Putting the D Back in Codling Moth

I was under the impression that there was a bit of irony at work when someone decided to name my most hated garden pest after a word, “coddle”, which means to treat tenderly; pamper even.

Because I can assure you that I do not want to tenderly stroke the slimy looking back of the codling moth larva.  I do not wish to pamper the frass-producing worms.  In fact, when I think about them, I think of them more as the brown and smelly stuff that fills children’s Pampers. 

I despise the codling moth and everything about it, even its name. 

Photo from Wikipedia

But, of course, I was wrong about the name.  There are two “d’s” in coddle and the codling moth has just one “d”.  If I had to guess, I’d say that the codling moth ate that other “d” just like they do everything else.

A not so quick research project of mine (i.e. a few keystrokes on Google and lots and lots of reading about how hard it is to control these buggers) revealed that the moth earned its name after attacking an old varietyof cooking apples called English Codling apples.  

This picture shows the stark contrast between an apple infested and one that will be infested.

Many of the publications I have consulted report that a bad infestation of the codling moth can reduce a crop by 90%.  In the case of my tree, I’d say that’s been pretty close to accurate.  So, this year the codling moths get an A.  I’m hoping next year that I’ll be able to give them that D they’ve been missing and get the destruction down in the 60% range. 

One day's worth of spoiled fruit picked from the tree and lifted from the ground.

Because I’m trying to garden with as few chemicals as possible (and because chemical control in this case depends almost entirely on exactly correct timing) I plan to combat the codling moths in a variety of ways:

First, I’m removing all of this year’s crop.  I will remove the remaining apples, bag them up, and throw them away.  That should decrease the number of moths that overwinter in my yard.

Hungry?  Me neither.  

Second, I’ll try cardboard banding the trunk of the tree.  The larvae will frequently crawl up and hide in the corrugated ridges of the cardboard so you can remove the cardboard after a few days and throw it away too.

I will try hanging a few pheromone traps to kill the moths and disrupt the mating cycle and I think I will move a bird feeder to a neighboring tree since birds are a natural predator of the codling moth. 

I will also try bagging the apples to prevent them from getting attacked in the first place.  It’s going to look strange having a tree with 200 brown paper lunch bags hanging from it but maybe I can try to convince my daughter that it’s not an apple tree, it’s a Lunch Bag Tree.    

If you have any tips or tricks on how you’ve handled codling moths, I’d love to hear them.  I’ve done a lot of reading on this and it seems like a pretty daunting task which is why I’m not aiming for anywhere near total eradication.  

I need a macro lens for my camera but perhaps you can still make out the worm in the middle of the picture.

Years of Learning

Temperatures in Northern California finally cooled off into the upper 90s making it possible to devote some of my weekend hours to finishing one of the first main projects at my new house.  All that remains of this project is to think of a name for this part of the garden.  Why is that gardeners have a need to assign names? 

I have spent the last decade watching Gardening by the Yard, Yard Crashers and the innumerable P. Allen Smith shows.  I have read garden design books, books about specific types of plants, and books about the lives of gardeners.  I have read, subscribed to, and written blog posts about gardening.  And all that information, all that time and energy has led me to this point.  In my new garden, I feel as if I have to prove that I actually learned something and that I can apply it to my own life.  What good is knowledge otherwise? 

With that in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned and how I applied them to this project:

Lesson – Just Live With it for awhile

I waited a couple months before I even tackled this project.  I stood at the window in the house and just looked at this corner of the yard and wondered what it would look like if I did X, Y, or Z.  I checked the sunlight at different times of day.  I went back to the window and imagined some more.  When it came time to break ground I did one thing at a time and then I stopped and went back to the window and lived it with it some more.  From start to finish, this project took 5 or 6 weeks to complete as a result.    

The view of the new bed from our patio

Lesson – Take your time and do it right

Most of this area was grass.  There was an Aristocrat Pear tree and an Oleander that had to go as well.  I dug all these out by hand and with the help of a new “Mr. Diggy” (heartfelt thanks to Calvin).  Then I put in the drip irrigation lines because nothing non-native will grow here without supplemental watering.  And then I went back to waiting.  I waited for the grass I missed to show itself again and when it did, I dug it out with my hori hori (best garden tool I own).  That left me with a bare patch of dirt for a while and I ached to get it planted, but I knew that if I got ahead of myself I could spend a lifetime weeding unwanted grass and that it would be so much easier to do it now with nothing in the way and nothing to disturb.

Lesson – Curved beds look better

My wife doesn’t often offer up comments on my gardening.  She sees it as my realm.  She’ll comment and compliment when I show things off to her but for the most part she lets me do whatever I want and is learning to trust that I have some kind of vision for things.  But after I carved the outline for this bed she broke from tradition and told me “I like the shape of that new bed.” 

