This was spotted on the trails.

Started a cactus garden. Hopefully it does well. Growing food for the tortoises.

Mara des Bois 🍓

This is the only day-neutral garden strawberry that I recommend (Fragaria x ananassa).

Alpine strawberries are also quite good (Fragaria vesca), but Mara des Bois is more productive and it does not have the bitter seeds.

I made redbud syrup. So yesterday after working in the garden I made some organic lemonade and used the syrup. 😋
Divine! 🍋💛

This is one of my more unconventional grafts, and much of what you see here is less than ideal. It was not as dormant as it should have been, since I decided to collect this one at the last minute, and the cut end is generally wrapped to prevent a loss of moisture. In this case, it was already dry so I didn't bother, but that might have been a mistake. The scionwood may also be a little too thick for a branch that size, considering I used a bark graft, and I had to use old wood with flowering buds, because the source did not grow last year. All of its energy went towards production.

The two that I grafted were done close to 3 weeks ago, and they haven't grown since. I am not sure if this is a significant problem though, since I have had a few apples and pears take over a month before they showed any signs of life, but I believe those were fully dormant when they were used. Fortunately, pears are quite forgiving. They rarely fail on me, and I have gotten away with much worse, so hopefully it works out.

I will be trying Bacillus thuringiensis galleriae this year as a possible method of control for Japanese beetles, but this bacterium can be used against other pests, too. There aren't many reviews on it, but it supposedly worked for enough people to be worth a try. It seems that not everyone sees positive results though, but who knows what's going on there.

When individual oils were used, wintergreen and peppermint were the most effective at deterring Japanese beetles in this study, but if we include the results of those that were combined, wintergreen and ginger outperformed the rest. However, it mentioned in the discussion that you should not spray the foliage with certain concentrations of essential oils, such as what they used (1ml undiluted), because it could severely damage the leaves. Instead, it says that if you oil the mulch that surrounds the plant, it "might" help deter them, but this method was not tested in the study. They were testing out the oil's effect on PEG attractants, so it was placed within another wafer positioned on the trap. Unfortunately, I have not seen any follow up studies on this, so their recommendation is quite experimental.