them a salary and told them that as there’s been some intermittent sunshine but the predominating climactic feature is a bitter chill.  Immediately the sun disappears momentarily behind a cloud the temperature dips.  Sunlight is so crucial to the progression of the our delicate seedlings, indeed in bringing on all the plants, but the vegetables particularly need warmth at this stage to encourage them so they’ll be healthy and fruit well in the months to come.  It's vital to their development and they'll suffer if deprived of optimum growing conditions at this stage of cultivation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nearly lunchtime and menacing skies above Northants makes it look and feel a lot more like Doomsday than Thursday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In all honesty we were beginning to despair of losing most or all of the mini plantlets we were so devotedly trying to protect, and then, halfway through May we had a succession of violent hail storms which left ice all around and in and among the seedlings.  Though the weather hindered growth, and progress was obdurately slow the report from the affray is that casualties were light and we didn't sustain any heavy losses.

 

The temperature was so low that the residual hail had failed to melt, even an hour later. 

 

Giving some indication of how slowly and irresolutely reluctant the temperature is to rise so far this spring/early summer.  Let’s hope for something better in the months ahead.

 

 

Tender young salad crops with hail stone ice deposits.

 

Summer bedding, 
cucumbers and runners addled by 78mph winds. 

Not what they signed up for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, not to be despondent in the face of adversity and as the end of May is always our benchmark for getting the hardened off seedlings and any tender bedding outside, we got on and planted up the second border. 

 

 

 

 

Our USG-Plot ‘Corporation Border’, all with summer bedding to create maximum impact in the shortest time. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The colourful clang of jangling annuals it has to be said are not our usual weapon of choice, in fact far from it.  Previously we’ve always intrepidly searched out unusually rare and surprising perennial specimens.  
 

However, what we’re using here are a mixture of the plants we raised ourselves from seed, together with a couple of back-up cells packs of bedding plus a few begonias from corms. 

These are all interspersed with a random scattering of seeds which mimic the now established cosmos, cornflowers and zinnias that we’ve already brought on. 

The idea is that as their flowering life comes to an end, we should get a succession of secondary showings as the newly sown young seeds, now planted directly into the ground, should by then be sufficiently developed to pick up the slack. 

Or, a horticultural Mexican Wave.

 

 

We've even left some gaps here for the Zinnias which are showing stubbornly slow advancement (but they are known to be temperamental). 

 

The vacant space here denoted by the empty pot.

 

We used our 'dibber' to locate some of the seeds exactly where we want them


If you want your seeds or tiny bulbs (ie: snowdrops) more precisely placed you could get one of these or alternatively, if you have fingers, or know someone who does, you could ask to borrow those.

 

 

 

It's such a temptation to overspend on plants and end up inundated with far too many, so we're doggedly determined to avoid this mistake here this year and manage our simple little garden as cheaply and efficiently as possible.  

So, with this stratagem firmly set as our default mind-set we’ve still managed to pick up a few surplus to requirements, but utterly gorgeous Lupins and some extraneous other oddments from 'The Plant Man' a fantastic little family run nursery that we’ve discovered right here on our doorstep, too close and way too tempting but with such fantastic prices and selection it'd be silly not to.   www.theplantman.net

 

 

 

 

To be honest we're impatient to stop showing plant labels and can't wait until we can start depicting an ocean of colour from our own endeavours, but that's not going to happen for a couple of months at least. 

But in the meantime, here's one youngster struggling to put on a show. 

 

And so to the sickly clematis of which we reported at the end of last month. Thank you for all your caring and compassionate messages of support, and yes it did rally. 

Although it sustained some further trauma later when wind damage whipped out the main stem. 


Thus, although appearing a little foreshortened in the picture (right) it's now doing well.  We delayed the planting of it to its final destination so as not to engender further shock or encourage ‘wilt’ and once it had put on some keen growth we introduced it to its forever home, where it's acclimatising nicely. 

 

As May has been so long, eventful and fraught with hardship I think we'll say "so long" for now and review how the vegetables are all doing in the next post.

No one said it was going to be easy.