The homestead dining room

Thank you so much for joining the china cabinet challenge. I hope you'll join me in my new challenges.

As the summer went on, I wondered about the "radish" as it was tall and gangly but when the little yellow flowers opened I left them. My youngest son, about 5, called them chocolate flowers. He told me to smell them and he was right. A strong chocolate smell! Shortly after, the canola was harvested and the flea beetles came. But they left my plants alone! They preferred the chocolate flower plants and stripped them instead. Seems it was wild mustard in my garden and it's the native food for the flea beetles species we had. After that, I'd plant wild mustard scattered in my garden every year as a trap crop! 😂 I was a happy gardener! I never planted lots of potatoes so it was easy to go through them and pick potato bugs off and the young soft ones, I'd squish on the plants. It acts as a deterrent as it screams danger! to the others. Works with most aphids too.

That is really interesting about using roses as an early warning system! I learned by accident a gardening truck to save my garden from flea beetles infestations come later summer. Where I lived on the Prairies, there were vast fields of wheat, oats, sorghum and canola (called rapeseed then). When the canola seeds were harvested, swarms of flea beetles would fly to the gardens instead. They attacked any plant in the Brassicaceae family - like my cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnip, Brussel sprouts , all which I love and grew. Within a short time, they could skeletonise a plant, leaving only the leaf veins. One time an unknown plant showed up in spring mixed between the rows. It was very tiny at that stage but I recognized the early leaves as radishes so I left them.

I didn’t know that about roses. Very clever

Interesting... I have seen roses on wine estates in some regions, but did not know why they had them...

Great