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.