The Garden Thread - August, 2025

August 1, 2025 | Diana in WI/Greeneyes in Memoriam

[Diana in Wisconsin]

The MONTHLY Gardening Thread is a gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you.

If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located.

This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked.

It is impossible to hijack the Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table Recipes, Preserving, Good Living - there is no telling where it will go - and that is part of the fun and interest. Jump in and join us! Send a Private Message to Diana in Wisconsin if you'd like to be added to/removed from our New & Improved Ping List.

NOTE: This is a once a MONTH Ping List, but we DO post to the thread all throughout the month. Links to related articles and discussions which might be of interest to Gardeners are welcomed any time.

[Liz]

Popovers are the best! I even own a ‘fancy’ Popover
Pan (found at Thrift)........ but a muffin tin works, too.

---

A ‘fancy’ Popover pan? Nice addition to your kitchen.

This recipe is a muffin version of a popover........
so you’re well-fixed to give it a go.

[Qiviut]

We have a major celebration & potluck at church the end of September & I have been looking for a relatively easy dish (cold) to take. There is more than enough potato salad, Cole slaw, broccoli salad, maccaroni salad, etc. to feed an army that shows up for potlucks so I want something different. What I have not seen is a corn salad. I will be testing this recipe this week:

Crack Corn Salad
https://www.plainchicken.com/crack-corn-salad/

I am going to substitute a ranch dressing I have made for the dressing ingredients in the salad recipe. I don’t want the salad to be drowning in sauce so I can start with adding a half cup & add more until I get it to my satisfaction. There are other crack corn salad recipes that use 1/2 to 1 cup prepared ranch dressing. I have made this ranch dressing before & it is really good:

https://www.wholesomeyum.com/recipes/low-carb-keto-ranch-dressing/

[Qiviut]

You have my sympathy on those chigger bites - I hate them! I have gotten them really bad before - up the legs, on my back, from sitting on pine logs while eating lunch on a hike. My brother & I got our worst cases sitting on straw bales playing with kittens. I couldn’t sleep for about 3 nights the itching was so bad. Calamine lotion never worked for me - I had better luck with Benadryl anti- itch lotion.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Pollard....Chiggers are truly hateful little bugs! Its one of the reasons that some in the Ozarks like to do a controlled burn in the springtime, to kill off the chiggers and ticks. (I get chiggers when I weed in my "floral border")

Arbico might have something to help.

Arbico chigger control

This might be a better investment, Rynoskin that you wear when you work in chigger infested areas. (Marines wear something like this to protect themselves from Sand fleas.) Maybe A great gift for someone with tracking dogs who thrashes through black fly and mosquito infested northern forests and bogs!

Rynoskin wearable protection against biting insects

(Cheaper than multiple bottles of calamine??)

[Qiviut]

Mom has gotten a couple of ticks this year, mostly lower body. She did have a large one (what I call a ‘dog’ tick as opposed to a tiny seed/deer tick) where her ear lobe attached to her jaw - she woke up & saw it when she looked in the mirror! The Rynoskin pants might be a good present for her - birthday coming up! Thanks for the info.

[Paul R.]

Chiggers affect my wife very badly too. Sometimes she has a little dark “splotch” from one for over a month, tho’ thankfully the itching goes away sooner. Luckily, our chickens get most of them. “Most” — I have an itch just below my ankle bone, right now...

Worse for us, I had to be away again for a day, and I didn’t find all the tomato hornworms early yesterday: One plant has ONE leaf remaining, stems chewed down a bit, and two forming tomatoes (they would have been about 2” diameter today, I would say, are 1/3 to 1/2 eaten.) No hornworm could be found on that plant (should be easy to spot now!), but an adjacent plant had light damage a big hornworm on it. Another nearby plant had more considerable damage (about 1/2 of foliage gone) and a hornworm “only” about 2-1/2” long on it. (I’m a male with very slightly below average size fingers - still bigger than most women’s fingers.)

To heck with trying to find the dang caterpillars, esp. since I’ll have no chance to use some for fishing bait:

I’ve declared war, WMD style. All nearby tomato plants got a good spraying with Sevin. I’ll hit the rest of the plants early tomorrow morning, when it’s cooler out there.

On a good note, my 3 rescue operation impatiens (12”[?] pots on clearance from Menards for $1 ea.) are all doing well. The best one is, in fact, fantastic now: The plants are deep green and strong, with many vivid flowers (mostly white and a sort of magenta). It seemed dicey when I bought it if it would even survive, but I’m so proud of it, I’ve put it right by the front porch! (North exposure) Hopefully this 97 deg. weather this weekend will not drag it down.

