Unexpected Garden Helper
For the past few years I’ve been tossing a bunch of wildflower seeds at the back of my veggie garden at the end of Winter and seeing what comes up. This year I had several plants that I think may be Rudbeckia. The bronze shaded one is particularly nice. Since the soil back there is chock full of big rocks and roots, I can’t really use it for vegetables and it’s nice to have some flowers to cut for the house too.
An extra bonus this year is a plant that I thought was Evening Primrose. There are several back there and many of them have grown extremely tall. So far they have not blossomed at all, but I plan to leave them there even if they never flower as they are performing another unexpected service. We have unfortunately been visited this year by quite a few Japanese Beetles and Oriental Beetles. I’m not saying that they haven’t done any damage at all to the rest of my plants, but they do actually seem to prefer these weeds/flowers/whatever-they-ares to the rest of the garden and that’s just fine by me!
I have used parasitic nematodes for a number of years, but just couldn’t afford them this year and have seen a definite increase in the "bad bug" population. Guess I was just lucky in that this plant just happened to sprout this year as well to help keep the damage in check.