fertilizer

One thing that is lucky about the slow start the garden got this year, is that by the time I was doing my later plantings (watermelon, squash) I had learned from some failures/disappointments from the first plantings. One of those was the importance of fertilizing.

Although we intended to fertilize the whole garden with manure and leaves, most of this went to just two beds. I thought since the land hadn't been used for a garden for at least several years (perhaps never), the soil was probably chock full of nutrients and fertilziing wouldn't be a problem. It probably wasn't, but fertilization would have helped.

The thing about fertilization is that it helps plants grow stronger, making them more resistant to bugs and disease. Used in a targeted way, it also helps the plants grow faster than weeds, increasing the likelihood of the vegetables' triumph over the weeds.

I didn't research fertilization options too much, and I didn't get my soil tested (I will next year though). I just found a recipe and scoured the gardening store looking for the ingredients. The primary ingredient is a seed meal of some sort - the only one I found was cottonseed meal. The secondary ingredient is lime. You use about eight times as much cottonseed meal as lime, and mix them together. I just put a small scoop of this (1/4 cup) where I was planting seeds and mixed it in with the hand trowel. The watermelon and the celery seem to love it, but the summer squash that I planted has been lackluster. Actually, come to think of it, I may or may not have given fertilizer to the summer squash.

I also bought a container of seaweed extract. It seemed expensive, but you dilute a tablespoon in a gallon of water, which has been enough for a whole bed of vegetables. I think it will last at least a season or two. The celery has always responded noticeably to fertilization. I hope to do some experimentation next year so that I can compare growth, insect and disease resistance, size of harvest, and ultimately taste for plants depending on the fertilization.

tomatoes - good news and bad news

soon-to-be-ripe cherokee purple tomato

The tomatoes have been ripening quickly. The first cherry tomatoes only took about two days to go from pale green to red!

BUT - I had trouble with blossom end rot and sun scald. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on - I did see a few insects on the plants, and I blamed them at first. But after cutting into every bad tomato that I picked, doing lots of googling, and talking to some farmers, I think it was just that the blossom end rot and sun scald created opportunities for insects. I also put yellow sticky paper up around the tomato bed. I would recommend this because it showed me which flying insects were hanging around my tomatoes. Turns out there wasn't anything damaging in large numbers, just some flies.

small spot of blossom end rot (seriously, in bad cases it basically covered the whole tomato)

what the blossom end rot looks like on the inside. In every case, it went much deeper than it
looked like it would on the outside.

First - blossom end rot. It is caused by calcium deficiency in the soil but also by watering at night. This is the third year I've grown tomatoes and I have always watered them at night and never had this problem. But now I know. I tried eating the parts that didn't look damaged by blossom end rot, but they are not tasty.

two tomatoes with blossom end rot - the one on the left was picked early, before the rot spread
and before insects took advantage. The one on the right was picked late,
after the rot spread and insects binged on it.

Second - sun scald. I think this was caused by the long stretch of very hot weather we got. These were just small spots and if I brought the tomatoes right when they began to ripen, bugs didn't get to them. So I was able to just cut off the sun scald and eat the tomato anyway.

tomato with two spots of sunscald

Two things for next year: I am going to plant repelling flowers like marigolds and borage around the tomatoes. I may not have insect trouble with tomatoes this year, but as I've said before, I'm going to be much more proactive next year. Second, I thought with 20 tomato plants designated for canning, I would have an easier time getting large amounts of fruit ripened at once. So far I am getting a handful of tomatoes every day. In addition, I began examining the canning books to see how many tomatoes you need for a pint of tomato sauce. It is a lot! I think it was 10 pounds per pint. So, I will actually at least double my tomato plants next year, or plan my garden for summer eating and buy a ton of tomatoes direct from a farmer.

I must say I was very relieved when I determined that the tomato problems were not caused by insects. I am upset about losing the squash, but I would be DEVASTATED if I didn't get the tomato crop I wanted. For the last couple of weeks I have been able to bring in lots of perfect tomatoes so I'm feeling hopeful!

unsuccessful vegetable update

Three crops have been disappointing - carrots, onions, and broccoli.

The carrots seemed to have a high germination rate, but very few grew to be seedlings - maybe 10 instead of the 200 or so I was expecting. The ones that made it past seedling stage seemed to do well, but I harvested a couple of them and they tasted really bad. I think the problem was the soil - I did an unsupported raised bed and through some combination of wind and rain, the bed spread out until it was only a few inches off the ground. This exposed the top of the root.