[Qiviut]

Hornworms
https://giantveggiegardener.com/category/organic-pest-controls/uv-light-for-tomato-hornworms/

They light right up!

[Liz]

Corn Salad looks like a winner.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

Qiviut, it sounds like a good idea for her! Everything I have heard about Lyme disease sounds really bad. If I were out in the country I would buy one.

[Qiviut]

Corn salad ... I made up a batch this afternoon - I don’t think I will have any leftovers! Easy to make, hardest part is making bacon. You could use precooked bacon to make that part easier.

[Pollard]

Yeah, I’ve tried spraying my clothes with permethrin but the chiggers and even seed ticks don’t seem bothered by it and I couldn’t stand the socks. They just felt saturated without being wet or just didn’t feel like the same material or something.

Most of the itch relief stuff is based on one of 2-3 common active ingredients. What I used this morning was something the ex bought for back when there was poison ivy here. Goats took care of the poison ivy. It’s called Ivarest. Main active ingredient — overpriced calamine. It helps a little.

My defense is to generally stay out of the woods for ticks and tall grass for chiggers but I let my guard down on this one. I do also burn the place but not grass. That stuff moves to fast and this place isn’t a big open field. That and run a band of Sevin granules around the driveway plus a path from house to shop which makes a circle I call my Tick Moat. Funny how I instinctively felt the need to do a bunch of mowing yesterday before I knew I had chigger bites. Thanks God.

The chigger bites end up ozzing for me at some point which is why I said thank God none between the toes. Nothing like seeing wet spots in your socks from oozing or taking your socks off at the end of the day and they stick where it oozed and then dried. Never mind the icky stick between the toes.

Then on the ankles, I tend to scratch in my sleep and may end up with little bloody spots on the sheets.

I have colloquially named them little bastards.

Then of course Lone Star ticks can kick off my Alpha-Gal mammailian meat allergy so yeah - generally just stay away. Jump off the tractor and jump back on in no less than 5-10 seconds.
Sucks to not be able to walk on most of the property for most of the year. There’s a reason rich people have a huge yard with a house in the middle of nothing but short grass. NO BUGS

I need more yard, less forest and better mower(s).

First sign of chigger itch, take off socks and pants outside and leave them outside and come in and rub down with rubbing alcohol. I thought it was a few seed ticks until this morning which I did get but those aren’t bad.

That rubbing alcohol thing is good to do 1-2 times a day after the fact but it will sting. Dries things up quicker though.

I see farmer type guys and gals wearing rubber boots but not pure black rubber, the nice ones, and they have their pant legs tucked down in them and the boots aren’t nasty from mud/manure so I think those boots are dowsed with some serious chemical to keep chiggers from making it to the top of them.

[Pollard]

This morning's project, after more mowing, -- fix rust hole on bottom of the old air compressor.

Pulled the compressor head off before flipping the compressor over, otherwise the oil would end up on top of the pistons where it doesn't belong. Same reason they say transport a fridge upright. It has a compressor.

The hole was right underneath the flat bar that's part of the wheel assembly. That center hole is factory, probably for alignment when welding the wheel support flat bar to the tank. Air was coming out that plus right behind the flat bar where that tack weld is.

Cut the tack weld and jammed a screw driver under it and found the hole which was smaller than I imagined.

Cut and bent up the flat bar to give me room to grind and weld a patch over the hole.

Found a piece of wider flat bar that happened to have a curve on the end that matched to round tank.

Thought I took more pics and know I did of the other little hole I found further forward on the tank but I don't see them on the phone. That other hole, I just welded a 3/4" circle around and then filled circle with weld. I'm guessing there's a rusty stripe down the middle from end to end on the bottom of the tank and more holes will blow out at some point. It's from people not draining the water out as often as they should. It was far from new when I got it but I'm guilty of the same.

Put it back together and fired it up. No leaks out the bottom. Slight leak at the pressure switch which has been there for years. I also took the compressor head cap off and cleaned up the reed valves. It could use a new pair if I can find some but for now, it's a decent little compressor again.

When I started it with zero pressure, it climbed 1 psi per second until it got to around 60 psi and then took a little longer than 1 psi/sec. It reached it's shut off point of 125 psi in 2-1/2 minutes.

