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Not yet, Jude, though Weds is promising to be the hottest day yet. We're in the low 80s currently - as Frelga says, around 25-26C but the humidity is dreadful. and of course air-conditioning in homes and schools here is non-standard! I'm coming home from work absolutely dripping...

27 here. Ireland is amazing when its sunny!

I've seen the pics Durty Nelly's has been posting. Even that little snippet looks lovely! So I can just imagine how nice it must be when it's warm. (We did see it sunny quite a bit, even if it was chilly.)

We just opened up the house again now that the humidity has dropped a bit. (The higher temps would be more tolerable if the humidity wasn't so oppressive.) But we had several days of 90+ weather and absolutely gross humidity. No thanks!

Uhh...just woke up to the weather forecast this morning - some parts of southern England are expected to reach 30 C today...

Time to move to Scotland!

Not a bad idea! It said 85 F in my car at 2pm... We're not used to it in this country, particularly down here on the coast where there's usually a sea breeze to keep it fresh.

It was about that warm today here. It wasn't too bad if you weren't in the direct sunlight. Sarah and I put up the tent in our yard this afternoon (in the direct sunlight ), and she is currently out there with some friends around a bonfire. They have a nice night for a sleepover/camp out.

It's supposed to be in the mid 90s today (35C) , and we'll be out this evening after work hauling hay. I've actually been doing OK in the heat this year. I've found that if I take enough potassium supplements and table salt, then I can actually sweat! That really, really helps me not overheat.

We have something called a "Bermuda high" off the coast and it's channeling hot and humid southern heat up our way. Normally, I don't mind bicycling too much even when it's hot & muggy - the breeze helps if you're moving at a reasonable pace - but the other day, it was too nasty even for that.

And I'm totally neglecting the garden.

My gardening time has been hijacked for the past week fighting a losing battle against Japanese beetles. Voracious little monsters.

I've ordered a product called "milky spore" which is a disease that targets them in the grub stage. Hopefully that will make a significant dent in their numbers next year.

Meanwhile, I try to kill as many as I can and still have an organic garden. I'm getting thousands in my pheromone traps every day and am feeding them to my chickens after killing them in the deep freeze. And my apple trees are still swarming with them! And my pole beans probably won't recover.

Ours just arrived, too. I tried milky spore a few years ago, but they still arrive in huge numbers from the neighbors, who have lawns and no gardens, or the nearby fields.

I finally gave up and turned to chemicals a couple of years ago. With 2 acres of gardens, it was that, give up the garden, or give up my job and battle Japanese beetles full time. So now I cut all the roses off (I don't want to attract and harm the bees and butterflies) and go around with a sprayer of pyrethrins and Neem oil once a day to spray them on the foliage plants. As long as I can hit the beetle clumps directly with a narrow spray, I'm not contaminating the rest of the plant too much. I still have to hand pick the vegetable garden, though.

I did try Neem oil alone, but it didn't seem to do much.

I thought Neem oil was fairly harmless by itself? Someone recommended it to me to keep squirrels off the fruit trees.

As far as I know, Neem oil is pretty harmless except to some insects. People even seem to eat it in India.

It's one of my first choices (or spinosad or a commercial combination of plant oils - rosemary, etc.) when an infestation is out of control. A pity it doesn't seem to work for the Japanese beetles. I include it in my concoction in the hopes that it's doing some good.


Neem effects on insects:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234642/

Jude wrote:

Time to move to Scotland!

source

The top halves of my apple trees are brown with skeletonized leaves now. I'm going to reapply diatomaceous earth this evening. It seems to help until it gets wet from rain or a heavy dew.

I was catching so many beetles they split the plastic away from the plastic sides of the reusable bags of the pheromone traps, so I converted them to bucket traps by cutting off the bottoms of the bags and letting the beetles fall into soapy water. This works well, but I can't feed them to chickens then.

After a day of bucket traps, there were so many beetles in the 5 gallon pails that the bugs were falling onto the bodies of their predecessors and not hitting the soapy water, so now I have to make sure the water in the pail is deep enough that there isn't a gap between the water and the bottom of the bought trap. This leaves live beetles built up inside the plastic tube, so I started emptying the buckets into a big trash can so the live beetles would still have a chance to drown.

This smelled AWFUL after a day. So yesterday I spread the dead beetles under the apple trees and I have hopes that the smell will drive away the live beetles. They are supposed to avoid areas where their kind have died in large numbers, so maybe this will repel them from the trees and they'll be attracted to the traps more? I dunno.

I've taken to calling the dead beetle water "beetle juice". My husband gets upset if I say it twice in a row.... "NO! Don't say it a third time!!!!"

(movie reference)

Quote:

They are supposed to avoid areas where their kind have died in large numbers, so maybe this will repel them from the trees and they'll be attracted to the traps more? I dunno.

I've heard that, too. Our beetles didn't care. I'm starting to suspect this is a marketing myth to get people to buy more disposable bags.

btw, something in our woods (raccoons?) doesn't seem to mind a bit of dishsoap on the dead beetles. If I throw them out at the edge of the wood, they disappear after a couple of days.

It took me a few days of reading about it before it finally dawned on me that I didn't need to use so much dish soap. Most sites claim that the soap isn't poisoning the beetles, it's just breaking the surface tension so the beetles drown. And that you just need a little soap for that.

I'm going to drastically reduce the soapiness of the water I use, so the wildlife doesn't eat so much soap when they eat the beetles.

I don't know if this amount will work for you, but I use a quick squirt - about as much as I'd use for washing dishes - in a 5-gallon bucket that's about 1/2 to 3/4 full of water. Once in a while, I have to add a little more, but mostly that works. They drown within the next 10 minutes or so, but I leave the bucket to sit for at least half an hour. Any less, and some of them come back to life.

Did anyone hear about the boys in the U.K. who wore skirts to school? Apparently, they said it was too hot to wear long pants and the dress code prohibited shorts, so a bunch of them opted for skirts.

I can't blame them - I go for skirts a lot in the summer, if I'm not wearing shorts.

Skirts or kilts?

Skirts, borrowed from sisters or girlfriends.

What I heard is that, when the boys complained that it was too hot for long pants and the girls could wear skirts, a teacher told them that well, they could wear skirts, too. So they did.