Cup day

Melbourne Cup Day, is a special public holiday in this state, gazetted so  all good veggie gardeners can plant their tomatoes out.  

Well I am a bit ahead this year as the Spring has been mild and the frosts finished.  My tommies have been in for about ten days and are looking gooooood!  So I will have to find other things to do.

Over at the  Fat Bear Farm blog they have had success combatting caterpillars on their broccoli by sprinkling diatomaceous earth (DE).  

Coincidentally, yesterday I was wondering if DE would help around my strawberries to beat the millipedes and shield bugs that ruined my crop last year.  

Is there anything worse than picking a big, red, juicy strawberry and then turning it over to find it hollowed out by a millipede?  Yes... finding half a millipede in the big, red, juicy strawberry you have just taken a bite from.

Don't start me on shield bugs...they are copulating everywhere I look!  Soon there will hundreds and thousands of their progeny, skittering about and clustering on ripe fruit, sucking the moisture out of it.

Have your fun boys and girls...DE is on the way.

The cleverness of strawberries

Have you ever noticed how strawberry flowers stretch up way above the foliage?

The pollinators find the flowers and get to work.

Did you notice the raggy butterfly at the top right corner?

As the fruit develops, its weight makes the stalk begin to bend.  The last flowers on the stalk still stick up above the leaves...just. 

Once all the flowers are pollinated and the fruit is forming, the entire stalk disappears below the foliage where the birds can't see it.  

They think the gardener can't see them either.

That is why we must ferret among the leaves to check if their are any ripe ones.   

Something that worked

Way back in April I blogged about planting these strawberries.  As mulch I used an old woolen blanket, cutting a cross where I wanted to plant. The straw in the photo blew away.  However, the blanket is still there but lost under the strawberries. 

I would definitely do this again. The blanket has kept the weeds down and I have only had to pull one or two that grew through the holes, right next to strawberries.  The blanket allows both water and air through to the soil below and the plants have flourished.