Where the allium grows..

...is where we have a trio of young lavender plants, but we won't see any flowers until well into the summer. This is the first time that we've ever set allium bulbs into the ground and I must say that they make the coolest-looking blooms.

I held off on updating with our first harvest of the year as I believe the snow peas could use a couple more days in the sun. The garden has been growing in the direction that I had hoped for, and it has given me such a good feeling to be working outside more every day. Although the slugs and snails were trying my patience, daily "gastropod foraging" with chopsticks and a container of cheap champagne won me the first round. Then, after a brief period of heavy rain, they were out again and I hit 'em with killer slug bait. Nasty stuff, and nastier to see the lethal results, but natural methods simply weren't enough to win the war.

On the peach leaf curl problem, we removed all of the diseased leaves and went with using Syllit. We were told that if 80% of the leaves were affected, the chances of saving our peach were slim. Fortunately only 50% of the tree was affected and for now, it seems to be doing better. No serious aphid problem even if the ants still like to hang around despite the sticky fly tape barricades! We have a few tiny peaches and they are actually looking bigger and healthier each day.

This year my green thumb truly made a mark in the herbs department. The borage that I had written about earlier is looking great, and the shiso/perilla plants are giving me more leaves than I can use. The real showstopper is the wild fennel that somehow weathered a tough winter. Not only was it the first plant to start showing green in early spring, but it also reseeded and propagated itself in a 4-foot radius from the original source. And that's without any intervention from me. While I was mowing the lawn today I noticed hundreds of baby fennel seedlings sticking out of the ground. If only the garden pests would chomp on them instead of everything else.

Average daytime temperature: 25°C / 77°F

Doing battle in the garden: you win some, you lose some

Early last month we could never have known that the promising-looking peach pictured above would eventually have something wrong with it, but a reply from a specialist confirmed the bad news. The photo below was taken yesterday at 5½ weeks later and our peach tree is ailing from bolla del pesco, or peach leaf curl as it's known in english gardening circles. The ag specialist says there is hope of saving the tree but chances of a harvest are zero. The advice that he gave was to use a fungicide called Syllit and while I despise resorting to those sort of things, if it means nursing our only peach tree back to a healthy state then Syllit it is.

How ironic for being ready to engage in battle with the aphids (which we won by the way!), yet being wholly unprepared for a fungus. The only question I have about peach leaf curl is if you should remove the sick leaves or not? I have read that you will only further weaken the tree if you remove sick leaves, while the advice on this site here says just the opposite.

Referenced links:
http://www.canr.msu.edu/vanburen/peacurl.htm
http://www.caf.wvu.edu/KEARNEYSVILLE/disease_descriptions/omplfcrl.html
http://www.thegardenhelper.com/peaches.htm
http://www.gardenaction.co.uk/fruit_veg_diary/fruit_veg_mini_project_november_2d_peach.asp

Average daytime temperature: 21°C / 70°F