The onions also seemed to have a high germination rate, but even fewer grew to be seedlings and none of them grew past that stage.

I planted two types of broccoli, with mixed results. The arcadia didn't germinate well (40%) but those that germinated grew well. The Thompson germinated well (100%) but only two survived past the seedling stage. The problem here seems to be more about timing - we had such a long spring that by the time the soil was warm enough for broccoli germination, it quickly got too hot for broccoli to flower. My plants are still growing strong, just not producing anything edible. See, they are huge!

Arcadia broccoli plant

I thought I would be able to do a second planting of all three crops for fall harvest, but after doing a bit more research about the soil needs of carrots, onions, and broccoli it turns out that is not the case for onions. Theoretically you could, because they take about four months to mature, but they don't germinate well in hot temperatures and they don't dry well in cold temperatures. Oh well, I will try again next year. Carrots and broccoli take a little more than two months to mature, so I will plant them soon. I'm planting carrots in the potato bed and broccoli in the old carrot bed, since the broccoli did reasonably well in that shady spot. My spouse tilled the potato bed so that it would be nice and soft for carrots - now I just need to fertilize the soil and stick the seeds in the ground!

birds as insect management

I know that experts on integrated pest managment will probably think this is way too obvious - but I had an epiphany the other day when touring a neighbor's garden. I pointed out hundreds of squash bug eggs and babies on her squash plants, and she wasn't concerned. She said that they always have them but they don't cause any problems. I wondered how this could be, and she said "the birds eat them!" At that moment I paused to listen to my environment and I heard the chattering of several birds, dozens probably, in her gorgeous tree-shaded yard. I noticed the bird bath and the bird houses scattered around. Returning to my garden, I heard.......nothing. For some reasons I don't have any birds in my yard!

Now I want to get birds into my garden, pronto! We do have one tree nearby but we will have to add a few nice homes (different types to attract different birds), places for the birds to rest in the actual garden, and a place or two that will provide them water. We are going to work on that this weekend, and I want to pick up a few bat houses while we're at it.

Of course, then I might have a problem with birds eating my garden, but I guess like everything else I will worry about that later.

pests

We're getting ready to go out of town for several days, so we've been focusing on getting the garden in tip top shape. We have caretakers lined up, but we don't want to ask too much of them. I've spent hours ruthlessly going after weeds this week, which has given me some time to reflect on this gardening season.

I know I've said it before, but I cannot emphasize enough how much time I have spent working on protecting my plants from bugs. Not bugs in general, but specific pests that are especially damaging and with high populations. These include japanese beetles, squash bugs, squash vine borers, and now cucumber beetles (though I've really only seen a few of the latter). I don't completely mind this work, but I would really like to avoid it in the future.

I have spent far more time working on the squash bug eggs and japanese beetles than I have on weeding. I don't mean this to discourage people from gardening - the opposite, actually. I believe a proactive stance towards certain insects is best. Usually that means spraying harmful chemicals, but when you're not willing to do that, prevention is much better than treatment. Especially as these problems are rampant in the area I live - one family told us that they lose their squash every year and they never knew why. After hearing us talk about vine borers, they realize that is what's going on. They were blaming themselves. Since you are almost guaranteed to have these unwelcome visitors try to take up residence, stopping them before they do damage makes the most sense.

I will say I have given up on the squash bug eggs. It just took too much time and after the vine borers, it seems highly unlikely that we will ever get anything to eat from these plants. I do still go out and capture the squash bugs - they still come out of hiding when the plant is sprayed, and they have started to live under the boards we laid out. They are pretty easy to get rid of once you see them. There have been dozens under one of the board every time I pick it up. I don't think the bugs grow fast enough to be ones that hatched from eggs on the plant, they must be coming from somewhere else. According to my research, it takes about a week for eggs to hatch, and then about a month for bugs to grow to be adults. Unless a bunch hatched before I ever noticed the eggs.

We have made the decision to pull up the last galeux d'eyesines plant. It was continuing to grow new vines and form new blossoms, but the plant overall looked really ill. If we were going to be here it might have been a more difficult decision, but we also have to worry about our watermelon plants. I pulled it and have left it on the squash bed as a trap for a couple of days - I'm hoping it continues to attract all of the bugs so I can kill them.

The zucchini is looking okay, but not great. I don't know if we will get any more zucchinis from it before it dies.

