Finally my Romas are ripening up! I still have an abundance of cherry tomatoes as well. I'd neglected to check on the garden all weekend, so I went out Monday afternoon to find the entire thing overrun with ripe tomatoes. Some of which has fallen to ground, but were still edible or ripening.

There is still a good amount in the process of ripening, and within a couple of days I should have doubled my harvest. If anyone has some good tomato recipe ideas, let me know!

Then I cut up all of the herbs and will be drying what I have left. Only my Bloodleaf remains in the containers. I've saved what I can of the soil, and while toss in some fertilizer when its time to reuse it in the spring.





In addition to harvesting tomatoes and herbs, I cleaned up the garden. I figure that if I go plant-by-plant, it will be easier to take care of in the end when I plant the bulbs. Weeds have been few and far between luckily. I uprooted all of the diseased squash, as the baby squash had started to rot as well. The salvia is flourishing, the begonias are holding their own, and the argeritum seems to be making a come back. The celosia died off a while ago.




My brussel sprouts are getting big and should be ready to pick soon!

Roma is here!

Yesterday's harvest. You'll note that I have a couple less-ripe tomatoes in the batch. The were knocked around a bit and fell off, so I had to take them in. My first ripe Roma tomato is in the batch, however. I can't wait to try him!


Below are some more on-the-vine shots. You can see the tomatoes beginning to ripen!

Cauliflower update

My cauliflower appears to have no hope of flowering. However, on a positive note, the damage done a couple of short weeks ago is completely gone. The plants look holeless and new. They're really quite lovely. But its sad given that my squash is now being destroyed in a few short days' time.

Photos documenting squash death

I've encountered a new problem: Fungus

The enemy has come in a new form: fungus. Its target? The yellow squash. Just the yellow squash. And it's such a pity too because the bees have finally taken notice of the squash blooms and fruit is finally growing!

Unfortunately, its too late in the season to justify the purchase of a fungicide to tackle this new problem. I'm likely going to just call it a wash, pick the few squash I have currentl, and focus on my tomatoes - the one great success of the garden (knock on wood). It's been nearly a month since I applied the Eight, and in the interest of keeping the horned worms at bay, I'll give them another spray down this weekend.

I'm afraid that each and every plant will lay victim so some form of pest or disease by the time the summer is over. It's been something of a trial by fire, and hopefully I escape the gauntlet with something to show for my energy.

On a more optimistic note, the new Martha Stewart Living came out this week. September Issue. In her gentle reminders, she suggested gathering up the last of the herbs to hang dry and store for the winter. I've been putting a good deal of consideration into freezing my oregano and marjoram in oil rather than drying. I mainly use those with pasta dishes that will get a dash of olive oil anyway. The dill can be dried.

My mother swears by laying herbs out flat on a paper towel and nuking them briefly in the microwave to dry rather than the hanging method. I may give this a try with my copious amounts of catnip. It will keep the leaves flat, while hanging generally leads to curled leaves.

Martha also suggested digging up the begonias to take inside for the winter. They're technical an annual, but with proper care, they should be fine for replanting in the spring. I also need to start thinking about which bulbs I want to plant for spring. I adore tulips, so they are, at the top of my list. I'm thinking about the grape hyacinth also, since they remind me of home.

Finally.

After the past month of my squash plants being in full bloom, the bees finally found them. I have regularly little pollen distributors out there now, and as luck would have it, three new baby squash on the way!







And here are a few obligatory green tomato shots. I've been getting a couple of these ripening every few days. The Roma are all still green, sadly.





Here's a snapshot of the garden itself. The Miracle Gro on the end is a solid 6 feet in some branches. It's been flopping out lately and I keep having to anchor it to the fences because it can't hold its own when during rainstorms.

The current solution

I ended up spraying down the entire garden with Eight in order to avoid anymore pests chewing away my plants. The pain-in-the-butt part about it is that they only sold Eight in the hose bottle.

As I might have mentioned before, my landlord has a hose near the front of the house, but it doesn't reach all the way to the backyard. Therefore, I still haul my watering can from inside, back and forth. What I ended up having to do for the Eight is to set up the hose and spray the diluted Eight into the water can, then drag that back over to the garden.

The main problem with this method is that I can't "spray" on the underside of the plants. I can try to drench them and splash it up underside the leaves, but overall, there are definitely places for pests to hide. I'm not going to take the effort to put it in a spray bottle and go leaf by leaf.

Anyway, I hope this will hold off any arrival of horned worms also. I still have visions of my mother getting so frustrated that she plucked each worm off at a time and cut off their heads. Until I had a conversation with my dad the other day about it, I was convinced for years that that was the only way you could kill them. Ha-ha.

I also picked up some Garden Safe, an organic pesticide, to spray down my basil with. It's generally not a great idea to use pesticides on herbs, since the leaves are the part that we consume. However, the woman at the garden center assured me that it would be safe. I'll just have to scrub everything down really well before I use it.

Disaster Stikes!!

My worst fears have come true it seems.

I came home this evening to find that my cauliflower has been eaten alive. Like within a 24-48hour period nearly entire leaves are gone on some of the plants. The leaves have more holes than swiss cheese!



I can't find any actual pests, however. I checked the undersides of the leaves and they're vacant. The only thing that looks remotely like it might be a problem are clusters of black things at the base of all the leaves. It's definitely not dirt, but it shows no sign of being a bug-like critter either. I'm not sure what to make of it, to be honest. I'm going to spray down the entire garden with Eight.



So that's my first problem. Then I went inside.

I'd brought my basil plant a week before due to trouble with keeping the soil moist. The container was small enough that I had to water it twice a day. So instead I brought it indoors to let it soak in a deep underdish.

I came upon it this evening and it had the strangest growth on the stalks of two of the basil stems. They're like brown, rock hard eggs almost. They're almost layered upon each other and it looks like they've grown out of the stalk itself, or is deeply attached. The only way I can remove them is with a sharp kitchen knife, basically filleting the surface.





Several of the leaves appear to be growing or have been implanted with the same egg-like sacks, but they're green on the leaves rather than brown. They also lay more flat and are settled into the veins of the leaves rather than creating a shell-like cover. Some of the uninfected leaves are drying out and turning brown.





There is no sign of pests. No little aphids along the stems. Only one lone green spider that I manage to kill. But I can't imagine that he's the perpetrator of this strangeness.

If anyone has any clue about what either of these problems are, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

How my garden grows!

I took this a couple of days ago, just to show how TALL my tomato plant is getting!


On Friday, I picked four new tomatoes - making my total 8. And then today, I got 8 more when I came home from the weekend! :D






My Roma tomatoes are coming in now too. I also have some yellow squash starting!

Out of control!

So last weekend it rained a bunch, then was super hot and beautiful for days on end. When I got back from CT, my garden was just out of control! I took some photos of it at the end of this week. I was originally thinking that I shouldn't have bought the extra big tomato cage, but I swear, this cherry tomato plant is about to outgrowing it!!

July 13th...





I have blooms on my yellow squash which are beautiful!






My Salvia has come alive!

They're growing like weeds!

Updating my garden again! :giggle I know, I'm obsessed. These are "Portraits" of various plants.




Brussel Spouts are growing bigger...[


A single castle Celosia


My marjoram is starting to escape! Quick, its gonna get away!!




My Salvia is starting to produce purple blooms..


My one big Golden Boy tomato..soon to turn yellow:



More of my cherry red large tomatoes..




My mint (on the left) is growing out of control as usual. You can also see the Catnip overwhelming the Blood Leaf in the next continer over. Anyone want catnip for their kitties? I will bag and send it to you!