Lesson – Paths don’t have to be made of stone

I’ve always loved stone pathways.  But stone is expensive and it’s labor intensive to install.  Plus, there’s the added and ongoing chore of weeding the cracks between the stones.  This time, I’m letting the lawn be the pathway.  Besides, a green lawn when used as a foil to the rest of the garden can be quite charming. Check out these pictures I added to my "Grass Pathways" ideabook on Houzz.com:

Grass Pathways

Remodeling, decorating, and more ∨

Consider a versatile murphy bed when looking for a guest bed, find home office chairs, and work with a contractor in your area to create a fun yet functional home office.
Share photos of the cabinets and kitchen sink you like with a top kitchen remodeler in your area.

Lesson – Repetition

When I go for a walk or take a drive and notice other people’s gardens I am almost always drawn to the gardens that use repetition in their plants.  There’s something wonderful about a garden filled with ferns or large patches of ornamental grasses.  And yet, when it comes to my own garden I have always wanted to use as many different plants as I could get my hands on.  There are hundreds of Japanese maple cultivars so how in the world is a gardener supposed to live with just one?  But in this case, I really did try to limit my plant selection.  I used mondo grass along the border and punctuated the garden with Japanese blood grass.  From there, I pretty much broke the rules though.  I planted a Baby Blue Spruce, a Snow Fountains Weeping Cherry, a Jubilee blueberry bush, a Mr. Lincoln rose that was given to me last month, and a Black & Blue Sage.  Even along the symmetrical trellises, a natural place for repetition, I failed.  I planted a climbing Iceberg rose on the right but planted jasmine on the left because . . .

I love the way Japanese Blood Grass (Imperata cylindrica) catches the sunlight. 

Lesson – Never plant thorny things where people walk

I really wanted a climbing rose to grown up this shed.  It would have looked awesome to have two climbing roses growing up over the window.  But I remember how annoying it was to walk under the arbors at my last house and get my hat or my shirt sleeve stuck on a thorn.  So I planted jasmine on the trellis near the pathway because it is easily trimmed and it won’t wave a thorny fist in my face when I walk past it.

Non-thorny jasmine on the left

Me So Thorny rose on the right

Lesson – Plants will grow

In my gardening life the times when I have been most pleased with something I have done was initially after I finished planting.  I arranged the small little plants just so and I stand back and congratulate myself on having an aesthetic eye.  And then the plants grow up and things don’t look like they used to.  Why I neglect to conceive of a plant’s ultimate size is beyond me.  Perhaps because I didn’t have the experience of watching them grow to maturity?  This time around I did my best to leave room for things to grow.  As a consequence, there is a whole lot of mulch being used as ground cover right now but I think that in a year or two, much of the mulch will be composting in place and the plants and trees will be filling in.  If not, I can always buy more plants to fill the spaces.

Piece By Piece

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.  I don’t have any grand plans.  I don’t even have simple plans.  Every Saturday morning I trudge out to the shed, pull out the lawn mower and get started mowing.  It seems like it takes all day.  It really takes about 90 minutes.  But the chore of mowing the lawn is taking up too much of my mental time.  By the time I am finished I feel a little bit defeated and quite a bit overwhelmed.  I don’t know where to start.  What can I do to make this easier?  What can I do to transform this place into the Eden I found so easy to imagine when we first toured this house a few months ago? 

My new back yard is very nearly a green blank slate.

My wife has been encouraging me to hire someone to mow the lawn – at least for the summer so I can focus on the things I enjoy like planting trees, putting in pathways, and creating borders.  But I have resisted out of stubbornness.  I tell myself “I don’t want to pay someone to do what I can do for free.”  And yet I don’t think twice about paying to have someone change the oil in my car.  Surely, if I was going to have to surrender my man card for paying someone to mow my own lawn the Man card Defense Authority Department (McDAD) would have already taken it away for not changing my own oil filter, right? 

I have also resisted hiring someone to mow my lawn because part of me begrudgingly knows that this sort of angst is a necessary part of my assimilation with the new house.  This is part of the “just live with it for awhile” strategy that I know to be good advice.  It’s just that it has been harder and more discouraging than I imagined it would be.  I have missed the satisfaction that comes with creating a new bed.  I have missed the creative spark that flares up when you finally think of the perfect plant for the perfect spot.  I have missed that simple feeling of accomplishment when you stand back and realize that you have successfully addressed a problem.  But every week that I spend walking back and forth through the yard I sense that I am learning something valuable even if I can’t quite take that knowledge and transform it into a bigger picture.

This weekend I really started to sense a change though.  While I mowed the lawn, I noticed that one section of the yard was really dry in spite of being in deep shade and in spite of having given the impression of perpetual wetness earlier this spring.  I noticed that a different section of yard that was especially uneven and promised at least one gruesome ankle injury if the issue doesn’t get addressed. 