We're going to dust the watermelons with diatamaceous earth and wrap the stems in aluminum foil before we leave. I also gave the squash trellis to the watermelon - hopefully being off the ground will help, somehow.

(8/9)

squash update and new trellis

Although I said I was giving up on the squash, you knew I wouldn't be able to totally do it. I'm not inspecting the leaves the way I was, but I did decide that if the plants were trellised, it would be easier to find and remove bug eggs. My spouse and I together designed this tent-style trellis that will be easy to store and easy to put up next year. The squash plant seems to love it - though I did have to uproot some of the areas where it attached, it has grown quite a bit since we put the trellis up.

This is the trellis, modeled by two watermelon plants.

I'm considering trying to grow squash again - just once more. If I do, I will be extremely proactive about insects and I won't add any new vegetables, so I can focus my attention and energy on successfully growing squash. I know now the importance of checking your garden every day - I would train the squash (so it didn't grow through the neighbor's fence), inspect it, put out insect traps, etc.

However, the squash plant that had the large fruit set on it is officially dead. It was looking pretty bad near the root, but one of the vines still looked strong, so I put extra dirt around its root and gave it some water in hopes that it would become the new root. Each day it looked worse and today, the large fruit had fallen off. It's been 10 days since we performed squash surgery, so I don't know if the plant died because of the surgery or because we didn't find all of the borers. The other plant that we found about a dozen small borers in looks really good - for now - though it doesn't have any fruit set.

The zucchini is still growing strong and we've harvested several. A summer squash that I planted later is growing slowly - maybe it is working on its roots or maybe it doesn't like the heat wave we've had.

(7/28)

canning green beans

We used the canner two nights in a row! We're on fire!

We harvested the beans this morning - some were overdue to be picked, which will affect the flavor, but not much we can do about that now. We mostly harvested kentucky wonders and a few cannellini lingots. The blue lake are not ready to be picked yet.

We got one jar of cannellini lingots, and we used a special jar for them because we want to be able to compare the taste after canning - seed catalogs do not consisently talk about the preserving profile of different varieties, so we have to do our own experiments.

The only other choices we made were: whether to cut the beans into one inch sections or leave them whole (after clipping off the ends), and whether to cook the beans before canning them. We got a late start so I chose the lazy option both times - we left them whole and we cold packed them.

Looking forward to eating them! This run with the canner went a little bit more smoothly. We're getting this stuff under our feet.

(7/21)

canning potatoes

We canned potatoes tonight. I gave about a half pound to one neighbor and set aside another two pounds to give to other neighbors, and we were worried we wouldn't be able to fill the 10 jars that our canner can hold. But we had more than enough! I will make a rough guess that each pint jar can hold about a half pound of potatoes, because I estimate we made it through 2/3 of the potatoes before we ran out of jars. The entire canning process takes a couple of hours, and we didn't want to do another round tonight. It takes longer than you might think, because we had to wait for water to boil at a few different points.

I soaked the potatoes in water for a minute or two before scrubbing them, to help loosen the dirt.

The methods are well-established and simple to follow, as long as you can handle precision. We have the directions that came with the canner and two books, and the instructions were basically the same. I definitely recommend reading the instructions thoroughly before you begin so that you are prepared for the next steps - for example, there are several points where you need to have boiling water ready. Next time I think I will make a step by step outline for ourselves that indicates when we need to put water on to boil, and how much. It's easier than going to the book every two minutes to double check and to look ahead to the next steps to make sure you're ready.

The only other thing I would do differently is get more heavy-duty potholders. When we poured boiling water on top of the canning jars in the canner, we both burned ourselves a little.


I've never eaten canned potatoes before, other than sweet potatoes, so I'm not sure how we will use all ten jars (plus we will probably can as many jars of the german butterballs). I'm getting excited for the winter!

first green bean harvest

Here are the green beans we harvested. The top photo shows the cannellini lingots - a pretty small harvest. Later I was looking at my records from when I ordered seeds, and it turns out I intended these for dry soup beans, not for canning green beans. That's okay, they can be used for both.


The next photo shows the harvest from the kentucky wonders. Seems like so much!


We picked beans that were long, and rounded - particularly where we could see the actual beans inside the pod. I'll let you know how they taste once we start opening up the cans, but one of my sources said that when the beans are bulging out (as the bottom bean is in the photo below) they are actually a little overripe, and they won't taste as tender as the flatter beans (the top bean) will.


