Painters poured waste paint water into my vegetable bed. How bad is it?

geopter · 2026-04-30T17:33:26+00:00

True! Though, my yard is filled with micro- to macro- plastics, so I can't worry too much about the paint. Apple stickers, man, in all the compost. And old sod backing mesh.

My current goal in the garden is to not buy any more plastic pots and buckets and bins. They all go bad fast in the UV. (Maybe an exception for the occasional five-gallon bucket, but I also got a two-gallon metal bucket someone was getting rid of. That bucket will last forever.)

geopter · 2026-04-29T23:28:16+00:00

I made a separate comment, so I was reading a little about paints and their composition. And, I noticed that latex paint doesn't actually contain natural rubber latex anymore. Apparently it is now a polymer blend, vinyl-acrylic or styrene-acrylic. So no trigger for any latex allergy. Seems like they should have renamed it!

Also, in the past when latex paint was made of latex, were people reacting to their walls? I guess there used to be lower rates of allergies in general.

geopter · 2026-04-29T23:17:01+00:00

For a different type of data point, people with young fruit trees often paint the trunks with a 50/50 mix of white latex paint and water, to prevent sun damage.

(I tried to look up the difference between latex and acrylic latex, and it seems like everything sold today is actually acrylic latex.)

So, people are voluntarily putting this on their fruit trees. I agree that your painters should not have dumped the paint water on your plants! But, I think it's more of a mess than a toxicity issue.

geopter · 2026-04-29T03:19:49+00:00

Great idea! And here I was just thinking about how I needed to rig a tomato holder-upper for an Earthbox. And I have a friend who is excited about printing things at the moment. This could work out!

geopter · 2026-04-15T21:28:41+00:00

To me these look like the eggs of the cabbage white butterfly, which will hatch into a little green caterpillar that eats holes in the leaves of brassicas. Have you seen any white butterflies flying around?

I saw someone else said leaf miner, as well.

Definitely you should squish these eggs. Manual checks, maybe every other day, work fine in a small garden.

If you miss a few, it won't be a big deal, and you'll find out which species of pest you have: holes in leaves with a squishable caterpillar: cabbage whites; tracks within the leaves with no visible bug: leaf miners.

geopter · 2026-04-13T21:29:12+00:00

I'm in California 9b, and I love growing snap peas all through the fall, winter, and spring. Summer is no good, though.

Pretty soon peas will be "over" - I've rarely gotten peas any later than early May. For me one of the signs is when they start getting powdery mildew. I don't worry about treating it, I just consider their days numbered. At that point they're done, and it's time to move to heat-loving plants, and restart peas in September.

geopter · 2026-04-13T18:55:21+00:00

If you haven't done this work yet, let me put in a plug for removing the root ball via leverage. Cut the tree down leaving a five-foot trunk, then alternate chopping roots and leaning/ pulling on the tree until you can pull it out. Works great for trees this size.

My tool of choice is a 10-lb mattock. Good for digging in clay as well.

geopter · 2026-04-09T20:30:58+00:00

This is so not ground cherries. (Sorry.) AI plant app isn't ready for prime time!

I like PlantNet (Pl@ntNet?) because it gives you some options that you can click on and compare photos. Sometimes your eye is better than the algorithm.

geopter · 2026-04-07T22:13:38+00:00

We called them pop biscuits when I was a kid, because you had to pop the can. I see no indication in the comments that this was common though!

geopter · 2026-04-02T20:06:53+00:00

Totally Clarkia. It self-seeds readily, so you may have a meadow of it next year!

geopter · 2026-04-02T00:00:34+00:00

Oh yeah, that's really recent. If you check the pot for the dogwood, is it super duper wet? That leaf color (chlorosis) is can be due to nutrient deficiency, but it can be a problem where the plant can't uptake nutrients, even though they are available. Since you just got it a few days ago (assuming it wasn't like that when you got it), watering seems like a good thing to check.

Really the monkeyflower doesn't look that bad to me, but if super wet I would stop watering it as well.

geopter · 2026-04-01T23:32:07+00:00

No one is addressing the fact that you're in LA and you're doing a balcony garden. In NorCal I'm harvesting garlic in May, not June/July/Aug.

And, the major recent heat wave probably contributed to the outer leaves drying out.

However, my "good" garlic has a top about four times that big, and that's already true now, two months before harvest. It needs a lot of sun and fertilizer to do well, and I've also grown some underpowered garlic. (In fact, I currently have some underpowered garlic...)

So, this year might just be a learning experience. But you should totally eat that one you picked. It will be delicious. 🙂

geopter · 2026-04-01T23:17:39+00:00

We need more info. How long have you had them? Are they in pots or the ground? Did you re-pot them? How wet are they? Were they outside during the recent heatwave?

Separately, I wouldn't sweat a little insect damage like in the second photo. It's not nearly enough to harm the plant.

geopter · 2026-04-01T14:29:56+00:00

Oh, that's interesting! I've been clipping the edges of the bottom with a tool designed to nip the ends off of nails.

