Well, I'll Be!

Blight and fungus on the tomatoes. 

Cucumber beetles and squash bugs.

Bunnies taking up residence and eating every leaf off the pepper and jalapeno plants.

Unbearably non-stop 100+ degree days that caused us to retreat to the cool shelter of the house.

And then a miracle. 
Just when I had written off the garden for the year as a semi-disaster, the heat broke and I ventured out to find something amazing.

Today's harvest!

 

The Roma plants were laden down with ripe fruit.  There's pasta sauce in my future this weekend, I think.  And my first ripe Sugary Baby watermelon and J.'s first cabbage.

Not only had the garden survived, but it was regenerating.

Those green beans that I had left to dry so I could harvest for seed were actually re-growing and had new blooms on them.

The cucumbers didn't succumb to the cuke beetles and were climbing like mad up the trellis.  Bees were busily flitting between the vines' flowers, their legs laden with pollen.  Will we have cukes this year after all?

Then my gaze turns to the tomatoes that I thought were dead or would be shortly.  All have a ton of new growth on them in the past few days.

Sharing their cages are the watermelon vines.  I found this little guy hanging on for dear life.  I'll have to take some old panty hose out there and build a sling for it.  I hate that the tomato cage is in the way in this picture and I have some others that are better, but I love this one the best because I actually captured an ant busy at his work.  Can you see him?

Click to biggify!

From the old comes the new.  And so it is in my garden.

If you like this post, you might also want to check out this week's Green Day, Farm Fresh Friday, Farmgirl Friday, Ole Saturday HomesteadingTrading Post and Eat. Make. Grow hops. 

God Bless Willis Carrier

It's still hot!  And that's what all the puppies look like at my house right now.  This is our 4th day straight of excessive heat warnings and it doesn't look like that will end until early next week.  Thank goodness!  It's so hot that the girls are laying hard boiled eggs!  *ba da BOOM!*

 97 degrees at 10 p.m.  tonight.  This does not bode well.

I hadn't been out more than 5 minutes on my way to water the garden and chickens and I was sweating like I'd stepped out of a sauna.  All the rain that we got late last week has now evaporated and the ground is hard as a rock. I thought I was going to have to use dynamite to get the garlic out of the ground tonight.  As it was, I broke a hand spade.

So, with this heat, we are watering pretty much everyday to keep the tomatoes from cracking.  The rest of the garden actually looks really good considering.  The cabbage heads are coming along nicely.  No more problems with bugs eating the leaves after I sprayed with Bonide Bt (it's organic!)

The watermelons are blooming and starting to stretch their legs, and our first spaghetti squash is starting to turn yellow.  We could pick it now at about 8 inches long, but I'm going to wait for it to turn.

One thing that is funny is the stevia plants.  They didn't like it outside, so I brought them in to water them in the sink and they LOVE it there.  Love the wet and the cooler temps, I guess.  I don't have the heart yet to kick them out but they will eventually need to find a new home.  Maybe in a window sill somewhere.

Stevia is really interesting.  You can pop the leaves right into your mouth and they taste like sugar.  They're a great natural way to flavor your tea, you can bake with them, etc.  You can dry the leaves and use them later.  A very cool plant!  I think I may post some more about it over the weekend.

Well, I need to go pay some bills and get organized for the weekend.  Since it's so hot outside and J. took care of the mowing last night, we'll be working on inside projects all weekend. 

Oh, and who's Willis Carrier?  The inventor of the electric air conditioner.   He's A-OK in my book.

Stay cool, my friends!

I'm sharing this with this week's Tuesday Garden Party.

Oh, No! It's Cabbagezilla

We farm bloggers, if I can call myself that, tend to make things look easy sometimes with all the pretty pictures and stories of idealized life on a beautiful farm.  All our critters are beautiful and well-behaved and our gardens are manicured as perfectly as the lawns in the rich folk's section of town. 

But it isn't all pretty flowers and copious harvests of veggies.  There's bugs to deal with and dirt under your fingernails and sweat and alot of times getting something to work right depends on what color socks you have on that day.  At least it seems that way to me.

So I'm going to air some of my dirty laundry here today.  Here it is in all its glory (click to biggify for an upclose look at the mean green mother from outer space):

I wouldn't get too close - it might take your arm off.  Cabbagezilla frightens me reminds me of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.  If it starts singing, we're in trouble.