There were quite a few that were ready! We will can tonight.

I want to separate out the kentucky wonder and the blue lake, so that I know if one of them has a better flavor or holds up better in canning. But the way the beans grew, it is hard to tell which is which. I'm trying to do at least one can that it all one edge of the bed so that I can be pretty sure they are kentucky wonder, and at least one can that is all the other edge of the bed so I can be pretty sure they are blue lake. My spouse picked these beans and he thinks we really didn't get any blue lakes, only the kentucky wonders.

re-doing the bean trellis

The bean trellis failed on us - after it broke in the wind storm, my spouse propped it up with extra support, but a few weeks later the bamboo poles were completely falling over with the weight of the beans.

He went and bought relatively inexpensive wood and built a taller, stronger trellis. He built the frame without using his saw, he just screwed the wood together and braced it using string to the fence and to the ground using stakes. Then he tied string between the old top and the new top. At this point, it really seems impossible to undo the strings, so hopefully the bean vines will figure out that they have new room to grow up.


I really like the way it looks, and it's easier to walk around when I'm doing japanese beetle duty. I don't have to duck under six strings, there is only one that is in my way now. We only spent about 30 bucks on the wood and twine, and we should be able to unscrew the wood to store it over the winter. The photo above was taken a few weeks after the new trellising was built - as you can see, the beans quickly vined to the top of the new trellis. I think it's about eight feet tall - I can't reach the top leaves for picking japanese beetles.

It is important to me to garden inexpensively, and this seems like a good option for beans. Ideally we would have had a plan for this last fall and we could've been on the lookout for something free, something re-used...but it is what it is. We also should have switched the new, taller trellis more quickly - the vines wrapped around each other into huge clusters that are really hard to pick beans out of.

squash surgery

We tried the surgery to salvage the squash last night. I don't really care about the zucchini plant but I will be sad to lose the galeux d'eyesines squash. I'm excited to try them, and I was really hoping to be able to give a few to friends and family. They travel better than tomatoes or spinach. So we're going to do what we can.

leaves wilting like this is one of the signs of squash vine borer larvae in your plant.

Galeux d'eyesines squash with evidence of squash vine borer larvae damage near the root - see the orange sawdust-like substance? That shouldn't be there.

zucchini with same stuff

We went outside with a small knife, the bucket of water, toothpicks, and gloves. My spouse used the knife to cut vertically above the holes where we could see the orange strawdust-like substance that squash borers produce.

The plant felt pretty strong - it was actually difficult to cut into, which is good news (less damage so far). But, we couldn't find any caterpillars (squash borers at larvae stage). We moved on to the zucchini - same thing.


When he cut into the last plant, the second winter squash, we found about a dozen teeny-tiny caterpillars. I really couldn't even see them from where I was standing - they were about the size of a short grain of rice. We also found one large one, about an inch long. He would scrape them out, then drop them in the bucket of soapy water. The toothpicks came in handy here, since they were so small it was hard to get them with the knife. After he had scraped everything rotten out of the plant, we declared the surgery over and I put a shovelful of rich dirt on top of the wound. This makes the plant more likely to live through the harrowing experience.

photo of an out-of-focus small borer larvae on a toothpick.

Now that we'd seen them, we went back to the other two and tried again. We still couldn't find any on the zucchini but we found a few on the other winter squash plant. They made it through the night without collapsing, but I expect it will take a few days to know if they really lived through the surgery. And of course we have no idea if we got all of the borers or not. I was noticing a few other places I thought we should check, so we might be performing surgery again tonight...

Update: the plants all lived through the surgery, but we didn't get all the borers. I think the problem was that the plants were so big by the time we did the surgery, and the roots were so stocky and thick that we just missed them with our cut. It's also possible that new eggs hatched. Twelve days later the second plant died, which was the one with the big fruit on it. I do not expect the third plant to live because it had serious damage and I had to remove the main root. The photos below show the borers and the shredded roots a little better. But, it's still there two days after these photos were taken and the plant is still alive, so maybe there is reason to hope.




If I plant squash again, I will use an aggressive strategy to prevent the borers. They seem like a more serious problem to me because they completely killed two of our plants before we got any produce from them. At least with the squash bugs there's a better chance that you will get to collect a little on all of your hard work. I will use trellising, wrap the base of the plant in foil, put out yellow pans filled with water, sprinkle diatamaceous earth, and spray neem oil. At this point I am not sold on row covers - they seem like more trouble than they're worth because they also keep out pollinators. I haven't heard good things about them from the forums I've read.

