Monday, July 11, 2011

Fruit!!!

Today brings some success and some frustrations.  Something is eating the leaves of the Swiss Chard and it’s being rather a hog about it too.  I think maybe it is some kind of bug but can’t see any evidence on the leaves either on the top or underside.  My neighbor warned me that I wouldn’t have success with this so I’m just monitoring to see what is going to happen.  Since I am doing this organically I won’t use any pesticide on the plants.  They might just have a nice Swiss Chard feast this summer if I don’t figure out what to do.  I have been sprinkling around the garden and even around the plants with cayenne pepper and more recently chili pepper but worry that I might be doing some damage to the soil or the helpful bugs so will back off on that.  Today after weeding I touched my lip and it is still burning a bit so whatever is out there is still effective to retard the bunnies anyway.

The plants that still look incredibly healthy include the beets, onions, tomatoes, pepper plants, spinach, strawberries, beans, peas, squash and cucumbers.  This is a photo of the garden from the north looking down towards the street.

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The squash plants have tiny little squash developing – they’re so cute:

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Can you see the tiny yellow parts?  This plant is called Cube of Butter Squash and it sounds just delicious.  I’ll let you know when it gets time to harvest and ingest!

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The strawberries are developing pretty well considering that we haven’t had that much heat and the plants only get about 5 hours of sunlight a day.  Not sure how much longer before they ripen.  I want to get them before the birds do.

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This is what I suspect is the beginning of the bean on the bean plant.  The description said the beans are purple and turn green when cooked.  Since this is purple I think this might just be the bean.  Thank goodness someone realized that it helps the novices to have their vegetable plants color coded! 

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