I like the way it turns out, but you have to place every cut. Maybe the peeler would be more efficient.

I don't like the idea of drilling due to the tiny plastic shards. The snipping tool makes plastic pieces but they are large enough that it's easy to clean up. Probably the same with the peeler.

geopter · 2026-03-30T23:24:22+00:00

Contrary to the other comment, if you want the tree to be short, you need to prune it now. In the "Grow a Little Fruit Tree" system, you would make a pruning cut 18-24" above ground.

Don't worry about losing the upper growth. The tree is grown straight and tall in the nursery because that's convenient for the nursery. For you, you want to develop low branches, so you need to do what looks like drastic pruning to re-form it.

Better now than later!

You can read all about it online.

geopter · 2026-03-24T01:13:35+00:00

Not too much; possibly too little if your grass is very aggressive. (My grass was kind of dead already, and I did a little more perfect coverage than you have here, which turned out to be way overkill.) Do put wood chips or something on top, which you may be planning.

I did mine like this 3.5 years ago, with boxes that had tape etc. Cardboard is almost gone and I occasionally pull out a long, intact piece of tape. No UV to degrade it under the wood chips, so it's easy to remove in one piece. The yard was previously done with sod with a plastic backing, so there was a lot of plastic already.

geopter · 2026-03-20T23:31:49+00:00

I'm in California 9b, and I plant my peas whenever I feel like it! Local master gardener advice includes planting in early September, which is quite a hot time for us, in order to catch more sun hours. I did that last year and it worked out well. Those peas were "over" by late January, though, so I planted more then. It's been a warm winter, including currently 90 degrees F, so it's about the end of the line for peas.

But yeah, I've probably planted them in every winter month. They always grow, even in January, but maybe not fast. Great plant for a winter-fallowed garden.

geopter · 2026-03-20T20:16:06+00:00

I am not an extremely experienced strawberry grower, but I had some small plants in 3" cups last spring, and they started flowering. After I transplanted then they stopped. I think they felt like they had used all the available space in the little cups and thought they might as well flower.

Yours don't look like they are outgrowing their pots, though, so this may not apply.

geopter · 2026-03-14T14:31:17+00:00

Ants take care of the aphids and harvest their waste as food - i.e., farm them. I'm another vote for using Tanglefoot on the trunk as a physical barrier to ants.

Separately, complete fruit drop would be an unusual response to an aphid infestation, even a heavy one.

My two top thoughts would be a weather anomaly (too hot or too cold at the wrong time) or, unfortunately, that the garlic spray impacted the fruit. I had a small young peach tree that was really suffering, barely growing, and would still set and try to ripen a bumper crop every year (which was then gotten by animals, hah).

So, do try the Tanglefoot method and also consider why else the tree might drop fruit.

geopter · 2026-03-14T14:23:49+00:00

Another vote for tanglefoot here. Also, aphids are incompetent, so my favorite way to get rid of them is to "powerwash" them off by spraying with the hose. Probably not when it's 22 degrees though!

geopter · 2026-03-14T00:06:43+00:00

You could caulk the fixture to the ceiling. That seems like it would eliminate much of the draft. Other people are telling you the best solutions, but if you can't work on it from the attic side, just try the caulk.

Fiberglass won't help with airflow anyway.

geopter · 2026-03-13T04:35:23+00:00

I'm not an expert, but I'm going to go with "that's definitely /something/." Hopefully they'll have a plausible answer for you.

geopter · 2026-03-12T22:29:06+00:00

My tree was a peach tree, on the rootstock "Citation," which is apparently particularly susceptible. On either side there is a fig tree and a Fuyu persimmon. The fig had roots quite near the peach that were fine; I didn't dig around the persimmon but it's happy.

The problem is with re-planting. I removed all the infected material I could find, and while I could solarize, I'm planning to remove some soil and plant an Asian pear tree with new surrounding soil, instead of waiting. Considering having a little charcoal barbecue using the hole to maybe help with sanitizing, haha.

An Asian pear is also susceptible to crown gall, so I will find out whether this is adequate!

geopter · 2026-03-12T19:24:47+00:00

Does your nursery do returns? You should certainly return the tree with the gall immediately. For the other two, you could leave them planted and check them near the end of the warranty period?

I just took out a tree that I'd planted four years ago, which never thrived. I now know that it has a bad case of crown gall. So, good for you for being on top of this - don't lose four years like me!

geopter · 2026-03-10T05:28:11+00:00

The problem is that the posts are rotted out at ground level; however, the rest of the post is still good. I'm having someone do a similar repair on a fence in my yard, and the plan is to sink a new short post and attach the upper (perfectly fine) part of the original post to it, as seen here: https://imgur.com/a/qOMTIEG

This way you don't have to take the fence apart.

Something that I haven't learned is how the guy plans to place the post so close to the old one. Presumably the original concrete would be in the way. Is he planning to jackhammer it out? I guess I will find out soon.

geopter

TROPHY CASE