I might wait a few years before trying squash again in hopes of discouraging the borers from hanging around my garden - but then again, there was no garden in this spot for several years so I'm not sure this will help. The only reason I'm still considering this is that I'm certain the yard was sprayed using artificial chemicals, probably excessive amounts in last two years. I think it's possible that in the process of transitioning this space of land from conventional to organic, I've been hit hard with insects that were being suppressed unnaturally and unsustainably prior to us. I don't actually know if this is how it works but it seems plausible.

bean update - time for canning!

I've been so focused on finding japanese beetles on my bean plants that I didn't notice that there are a TON of beans ready for harvest! Usually I really enjoy finding the baby vegetables and watching them grow until they are ready to be eaten, but this time I didn't even notice what was going on. Pictured above is a baby bean - I didn't get a good photo of the more mature beans.

I'm not exactly sure how many will be ready to be picked. Only one of my resources gives a tip for knowing when to harvest, and it says to pick them when they are still immature because they taste better - before the beans start to swell. That makes it seem like they should be flat. But every time I buy green beans at the farmers market or get them in my CSA, they are nice and round. It seems like that is what I would be looking for, so I'm just going to pick the ones that I would want to eat and can them.

I was not prepared to can this early - I need to wash the jars, buy rings (I got several canning jars off freecycle but they didn't have any type of lid), take stock of the other canning supplies I have, figure out exactly how this whole canning thing works, and then find a chunk of time to actually do the work!

potato harvest, part I

We harvested the rest of the cranberry red potatoes, leaving one plant to see if the potatoes get bigger in a week.

We pushed the flat fork that we use for compost down several inches away from the base of the plant, then lifted up. We erred on the side of too far away while we figured out just what the potatoes would like when harvested, which I recommend. The soil was really easy to work with, probably because we worked it so much before we planted potatoes.

Like many vegetables, the roots extended about as far as the leaves did.

we found 2 or 3 rotten potatoes, but there weren't any widespread problems

I weighed our harvest using our bathroom scale, and it said we got 10 lbs, but it's probably a little less because the bathroom scale is not that precise.I'm basically happy with that yield. There were several tiny potatoes (about the size of a dime) that weren't even worth collecting, which is why I left one plant to grow for another week. I wonder if we didn't jump the gun on the harvest or if there will always be small potatoes.

We planted one lb of seed potatoes, and according to the seeds company you can expect about 10 lbs of harvest for each lb. At 5.50/lb (plus shipping) for seed potatoes, these come out to about 50 cents/lb for edible potatoes. I think most vegetables are much more money-saving - we paid about $2 for a packet of spinach seed, used less than half, and got about 4 lbs worth. 25 cents for a pound of organic spinach is absolutely incredible!

cranberry red potato harvest 7/19

The main benefit that I can see now of growing your own potatoes is the variety you can get. Most of the farmers at our local market sell pretty standard potatoes. Growing your own, you get to choose your favoriate varieties and even try new ones. And it does save money if you only think about the seed - I think market potatoes usually cost 3 or 4 dollars per pound. But when you factor in the cost of materials, not to mention the labor, I doubt it saves money. Still, it's fun!

Now, since I made a critical error and bought early potatoes which do not store well, we have to decide what we will do with our bounty. I want to share them with our neighbors, who have been so extraordinarily kind, generous, and welcoming to us. My spouse wants to can them. We will probably do some of each.

squash update - it's not good

I had a post written over the weekend about how well my squash was doing. It was growing so fast!

zucchini

It looked beautiful!

galeux d'eyesines winter squash

I already had fruit set!

(can you see the baby winter squash hanging on the vine?)

But things change quickly.
First, I saw a couple of clusters of small reddish-orange balls on a couple of my winter squash leaves.


I didn't know what they were and I found them right before I went to Saturday market, so I took a couple of photos and asked the MGs and my farmer about them. They were squash bug eggs, probably one of the most common problems affecting squash. They can really devastate a crop, so I knew I would need to go home and remove them. I tried scraping them off with my gloved hand, but they are too small and sticky. I then tried using a paper towel soaked in soapy water, but what worked best was just scraping them off with my fingernail. Honestly, it grosses me out to think that they are bug eggs so I just pretend like they are little clusters of seeds - that is what they feel like so it works. Anyway, I put a bucket of soapy water under the leaf because some of the eggs fall right off, and I want them to land in the bucket of soapy water. Plus when they stick to my fingers I just dip my fingers in and they fall right off. I know some of the eggs landed in the dirt, and I don't know if they will still hatch or not - but there wasn't much I could do about it so I tried not to worry about it.

