Wildlife in My Garden

Cutter bees are out now. They live inside the bark of our coyote fences and you can tell they've been out and about in the garden by their meticulously circular eating habits. The foliage of my beautiful peony has been chomped in neat, perfect circles.

Cutter bees eat perfectly round holes

They are beneficial pollinators and they don't really do much damage to the whole plant, although sometimes they can make the foliage look pretty ragged. But the peony will be fine and the cutter bees are a good sign.

Not so good is the light gray speckling you can barely see on the peony leaves: powdery mildew, a common fungus, is developing. It's been so darn windy and dry and the spores are wind driven and I'm seeing powdery mildew on several plants.

This should be treated to limit the spread. Powdery mildew defaces plants and can weaken them. The time tested treatment is copper fungicide, called Bordeaux mix.

Organic?? It's toxic metals - copper & lime

In the 1860s a vintner in Bordeaux, France was spraying his grapevines with a copper and lime mix to make them taste bad. Why would he do that? He coated vines nearest the roads to deter passersby from eating the grapes. Make them looked sprayed and taste awful and stop grape theft! The big discovery was that copper and lime also stopped downy mildew. 

A French botanist saw this, noted that the untreated vines furthest from the road were suffering from fungus blight but the ones near the road were not, and the rest is history -- he developed the copper and lime treatment we use today on powdery mildew in our gardens.

I love this kind of history. Accidental discoveries, still used today. Like penicillin.

The rabbit is back. Not the same one from previous years, but a new one is plaguing my front garden. 

Wascally wabbit -- shoo!

An entire sedum that had been growing beautifully has been sheared to the ground, and a lovely little orange globemallow that I had been babying is gone too. 

Bad Rabbit uses the same diagonal route inherited from his predecessors; he hops across the street, checks out my plants, zigs across the driveway and out into the field and up the hill, always the same route, always munching good stuff as he goes. 

So the Havahart trap is back out, baited with lettuce that turns to thin papery crisps in an hour in our dry winds. 

I need to get some carrots. Or would Bordeaux mix work?