So tell us about Burdock?

Yesterday I took a close look at an ornamental juniper tree beside the garden. It has been looking particularly ratty, and it turns out it was covered with bag worms. Ugg. I filled about 1/3 of a bucket with the things, which were wiggling away and starting to drag their bags out of the bucket. I poured them all into one of the plastic sleeves the newspaper comes in, tied off the top, and let them cook in the sun. It's now in the trash.

Howard Garrett (the Dirt Doctor) says that when a plant is attacked like this that it is in stress and makes it a target for insects and disease. I look and found that this tree is buried too deep. Not a surprise--most of my trees are. I planted them in 2002 at the level of the dirt in the pot, maybe even a little deeper, before I started listening to Garrett on the radio and before he discovered this problem. Nurseries plant trees in a few inches of dirt in a pot and then before shipping they dump in several more inches of dirt so the plant looks more established, whatever. If you don't take that dirt off the plant can actually slowly suffocate. They clearly fail to thrive. The swell at the bottom of the tree needs to be exposed and then the tree will be much healthier. So I watered and scratched off several inches, and I'll water and scratch off some more today. BT on the plant to kill any more worms still crawling around, another pass to remove bags I missed, and some good fertilizer and the "sick tree treatment" (see Dirt Doctor). Bag worms are best removed with dormant oil application in winter, I think, but I can go a long way to making them scarce by working on the ground around it now.

Tomatoes are coming in at the rate of a couple of quarts a day. I'm going to be defrosting my big freezer today and I'm also going to be doing some canning this weekend.

SRS