(close-up of recently hatched squash bugs and their eggs)

As soon as I started looking for more, it went from bad to worse. I ended up spending FOUR HOURS searching my four squash plants for egg clusters. They were on the underneath of several leaves, so it took careful attention to detail. It was quite laborious, but I felt like I got them all. Occasionally I found a group that were recently hatched, which was even grosser to me because they look like spiders. I had a serious arachnophobia when I was younger and though I am much better now, I still have a visceral reaction to the sight or thought of spiders. Generally when I put the bucket of soapy water underneath them and brushed them, they fell right into the water. Some of them ran away and I just tried to squish them.

Then of course I went out the next day and found a couple hundred more. Evidently the bugs are egg-laying machines, so it is important to take a three-pronged approach - kill the eggs, kill the babies, kill the adults. I heard if you put a board on the ground, the adults will sleep under it so it is a relatively easy way to kill a bunch of them at once (I've tried this and never found any underneath the 5 or 6 boards we laid out). Another way to find adults is to spray the plants with water around the roots (where they hang out, away from the light) - they don't like being wet, so they crawl up the leaves to dry off. I've been doing this every morning and generally find two or three.

Then, the second problem. While I was out there, I noticed one of the plants was really dead. The leaves were all yellow and limp and it was obviously done with life. I pulled it, and it came right up as though it wasn't attached to anything! Upon further inspection, the plant was rotted at the base of the stem. I came inside and searched and quickly figured out that it was squash vine borers. Although my other three plants (two winter and one summer) seem healthy, I thought I should go check on them...and I can see that they look similar at the base of the vine too.

It doesn't seem like there's much I can do at this point - obviously you can't reverse the damage, and it looks so bad to me that I would be surprised if the plants live. But I suppose it's worth trying. So far, there's a lot more about preventing than getting rid of them: kill the adults before they lay eggs (put out yellow pans filled with water. They are attracted to the color yellow but then they fall in the water and drown), or kill the eggs before they hatch and burrow into the vine (They look like small black dots).

The only option at this point is emergency surgery - cut a slit in the stem where you can tell the borers are doing their damage, and kill whatever borers are inside. The surgery could kill the plant, but it will die anyway, so it's really the thing to do. I guess it's better than nothing. So frustrating!

When I was 8 years old I had a small garden, and I grew watermelon and pumpkins but never got to enjoy the fruits of my childish labor because of the squash bugs. I think I am just not meant to grow squash!

watermelon germination

Well...only two of the three types of watermelon I planted germinated. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which one I planted where, but I'm almost certain that livingston seed's petite yellow is the one that failed. I'm disappointed and very concerned that even the two that germinated won't set fruit before the weather gets cold. Plus, I'm going to have to be very vigilant about pests, after the trouble I've had with the squash - more on that later.

Next year, I will almost certainly start watermelon seeds indoors. Maybe in the south people can direct seed watermelon and it will ripen in their long growing season, but here in zone 6 it doesn't seem like it will be a success - especially since we had such a late start to summer.

They took a surprisingly long time to germinate - at least two weeks for the first one that poked through (pictured below) and even longer for the second.

pepper update

A few weeks after I transplanted the peppers, they were growing several more leaves and buds, but did not seem to be getting taller. One of the bell peppers does not seem to be growing at all, and is a funny (pale) color. And, one of the strongest ones (bottom right of photo below) was snapped in half - perhaps by a bunny. It is still alive though.


Now they are taller - probably two feet or so.


The peppers I bought, which are jalapenos, have fruit on them and they will be ripe very soon! I am so excited about that.

Though we thought we bunny-proofed the fence, I found a baby bunny in the garden one day when I was out there weeding. I had my dog chase the bunny out, so we could see where the hole in the fence was (don't try that at home! I knew I was risking something awful but we've noticed that our dog stops chasing bunnies and squirrels when she gets close enough to catch them). There are some bushes on the north side of the fence that made it difficult to see the smallest gap between the ground and the fence. My spouse hammered the fence down lower but we will probably have to put some boards down to keep the rabbits from digging underneath the fence. We haven't seen any more rabbits or evidence of damage.

