Permaculture – Beautiful Chaos

Plum moth maggots (Grapholita funebrana) in almost all of our plum fruit

2 years after planting our plum trees, they are carrying fruit nicely, but they are full with maggots of the plum moth

2 years ago we planted a lot of fruit trees (different varieties of apple, pear and plum). Some of them already carried some fruit last year, but a lot more trees where carrying fruit this year. Most trees actually blossomed this spring, but due to the wetter conditions not all where pollinated. This spring was cold, wet and windy, which is not ideal for bees to fly around, collect nectar and pollinate along the way. That’s why we where so happy to see different trees building fruit, the greater the disappointment seeing fruit starting to fall.

When the fruit was still small I know fruit trees tent to drop some of there fruit, so I did not think much about that. By the time August came more and more fruit started to fall and we found all of the fruit having a maggot inside. Especially striking where all of the plum variety trees. Some of the trees where packed with fruit, but a lot of fruit started falling to the ground.

From the early varieties we where able to eat some of the fruit directly from the tree, but I checked all for maggots before eating. More and more fruit started to fall and at one point we just harvested all of the fruit of the trees, even if it was not ripe yet.

While cleaning them I found a few that where kind off ripe enough for fresh eating, about half of the plums I trough away because they had maggots in them. With the other half I made plum sauce, where I did at a little sugar, since most of the fruit was still a bit sour.

Because of the maggot problem I had actually purchased plums to can for winter. If we did not had this much maggots, we would have had enough fruit from our own trees.

After researching in the internet I learned that the fruit falling in the spring is already due to maggots and we need to collect all of the fruit that falls to the ground to lower the maggot pressure. The plum moth produces at least 2 generations in our region, so if we can reduce the maggots by removing the first fruit that is dropped, we should clearly have fewer maggots by the time the fruit ripens.

Another help against the maggots in our fruit are bats, since they eat the moth’s. In the past years we had seen only 2, but recently we have noticed 6 bats flying around. Hopefully they will help reducing the general moth pressure around our trees. I do not mind losing some of the fruit, to keep the predators’ around, but almost all is a bit hard.

Our task for winter and next season to reduce the maggot problem is checking if we can find any cocoons underneath the plum trees (winter job) and picking up and removing any fruit that falls to the ground in the new season. Hopefully next year we can actually use the fruit from our trees instead of purchasing fruit.

Garden thoughts from 2024 for the new garden season 2025

Notes and change ideas for the next garden season

This post will be amended and expanded as the ongoing garden season progresses

Tomatoes

After this year is turning out to be a disaster when it comes to tomato plants, I am probably not going to do any tomatoes next year, or maybe a few placed on a very windy and some what shady spot. The tomato plants should hardly make any work, since it is so questionable if we could harvest any tomatoes at all.

Garden 2

In our garden 2 we are somewhat giving up due to the so invasive and all overtaking couch grass, that we are going to remove almost all of the garden beds where there are no fruit trees in. The garden beds with fruit trees are going to be filled with perennial plants, so there would be little to no space for the couch grass, suffocating it this way.

We will be filling the space with a lot of strawberry plants, other berry plants and flower bushes and plants.

We will be keeping a garden bed with no fruit trees to fill with raspberries, because, I think, these are to overtaking to be planted with fruit trees. I am afraid they would suffocate the trees after a few years. And another garden bed with no fruit trees will be kept, because there are perennial plants in there already. And my daughter’s garden bed without fruit trees will be kept since that is already very full with raspberries and there is a currant plant in there as well.

This way there will be less garden beds we need to tent to, in terms of pulling out the grass, and we will be able to mow most of the garden with the lawn mower tractor, which saves a lot of time.

Taking out those mentioned garden beds will also give room to extent the small garden patch we have in this garden. This small garden patch is being taken over by some type of rhizome grass, which we will be rotary tilling after harvesting. We will have to watch this field closely and after the grass starts growing again we will be pulling it out (which should be easy after the rotary tilling) and probably rotary till a few more times with some time in between to get a usable garden patch again. We will also add some compost in the spring.

Notes, not related to a specific garden

I watched a garden tour video from someone who had started dahlia’s from seed. She hat so many different and so beautiful dahlia’s that I would like to try that next year.

Is a planter table the solution against the couch grass?

Couch grass everywhere, so we experiment with growing vegetables out of reach of the couch grass.

Well, if the ground is full of couch grass, what better solution is there to avoid it, than raising the “garden”. Our solution looks like this.

A wooden planter table with a sturdy trellis with a lot of plants growing in it, in front of a beautiful garden

My husband and son build me 2 of these planter tables to try them out this growing season.

We filled them by starting with a good layer of sheep wool to store moisture and prevent soil from falling out trough slits between the boards. Next came a good layer of woodchips followed by a good layer of composted cow manure. After sowing we finished the bed of with a layer of woodchips that came out of the chicken coop. These woodchips are already partially breaking down and bring there own nitrogen (in form of chicken poop) they need for the ongoing decomposing process.

The compost we used was very dry, which I do not mind while sowing, but after sowing a good watering was need and after covering the compost with the woodchips the water had the change to really soak into the compost. Since this growing season is a ratter rainy one I did not have to tent much to the planter tables.

Since I have 2 planter tables I wanted to do a little experiment. I had seen someone use a tarp with the black side up to trap moisture and warmth underneath to help carrots germinate. So I covered one of the planter tables with a thick black foil for a few days. After 3 days I took of the foil because a few sprouts where visible.

A little sprout peaking up from underneath woodchips

Shortly after taking of the foil the sprouts where gone though, but it did not take long for other things to sprout. After a few weeks some things I had sown where slightly earlier in the planter table that had the foil as in the planter table that did not had the foil. A remarkable difference was with the pumpkin, of which I had put one seed in each planter table. Both actually sprouted, but the one in the planter table with the foil was weeks earlier than the one without the foil.

Pumpkin sprout with woodchips at its feet

Since the spring was so cold it took a while before things started to grow, but it looked promising by the time summer came.

After that some things started to turn. Every variety that belongs to the Brassicaceae started to get damages on there leafs. It is from some kind of very small bugs that also go on the cabbages and the mustard every year. The white radishes also started to look wilted, so I harvested these. Some white radishes where just big enough to prepare to eat, but others where still so small that we fed them to our hair. I found very tiny white caterpillars with a black head in the root of the white radishes. The reason they where wilted.

After cleaning out the planter tables of everything that did not look good, a lot of room came free. I’m thinking of sowing some more lettuces there, since these seem to do well in the planter table. Beside the lettuces, the runner beans are doing well also.

A runner bean with beautiful red flowers climbing towards the trellis

Some herbs and flowers came up as well. The red beets looked promising, but are not building any bulbs, but that must be the wetter, since they are not building bulbs in other parts of the garden as well (or maybe I am too inpatient). The peas looked promising, but before it was time to harvest they started to wilt and die. Maybe that was from the sudden heat, as I have heard they do not like heat. The carrots sprouted, but do not really seem to grow much yet.

Surprisingly a volunteer tomato emerged between other plants. I have no idea how that seed ended up there.

A volunteer tomato emerging from between other plants

Well, I do not want to go on about the different plants and I do not want to jump into any conclusions. I am just going to try and fill in the empty spots with things that do grow in the planter tables this growing season and try all the different things again next year.

Some pictures from middle of June