Good afternoon, Steemians. As promised yesterday in French Marigolds Part 1, I did get pics of the french marigolds (Tagetes patula) at work today. As you can see below, they've gotten quite a bit bigger and have really filled out nicely.
This one is a pic of the same flowers, just closer and from a different angle.
(Those are actually Beit Alpha cucumbers growing on the trellis in the background, in case you were curious. More on those in later posts.)
I have a lot of autonomy at work and for the most part get to make most of the decisions for the garden. Sometimes I don't really have a whole lot of say though. Boss knew I wanted marigolds so he went and bought a bunch and brought in. Ended up with way more than I really needed or had intended on using. Most of the extras being solid yellows.
This is how I managed to utilize most of those extra yellows.
I'm hoping the red and orange ones will get a bit bigger. May need to trim some of the yellow ones back from around them. The splash of red and orange in the middle really does create a nice contrast to the yellow.
In yesterday's post I mentioned that marigolds do seem to attract Japanese Beetles, but that they almost serve as a catch for the beetles, keeping them from munching as heavily on other plants. This makes it easy to spot when they first start appearing in the garden. It also makes removing them and tossing them into soapy water much easier when most of them are on the marigolds. I'm still pulling a few off of other plants around the garden, but usually it's just loners here and there.
Here are a couple of Japanese Beetles hiding in amongst the flower petals. In amongst the petals, and underneath them, around the base of the flower tend to be favorite hiding places. If you look close you can see where they've been feeding on the flower petals.
This pic has multiple Japanese Beetles in it. Feeding damage is visible on some of the foliage as well as on the flowers.
If you don't know anything about Japanese Beetles, suffice to say that they're a scourge that can decimate plants rather quickly when their numbers start to get high. I hand pick them from the garden daily. Their habit of congregating on the marigolds makes this task much easier.
Well that's all I have for this post. Thanks for visiting. If you have any questions or comments, pics, or related posts you'd like to share below, please do so.
All pics in this post were taken by me on 6-22-2017 with an HTC Desire Eye phone camera in southwest Missouri (zone 6a).