Garden Update
Well, my posting has kind of fallen by the wayside over the past weeks since we have been doing much outside. I'll try to give you a quick garden update right now before we head to the local swimmin' hole.
This year was a more difficult year to grow things. We planted as soon as we could in April and got hit up with a variety of troubles - early blight, squash beetles (I'm still battling these even now in August!), grasshoppers, Japanese beetles. When I make my rounds in the morning, I usually just grab a spray bottle with Dawn dish soap in it and spray to groups of black blister beetles as I see them.
Despite these gardening trials, we have managed to have a fair amount of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers and jalapenos. The tomatoes and cukes are coming to an end now and the 3rd planting of zucchinis are starting to grow - hopefully, I will be able to fend off the squash beetles! Along with the zukes are pumpkins and watermelon plants. The pepper plants seem to have survived the heat indexes of 105 and are still producing green & red peppers and lots of jalapenos. One of my favorite things to do is to pick a red pepper and eat it like an apple - sweet and yummy and lots of vitamin C and lycopenes. I'll try to get a post up about what I am doing with bucketfuls of jalapenos later on . . .
Soooo, onto some pictures! Here is where the pickling cukes were planted. They have been uprooted and tossed over the fence to the goats. Now there are Sugar Peas planted here.
This year was a more difficult year to grow things. We planted as soon as we could in April and got hit up with a variety of troubles - early blight, squash beetles (I'm still battling these even now in August!), grasshoppers, Japanese beetles. When I make my rounds in the morning, I usually just grab a spray bottle with Dawn dish soap in it and spray to groups of black blister beetles as I see them.
Despite these gardening trials, we have managed to have a fair amount of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers and jalapenos. The tomatoes and cukes are coming to an end now and the 3rd planting of zucchinis are starting to grow - hopefully, I will be able to fend off the squash beetles! Along with the zukes are pumpkins and watermelon plants. The pepper plants seem to have survived the heat indexes of 105 and are still producing green & red peppers and lots of jalapenos. One of my favorite things to do is to pick a red pepper and eat it like an apple - sweet and yummy and lots of vitamin C and lycopenes. I'll try to get a post up about what I am doing with bucketfuls of jalapenos later on . . .
Soooo, onto some pictures! Here is where the pickling cukes were planted. They have been uprooted and tossed over the fence to the goats. Now there are Sugar Peas planted here.
These are the 4 mounds we did a month ago or so. There are zucchini, pumpkins and watermelon growing here:
This is a patch of Green Bell pepper plants that we got from the local feed coop. They were heading to the trash can (since "most" folks think gardening ends at the end of summer) - Thankfully Joe was nice enough to pass them our way and so we ended up with over 200 plants! We passed them out to some friends and neighbors and also managed to get about 40 plants into this spot.
More pumpkin and striped zucchini growing near the edge of a garden spot:
This is one of the sweet potato patches that we planted quite a few months ago:
This is a spot of renegade cukes and some cantalope plants that we rescued from the dumpster!
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