UPDATE: The peppers continue to grow well, and several have fruit set on them. I was hoping to get a total of 60 peppers, and currently I can find 10 peppers growing (a couple of them are pictured below). Currently none of the rainbow bell pepper collection plants have fruit, only the yolo wonders. I have been very dissatisfied with all of the seeds I bought from Livingston.

potato harvest - surprise!

After the last post when I was so worried about my potatoes getting leafroll virus, I took a leaf sample to the farmer's market so I could ask my farmers as well as the master gardener's. The MGs are a great resource and incredibly eager to help, but they usually have to do some research before giving me an answer. They thought it was an insect because they focused on the holes in the leaves, and we looked through their pest book and found a picture of damage done by potato leaf hoppers that looked exactly like the leaf I had brought in. This was actually good news to me - much easier to deal with than a disease.

But then I took the leaf to my farmer, who said there was nothing wrong with it - it was just ready for harvest! I hoped he was right but I was skeptical because the photo I saw looked uncanny, and my resources all indicated that it was too early for potato harvest. But I also know that the farmer is most likely to be right, because it is his full-time job rather than a hobby (even if the MGs are experts, my understanding is that most are volunteers so they just haven't had as much experience as a full-time farmer).

I came home hopeful and decided to yank up one of each variety of potatoes I planted. It was so exciting to find a bunch of real potatoes under each vine! It makes it totally worth the wait:-) But they were pretty small, so I looked up each variety from the seeds of change catalog and found that indeed, these were both early varieties that take an estimated 100 days until maturity. It hasn't quite been 100 days (I was able to use the time stamp on my camera to verify this) so I will wait a little longer, but I am so relieved.

Here is a photo of the harvest from two plants:


Here is a photo of the cranberry red, which was a gorgeous fuschia color!


We will be using them in our food tonight...I'll let you know how the taste compares in a later post!

tomato update

On June 30th, the romas and cherokee purples had blossoms, though the brandywine did not. Every single one of the tomato plants seems to be growing well - a nice surprise since there were several I didn't think would survive, but I planted anyway because I had the space. We were starting to get several little tomatoes on the two tomato plants i purchased, which were more mature than the ones I started from seed.

Two weeks later, every single plant has little tomatoes on it! Way more than I can count. And, I've already harvested one early tomato from one of the plants I purchased. It was DELICIOUS! There is nothing like the flavor of the first tomato of the season.


My only two concerns at this point are continuing to stake the plants up as they grow larger and heavier, and canning the tomatoes - I'm worried they will ripen at a pace that will have us continually canning a few quarts rather than doing a big session, as I would prefer to do. Oh, and we will be out of town for 10 days in August and I don't want them to ripen while we are gone!

Potato update

It's not good, folks. I noticed the potatoes weren't looking quite as good toward late June - I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I made a mental note to keep a close eye on them. When I returned from my trip, they were noticeably sickly. They had somehow shrank, the color of the leaves had gone from lush green to almost yellow, and the leaves were curled and dry.

My first thought was that they needed water, but I researched potato problems in my books - found nothing other than potato blight. So I googled the symptoms, and diagnosed the problem as "potato leaf roll virus." On the bright side, this won't completely kill the crop...

But on the (much more weighty, in my opinion) down side, it will reduce the quality and quantity of the potato crop, you can't make it go away once it hits, and... it could easily spread to my tomatoes and peppers. I can see the first hints of evidence that it has spread to two of my tomato plants. I'm very upset and honestly, not sure what to do.

These were certified disease-free seed potatoes, and we know nothing has been planted in this spot for years. It's just frustrating to put this much work, time, and money into something and not accomplish the stated goal.

japanese beetles

Well, it happened. I found dozens of Japanese beetles on the beans, and a few on my potatoes. From what I've observed, they are THE major pest to contend with in central Illinois. I was surprised because all of my friends and neighbors assured me that although they'd heard Japanese beetles were a problem, they'd never actually experienced them. I was not so lucky.

I had already been advised that the best way to get rid of them was to take a bucket of soapy water, set it under the plant, and shake the plant gently. Their instinct is to drop to the ground when the plant shakes, so they land in the bucket and quickly drown. I'll spare you the photo of the floating bugs:)

For me, this was only somewhat effective. Any that fell in the bucket were taken care of - they swim around for a while but they aren't able to get out, so they do die (perhaps cruel, I know). BUT the problem was that many of them would fly away rather than dropping. Perhaps the species is adapting, but I don't even think I was able to get half of them. Plus, it might work for certain types of plants but for the beans, it was logistically difficult to put the bucket in just the right spot.

