Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The latest garden news

Well I'm not posting a picture, but my garden is starting to look like crap. I guess its because its organic. Organic=lots of bugs. I'm planning to do a better job companion planting next year and hopefully deter some of the bugs that are destroying my garden. I noticed today that squash vine borers are taking out the remainder of my squash plants. Not only that, but they also have powdery mildew all over them. I'm not really that torn up over it though, I'm honestly getting sick of yellow squash and the plants are so big that they're creeping around the garden. Next year I'm putting them on dedicated hills... I now see the reasoning behind that.

Yesterday I went in-organic with my tomatoes. I had enough... I STILL don't have any red tomatoes and every time I find one starting to turn its rotten with squash bugs on it. I had it, I grabbed the bottle of sevin that Jason bought me when he was feeling sorry for me over the aphid epidemic and started spraying. Oddly enough as sad as I was to in-organic my garden it felt GOOD to get revenge on those bugs. Organic gardening is SO hard, you can stick to your guns and risk all your hard work going to the bugs or you can get some pesticides and ensure that you actually get to eat some of your crop. I'll try again next year. I only sprayed the tomatoes but I'm sure if I were an organic farmer that would negate my whole farm for 5 years... luckily I'm not.

But the positive thing about the garden today is that for one, I keep picking cantaloupe. I've picked about 20 so far, maybe a few more than that, and I have about 10 left out there to ripen. The downside is I am getting SICK of cantaloupe and it isn't as sweet as I would have liked it to have been. Oh well.

AND the okra is blossoming. I have never grown okra before or even seen an okra plant, I had no idea that they flowered so beautifully:

So that is pretty exciting. Hopefully we'll be eating some home grown okra soon!

1 comment:

AmyJ said...

Mmmmm... I love okra!!