I left it on and in about 20 minutes that pressure switch leak made it lose enough pressure to kick on and then it ran for 20 seconds, made it to full pressure again and shut off. Once upon a time, I could turn this thing off at full pressure, turn it back on in a few days and it wouldn't run because it still had full pressure. It was a tight little thing. I'll have to look into getting a pressure switch or the one little part of it that leaks.

So I've got the nice old little chugger for up at the house and the new high rpm screamer for down at the shop. I think it was the movie Dumb and Dumber which had the line; "Want to hear the most aggravating sound in the world?" and then Jim Carey makes an aggravating sound. That's this new compressor. Kick myself in the butt for not having looked at the rpm or looked up a video, with sound, of one running. It's gonna have to have it's own little shed and maybe with the inside lined with that acoustic foam with the egg carton shaped surface for soundproofing.

I'll be keeping my eye out for another old chugger but bigger than what I have. Then I can pawn off the noisemaker to some deaf person.

And Diana, you'll be happy to hear that I completely cleaned up from this project and even went a little further to move something I was tripping over to the travel trailer, as excruciating as that all was, like a bad dream to me now;)

Then I went food and hardware shopping. Grabbed another 10x25 sheet of black poly and a cheapo gate latch for the newly opened back door of the shed and a 50' air hose. I forgot ends for it so I'll grab them tomorrow. Gonna go put the latch on lay one sheet of poly down but I'm about whooped once the sun's down far enough. Next T, W, T, I'll get more stuff done around here.

[Qiviut]

Oh man, you are conjuring up some BAD memories ... oozing chigger bites & bites between the toes ... pure misery.

Interesting article on chiggers:
https://warriornation.ning.com/group/gardener-s-corner/page/chiggers

[Pollard]

I had a couple myself a few weeks ago and might have had a third that I couldn’t find and had forgotten about the UV light at night trick. Not sure and I wasn’t too worried about it. More than 90% of my tomatoes were bad from that biotic condition with cause unknown.

I do still have six maters here and one is one of the few biggest, has little to no blotchy ripening and feels just right to eat. Two plants and bad harvest — still better than store bought, once I learned the hard way that internal whitening of a tomato makes it taste bad. The more blotchy the ripening is, the more chances there are of the whitening.

I got so good at picking out the bad ones that my throwing arm got sore one day.

[Qiviut]

You probably know this already, but if you find a parasitized hornworm, leave it. It won’t be munching on your tomato plants & the wasps that hatch will be hornworm hunters.

From link:

Rather than killing a hornworm outright, a female parasitoid wasp injects it with eggs and flies away, leaving her brood to hatch inside the live host. The eggs soon release little wasp larvae, which feed on the hornworm until they’re ready to pupate.

The larvae form cocoons outside the host’s body, and these white projections are easily visible to us. The hornworm is still alive at this point, and may continue walking around, but it has stopped eating. In fact, if you see a hornworm in this predicament, the best way to protect your garden is to just leave it alone.

“If such projections are observed, the hornworms should be left in the garden to allow the adult wasps to emerge,” UMES explains in a fact sheet on hornworms in home gardens. “These wasps kill the hornworms when they emerge from the cocoons and will seek out other hornworms to parasitize.”

https://www.treehugger.com/how-baby-wasps-can-save-your-tomatoes-from-hornworm-caterpillars-4868727

[Pollard]

Mine were clean and green but good to know they have parasitic enemies and to look for white spots.

[MomwithHope]

I don’t think we have chiggers in Michigan. And if we do I don’t want to know. 😜

[Qiviut]

There’s actually a Chigger by State map:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/chiggers-by-state

I looked ... you’ve got them 😬

[MomwithHope]

Aw man.....

[Liz]

GARDEN ZUCCHINI PIZZA / carbless

ING 3/4" slices lge zucchini Jar Pizza Sauce (homemade recipe follows) 8 oz cooked grnd beef
4 oz can sliced mushrooms, drained/minced 1 green pepper, minced 4 oz grated Mozzarella

Cover bottom of sprayed pizza pan with zucchini. Layer on Pizza Sauce,
cooked meat, mushrooms, green pepper, cheese. Bake 350 deg to melt cheese.

Homemade Pizza Sauce: Mix 8 oz can plain tomato sauce
1 tsp Italian seasoning 1/2 tsp ea garlic salt, onion pwder.

Chef's Note: you can parboil zucchini briefly but you want it crisp.