The beasts are out and about

I'm writing this post from a sunny corner of Cowick Garden. It's been another glorious day, however, extremely windy. All the plants are looking a little windswept, probably not a good day for gardening. A good day for hanging out the washing and flying a kite, according to the weather man, but not a good day for planting. However, seeing as tomorrow is back to work, it was either do all the planting today or wait till the weekend. So I decided to hold onto my hat and plant some dill in the vegetable patch, plant a fuscia near the deck (the one we had last year didn't survive the winter) and plant a colourful reddy orange plant called a Georgia Peach!

So, in the vegetable patch we now have rows of marigolds and some rows of dill in an attempt to ward off the aphids. Still no sign of ladybirds in our ladybird tower however we have spotted some ladybirds around the garden so hopefully it won't be long before they set up home. We're also finding more greenfly unfortunately. There are still quite a few on the rosebush and on some of the peas and sweet peas. We've also discovered a large number of caterpillars on the blackberry bush. We never had such a problem with caterpillars last year until we started growing broccoli. (Damn that broccoli!) Looks like there isn't much out there to deter caterpillars, however, you can buy some eco-friendly, non-chemical sprays and we found some specifically for caterpillars on www.greengardener.co.uk. (Thanks very much Sheila for recommending the site.) We'll give that a go when it arrives and in the meantime we are cutting away the badly affected leaves and getting rid of any caterpillars we see.

We also discovered scale insects on the campsis outside the kitchen. Scale insects apparently stick to the branches and leaves on plants and suck all the goodness and nutrients out of the plant until they die. We removed as many of the scale insects as we could by scraping them off the branches (yuk yuk yuk) and then gave the campsis a healthy dose of fertiliser to help it recover after that traumatic experience of being eaten alive.

So it's been quite a battle in Cowick Garden these last few days. Aphids, caterpillars, scale insects, black fly, snails, slugs, it goes on. Can't let your guard down otherwise you are under attack by the beasts! This gardening business is hard work!