Getting rid of the grossness...

We are overrun by flies! Urgh!

I even resorted to using flyspray during the week but it didn't make a difference. Probably didn't help that the doors remain open (without screens). Nevermind.

So today my parents came over for a visit and something my stepdad said (totally unrelated to flies!) brought back a strong visual memory of a disgusting contraption that my granddad had outside their house. I visualised a bottle-full of half dead flies. Blech.

Anyway, after questioning further, we got the instructions on how to construct our own - apparently they will attract flies from a wee distance away, so figured even if it was set up down in the garden it may deal to the houseflies too and I wouldn't need to look at it daily (or freaking any visitors out).

I suspect the bottle really needs to be clear (but this was the only one in our recycling bin, so had to do for now) since the flies are attracted to the sunlight when trying to escape out the inverted funnel but can't quite figure it out and fly around until exhausted. For bait, Simon put some sweet stuff in there along with some chicken poo (I know that attracts the flies coz I get assaulted by them when I go down to feed them!). So if this works, we may put another up nearer the house.

Caterpillars attack!

Not quite so dramatic as that yet! This afternoon we were out in the garden and I noticed one of my broccoli plants had a few nibble holes. Upon flipping the leaf over I saw a few tiny caterpillars on it with eggs randomly scattered around. So off they came, squished, eggs, squished and funny spit-like stuff in the centre of the plant flicked off. So around the rest of the plants I went. Only one bed so far had noticeable eggs on a few of the plants but I can see this will be my daily ritual considering I still have the vision of uncared for broccoli's from last year riddled with caterpillars when I came to harvest them.

I constructed some tripods from bamboo for my peas to grow up - unfortunately I wasn't thinking too far ahead when I sowed the seeds - in a row - so kind of overlapped the tripods down the row and I'm sure they'll find their way up anyway.

Codling Moth

Blech - the thought of these burrowing around inside my apples gives me the heebie jeebies.

Every year since we've been in this house (5yrs) our apples (and pears to a lesser degree) have been inundated with codling moth. I've never been too bothered about it and we've just let the fruit fall off and rot (sounds terrible doesn't it!). Remember, when we embarked on this permaculture garden thing back in March when I was planning it all, we had a large line of very tall trees cutting our lower section off from our sights. It was so overgrown with grass that it wasn't usable land unless we upkept it - which we never did!

I hadn't really thought too much about the fruit trees this year with getting everything else up and running, but it's been bugging me (hehe) about how to manage this problem.

In tonight's organics course class I asked the tutor on the best course of action. It's too late in the year to wrap the trunk to stop the caterpillars crawling up the tree (the best time to wrap is in winter and remove it in spring). So, I think I will go on the hunt for some moth traps. They are hung from the trees and baited with pheromones to attract and trap the moths.

Progress on the trench and trough

This was the result of last weekend's efforts. Simon has dug it out all the way down the garden and tomorrow plans on laying the hosing and getting the bath in position. The tap (at ground level) has no pressure, so will just trickle down into the bath. Might need to get us some frogs to eat any mozzies. Or maybe we'll get to see some cool dragonflys on the hunt for mozzies too.

On snail watch...

Well some slimey little creature has been attacking one of my bean plants (strangely, only the one out of many). So Simon went down to the garden last night after dusk with his headtorch on to see who was out there. He found one offender. So he'll go down again tonight and see if there are any more lurking around.