MOZZIE ALERT
Check your ponds, tubs and pools, not for wasps, but mosquitoes – the larvae, not the parents. Still water is home right now to the wriggling larval form of the mosquito and you’ll see them breaking the surface of the water in order to breathe through what seems to be their rear ends. Left to mature, the wrigglers will metamorphose into flying, adult mosquitoes and do all they can to make your life a misery. Raise frogs to eat the humming, blood-sucking parent mosquitoes, or pour a little detergent onto the surface of the water to block up the breathing apparatus of the larvae. Mean I know, but so’s the whine of a hungry mosquito, heard as you are trying to drop off to sleep! – Robert Guyton
NET YOUR BRASSICAS
There are many approaches to beating cabbage white butterflies at their game laying eggs on your cabbages, cauli, broccoli and kale, but none are perfect, save netting. You can’t go wrong with a well placed, well timed, unbreachable net that’s fine enough to keep white butterflies off the leaves of your brassica collection. You need to make sure the net is lifted clear of the plants; use hoops of wire, alkathene or bamboo to
KEEP TABS ON YOUR FRUIT TREES
Especially note the success or otherwise of pollination across your garden or orchard. It’s very useful to track, year by year, of how climate; wind, rainfall, temperature and other impacting elements, make the fruiting season a good or bad one. Catering for frosts because you’ve noted a yearly pattern can save a whole crop from loss. Take especial note of the presence of bees and other pollinating insects and see if you can determine where they came from and how they got to your garden. If there’s a problem with poor pollination, you could formulate a plan for better results next year, by for example, talking to a bee keeper and arranging some temporary hives for your neighbourhood. – Robert Guyton
ADD LEGUMES TO YOUR GARDEN
There are many beautiful leguminous plants that could add value greater than their beauty to your garden. Trees such as kowhai, kakabeak, tree lucerne and laburnum do as all legumes do – capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and store it in your soil for sharing later on. Legumes (and remember that peas and beans are included in this family) feed the plants around them, sometimes when they expire, as with annuals, but often gradually as their roots reform. A bonus with most leguminous trees and shrubs is that kereru will travel big distances to feast on their leaf tips and flowers, their favourite being the broom and gorse so disliked in the agricultural world. I don’t suggest you plant those, but legumes like them would do very nicely indeed.