I started filling holes and discovered
many more in the process.

Though I was silently complaining to myself about the size of the lawn, the time I spent out there afforded me the luxury of day-dreaming about the summer ahead.  It occurred to me that this yard is big enough that I wouldn’t feel conflicted about filling up my daughter’s pool and just letting it sit there for a couple days.  The grass beneath it could die and it wouldn’t be a huge eyesore like it would have been in the smallness of our former yard.  As I struggled to maneuver the mower as close to the shed as I could, I had a quick vision of a small bed of flowers surrounding the shed with a trellis of sweet peas in the middle.

I think I'll remove the ornamental pear tree planted so closely to the shed and put in some kind of flower bed.

I could imagine a fall day, years from now, sitting around a stone fireplace with friends and kids while the dark came on us. I imagined friends sharing spiked hot chocolate or mulled wine while the autumn colors of trees I have yet to plant cast a quiet spell upon us.  

I found this picture on Houzz and I would love to mimic this some day.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

Another view from a different angle.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

I don’t know which of these things will come to pass.  Maybe I will have a different vision at some point that will inspire me to go in another direction.  But the encouraging thing is that I am starting to believe that I will, eventually, make this work.  This will become a place I can handle or at least a place that I will enjoy trying to handle. 

Living with it for a while is still going to take a while.  But piece by piece I am putting this puzzle together and it’s starting to feel okay that I’m doing it all without the picture on the box to guide me. 

Just Live With It

I’ve been overwhelmed with tasks.  We have moved in to our new place and unpacked most of our boxes.  We’re still in the process of remodeling the 69-year-old kitchen so there is still a sense of disarray in our household.  But we’re getting “there” even though we don’t quite know where exactly “there” is or what it will feel like when we settle there.

With some of the more pressing issues taken care of I am slowly turning my attention to the yard.  But the yard is larger than I’m used to and I don’t know where to start.  I haven’t been here long enough to discover all the things that make this yard unique so I'm reluctant to commit to anything.  For instance, our recent rains revealed that there are a few places close to our patio where the water does not drain.  At all.  I had already considered putting in some kind of rock pathway beginning right where the water puddles so that idea might have “gone down the drain” . . . unlike the water.    

The best advice I’ve ever received about garden design was in Julie Moir Messervy’s “The Inward Garden.”  I’m loosely paraphrasing here, but she said that a gardener should just live with their garden for a while.  That advice has been on my mind lately as I’ve been eager to tackle new projects.  I keep telling myself to be patient and let the ideas come to me as I spend time working in the yard, as I get familiar with the sunlight, as I live through the seasons and experience the patterns of nature here. 

But I don’t think Messervy was trying to say “do nothing” either.  So I am keeping up on tasks like mowing the lawn (which I really don’t enjoy doing), and picking from the abundance of weeds.  I have also set up my compost bins and planted three dwarf Japanese maples that I brought over from our old house. 

Last night, however, I had a spare hour-and-a-half after work so I decided to tackle a small project.  At some point, along this trellised fence that marks the divide between my property and the elderly lady’s next door, there was a flower bed.  I imagine it must have looked beautiful in the spring several years ago.  But now the only word that comes to mind is “dilapidated”.  The lattice work needs to be repaired.  The weedy grass needs to be pulled.  Irrigation needs to be addressed. 

From the look of it, I thought the house next door was empty when we bought this house.  It is not.

I started by pulling out handfuls of grass and discovered that buried within the grass were various types of edging materials – bricks and red cement edgers.  I have no formal training in archaeology, but I’m pretty sure that these buried materials were placed right against the base of the fence to prevent the overgrown grass and weeds from coming in from the other side of the fence.  

I dislike this type of edging.  I dislike it a lot.  

I assume that the elderly lady (whom I have yet to even see) no longer cares about gardening or keeping her exterior in tip-top shape.  I may help her with this in small ways if I can but I don’t want to assume that my help would be welcomed until I’ve met her.  I’m not a fan of using weed blocking fabrics, but this might actually be a perfect place for using it. 

After the grass was mostly pulled out I was able to get a better look at the irrigation pipe that so prominently stands out in this small bed.  I could definitely take this down to ground level and still have access to water here but for now I think I will just add a Y valve and attach a drip irrigation timer to it and leave the other valve open for attaching a hose. 

Irrigation is always a first concern when planting here since we very rarely get rain between May and October.

This weekend I’ll try to repair or replace the lattice work and install the weed fabric.  I will pull out the grass roots that I missed.  I will use the weed whacker to trim the edges.  I might even plant a few Moon Flower seeds that I harvested unless I simply can’t escape the siren’s call of my favorite nursery and need to take the plunge and buy something that is already green.  And then I’ll live with it for a while.