My “Pot-luck” Patch

[Gill-b]

My “Pot-luck” Patch

…is a small patch in my small garden which, during the winter months, I dig in some compost made from the vegetable matter cast off from my kitchen. During the same months, I generally keep the patch mostly plant free, except for occasionally some spinach. Each spring, seeds that were in the compost germinate and whatever blooms, that I do not consider a weed, gets a chance to grow.

Sometimes I transplant a new shoot into a pot or to another location in my garden. I now have five avocado trees (there were more, but I gave some away), three apricot trees (one might be a peach?), three apple trees (there could even be a pear tree in the mix there – I am not entirely sure yet), one plum tree (the baby of the “family” since it germinated a few weeks ago), two chili plants and one tenacious little shoot that looks suspiciously like a grape vine but it is still a mystery to me.

I mostly leave the annuals, like tomatoes, in the patch; and I always leave members of the Cucurbitaceae family, namely: butternut, Flat White Boer pumpkin, gem squash, spanspek (also known as cantaloupe or rockmelon), and watermelon.


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My Pot-luck Patch in the foreground, with spinach growing in it.

 

[Gill-b]

This year I have a few potatoes growing in the Pot-luck Patch, which is a surprise to me as I am sure I only put relatively thin potato peels, with no potato eyes, into my compost box ...huh, another little mystery...

...anywho... the plants which appear in the patch that I wish to now mainly focus on, are members of the Cucurbitaceae family.

Since I began my Pot-luck Patch (and especially noted over the past four years), whenever one of these Cucurbitaceae plants produces a fruit, much to my dismay, the fruit (or at least part of it) rots on the vine; and last year I discovered why. There is a culprit involved and it is Dacus ciliatus, more commonly known as the Pumpkin fly.


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The above three pics shows a spanspek (also known as cantaloupe or rockmelon) which rotted on the vine, at the beginning of 2023.

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The above three pics shows a plant that grew at the end of 2023 that was never able to fruit as the larvae damaged the beginning bulging.


This small, orange-brown fly is part of a group of fruit flies, Dacus, with over 40 species within the family Tephritidae. The female Pumpkin fly lays eggs under the skin of host fruit, which hatch after about three days, and its larvae feed on the fruit pulp, leading to damage.

This year, I am hoping to get at least one decent fruit off of any of the Cucurbitaceae plants that are busy sprouting in my Pot-luck Patch, so I decided to create this thread to document my trials. I do not wish to spend any money on this fun little project, so it is going to be interesting experimenting in Do-It-Yourself ways of trying to outsmart the Pumpkin fly.

 

[Gill-b]

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I unknowingly photographed a Pumpkin fly busy burrowing into a flower. I only saw it later when zooming in on the uncropped images on my computer screen.

 

[Gill-b]

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A watermelon from the beginning of 2024. This was the closest I got to a successful harvest from a Cucurbitaceae family plant.

 

[Gill-b]

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Again, something different.
I have these home painted broken bricks all over my vegetable patch. Today I found "a message" left on one of them by my 11 week old Guinea Fowl keet. So that is what it thinks of my authority, pffffft. Kids these days.
***sigh***

This above little story in a post from March 2024, happened in my Pot-luck Patch.

The broken bricks are there to try prevent the neighbourhood cats from using the patch as toilet.