YORKTON - Thank you to all our gardening friends who came out to the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society’s Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Show last week at the Parkland Mall. A great time was had by all who attended: it was a time to visit with fellow gardeners, and look at a variety of displays. The show has changed over the years; some of you may remember the large shows, with enough entries to fill an entire hall! Those shows took an incredible amount of work, both in the garden beforehand and during show time.
Gardening has also changed. While there may not be many gardeners with huge gardens that can supply entries in ever veggie, fruit of flower category from A to Z, gardeners have their favorite plants and love to share the beauty of them with others. We all learn from each other!
Bouquets of thanks go out to the members of the Hort Society who brought entries of any kind, helped set up, helped with coffee duty, played hosts to our guests, and helped take the show down at the end of the day. The show could not happen without your support, thank you everyone! A big bouquet of thanks also goes to our friends at the Parkland Mall, our friends at McDonald’s,and our friends at YTW who all play such a big role in the success of our show. Thank you everyone, it was a fun day!
Now, on to other garden matters. What bugs you? As all gardeners know, there is always something that can bug us, so let’s chat for a moment about sap beetles. Have you ever had them, potentially, in your garden? Here is what we learned about them.
They were a first for us. We picked some raspberries. There were some over-ripe raspberries on the plants since we were away for a bit and missed a couple pickings. But when we started to clean the raspberries, there were a few small beetles in the bottom of the bowl. New to us, so time for some homework!
From reading up on these little critters, we think they might be sap beetles. Sap beetles are small, about one-eighth to one-quarter inch in size, and oval in shape. These beetles like fruits that are over-ripe or decomposing, but they are also fond of corn, tomatoes, melons, and strawberries.
If we see them how do we get rid of them? We should start watching for them in early to mid-July, and be diligent to remove any over-ripe fruits or vegetables. We can either bury the fruit or veg, or throw it away, but we need to be sure that we don’t leave it laying around as a buffet for the beetles. They won’t hang around if their food-source is gone. I read that pesticides don’t work that well on these beetles, and we don’t want to use them anyway on things that we will be consuming. Beetles appear at harvest and feed on damaged, overripe, or decomposing fruits and vegetables.
This is interesting, because we also noticed holes in our zinnia leaves, and they are planted close to the raspberries. Inspection of the zinnias did not reveal any bugs at all, like aphids, but some leaves did look “skeletonized”, with only the main spines of the leaf intact, so one article suggested that this could be beetle damage.
Are they one and the same culprits? Time will tell, but now that we are aware of the problem, we will be more vigilant and see if we can discover what is causing the damage.
You might want to check your gardens, too!
Thank you to our friends at YTW for their great work. Gardeners, visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca, and have a wonderful week!