Seriously...what the heck is wrong with that cabbage plant that it looks like it came from some other planet?  And I've got three of them that look the same way.  They came from the same pack of starts as the normal cabbage plants, which all have heads forming on them and are looking good.  Were they traumatized as seedlings?  Did I not talk to them enough?  :-)

Somebody told me that they will never form heads and that I should pull them, but now I'm kind of fascinated to see what happens with them.  Maybe they're just biding their time before they go on to break the current world record for largest cabbage of 125.9 pounds.

Any cabbage growers out there with any ideas on why this happens?  I could sure use some sage advice.

In a search for answers, I'm linking up to this week's Barn Hop, Tuesday Garden Party, Garden Life and Country Garden Showcase hops.

My Empire of Dirt

The gardening game has been called due to rain delay tonight, so I'm sheltering inside and listening to the man in black:  Johnny Cash's new song "Hurt".  It's a raw, hauntingly beautiful song.   I hope you enjoy listening to it as I give you a tour of what's going on in my own tiny little empire.

My cell phone camera doesn't even begin to capture the brilliant color on these lilies.

Not sure how these green beans snuck up on us. I swear they weren't there the night before!

Cabbage head beginning to form.  Notice the holes that indicate my sluggy friends have been at it.  I sprayed all the plants with an organic insecticidal soap a couple of days ago.

Sweet 2-week-old bunny snoozing in the shade of the tomato plants.


What's going on in your neck of the woods? 

Quick Garden Update

Home again, home again...lickety split!  Even though I had all the best intentions of posting pictures while we were at the Festival, it seems that my Android tablet didn't fully like Blogger's new interface.  Specifically, I couldn't alter the size of pictures.  Phooey!

So, since it's so late and I still have to unpack and re-orient to home life again, I'll finish this post that was supposed to go up on Saturday.  It's a quick look at what's growing in our fledgling garden right now.

Cabbage with a head starting to form?  What's weird is that we have 3 cabbage plants and, while 2 of them look normal like this, the third is twice as big and standing straight up.  I think it might be some kind of freakish, maneating cabbage possibly grown from irradiated seed.  We may see it dancing as it destroys Tokyo later this year.

Something is chomping on my cabbage.  I sprayed them with an organic pest repellent and they do look better, but there's still damage.  Could be slugs.  But I've been unable to locate exactly what's doing it.  If you've got any ideas, let me know please!

Here's one of the beds with the lettuce in the background (coming along nicely), cabbage next to it, and beans (left) and spaghetti squash (right) in the foreground.  I planted some Straight Eight cucumber seeds just to the left of the beans right before we left and we came back to discover that they have already sprouted!

Too bad there's not a blue ribbon for growing weeds.  I'd be a shoe-in!

And, finally, a shot of the onion and strawberry bed, and the potato bins in the background.  And more weeds.  *sigh* 

Well, tomorrow, I have a TON of pictures to share with you from the planting festival, so I hope you'll stop back by and check them out.

Signing off for some much needed shut eye,

Linking up late to the Country Garden Showcase.  Click to see what is goin' on in other folks' gardens this week.

Unplanned Gardening

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

 - Carl Sandburg

I'm the planner in the family and, well....J.?  Not so much.  So it wasn't surprising that he sprung on me at Home Depot this weekend that "wouldn't it be nice to plant some cabbage so that we could make slaw?"  Oh...and "those Early Girl tomatoes did so well last year, so maybe we should plant some of those also."

I hadn't planned for either of those and I could see my beautiful garden plan slipping away with every word.  (Hey...a little moment of melodrama never hurt anyone.)  But how could I say no to my one true love?

So two little Stonehead cabbage plants went in the cart along with two healthy-looking Early Girl tomato plants.  Little did I know (and I should have paid more attention) that those two cabbage plants were actually 8 cabbage plants!

J. accused me of being unhinged when I described this little cabbage plant as "cute"? It IS cute!

We planted everything tonight, with a couple of the cabbages going in the bed with the cucumbers, squash and beans.  I'm hoping that this won't be an issue since we'll be trellising everything and they'll have room.  I'm also going to move the lettuce over there, so that freed up just enough space to put the Early Girls on the south end of the westmost bed near the Romas.  The rest of the cabbages?  Planted in a raised bed in our backyard by the hot tub.  Which is where our blackberries are.  Speaking of....we planted another Apache thornlesss blackberry bush there as well tonight.

Storms are coming tomorrow and all next week it looks like, so I'll be keeping an eye on these tender little plants.  I hope it's not a washout like it was last week.  We're about 2.5" over average for this month and still running abot 20 degrees warmer than usual!

What were you up to this weekend?

This post is linked to the Country Homemaker Hop.  Check out what other folks are up to!