What I found works best is to wear garden gloves, put one gloved hand underneath a leaf with a beetle on it (in case the beetle does drop off), then pick the beetles one by one and throw them into the bucket on the ground. This way they couldn't fly away, and I could tell if each individual was taken care of by the splash in the bucket. I did this three times a day and sometimes it took a half hour, because even doing this one by one some of them escaped (for example, there are often several on one leaf, and they fly away easily). I would do several loops around the bean bed, staying out there until I couldn't find any more. I found that they were the thickest at the hottest part of the day, which motivated me to get out to the garden at a time I would normally insist on staying inside. Also, I've noticed that the beetles are more likely to just drop off the leaf in the early morning before the sun is out, but later in the day they are more likely to fly away.

I was really panicked about this because they did an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time [see sample of demolished leaf photo below], and I found them soon before we were leaving on a week-long trip. When I returned, I was prepared to mourn the loss of my bean crop...


but to my surprise, the beans were living and continuing to grow. Yes, the beetles were still there and yes, they had continued to do damage in the week I was gone. But they didn't destroy any of the crops. They may have stunted their growth, and we will see what happens in the rest of the summer...but for now, I feel like my bean crop is safe. Hooray!

I would recommend taking care of the beetles the way I did. It can seem daunting to remove the beetles one by one, and perhaps gross - but as long as I had gloves on, it didn't bother me to pick up the beetles. And I could definitely tell each day that there were fewer beetles than there had been the day before at that time. Plus, beetles reproduce, so each beetle you get rid of is saving you exponential headache the following year. I would say about 1/3 of the beetles I find are engaged in reproductive activities when I snatch them and dunk them in the water. After they mate, they deposit eggs in the soil that turn into grubs, that turn into more beetles. Best to nip that in the bud!

Freezing spinach

For spinach, you have the option of canning or freezing. You could probably dry it as well, but for us there was no question - freezing was likely to have the best texture and flavor. But you can't just rinse the leaves and shove them into the freezer - I'm not sure what would happen if you did that, but at the very least it would taste bad.

We rinsed the spinach leaves by dunking them in water, shaking them around, and then putting them in a colander. My spouse rinsed them before tearing off the parts he didn't want to preserve, while I removed the parts I didn't want before rinsing. I think either method is fine but my method meant having to change the water fewer times. Sometimes a clump of dirt or a little big would come off, which is a normal part of growing food. We just picked the parts we would want to eat if we were making a salad - we probably could've included more leaves, but I wanted this frozen spinach to be extra good! In the photo below you can see the bowl of spinach ready to be blanched.


Then, you blanch. This stops the growing process. We decided to use the steam blanching method rather than the immersion blanching method. For immersion blanching, you put the spinach in lightly boiling water for two minutes (precision is important when preserving food). For steam blanching, according to my resources, you just increase the time by 50% - so three minutes. We used a steamer pot and put a very thin layer of leaves in.


Then, you ice bath them. This stops the cooking process. This was kind of difficult - we didn't have enough ice on hand. But we did the best we could and I would just spoon the steamed spinach into the ice bath, swirl them around with my hand until they felt cooler than room temperature. Then we put them in a colander to drain.


Then, you remove the excess water. The more water you remove, the longer the spinach will keep in the freezer. My source recommended using a salad spinner, but we didn't have one so we did the best we could using a spoon to squeeze as much water out as possible. The following photo shows my spouse trying to squeeze as much excess water out as he could - even though we thought the spinach was well-drained, once it was in the bag we could see that there was a lot of water still hanging around.


Then, you put them in bags. We used quart-sized freezer bags and labelled the date, the vegetable, and any other information. For example, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to remove the stems or not so we did one with stems, one without. We're almost certain that you don't have to remove the stems, which is nice because doing so is time consuming. But, perhaps it will taste better.

We harvested enough for two quart-sized bags. In the future I will try to do more to get more water out, because I can tell there are a lot of ice crystals in the bags already. I don't think this will hurt the flavor as long as we use it relatively quickly - I'm guessing three months? I will say that we sampled some of the spinach and the quality - both taste and texture - was phenomenal when judged against the standard of supermarket frozen spinach. I'm excited to see how it holds up!