Garden

Gardening Notes: This has been our best garden yet and it hasn't been very good. . . What do we need? RAIN! What do we not need? BUGS! But here's some beautiful yummy tomatoes!

I'll start with talking about them. . . We planted right at 80 plants this year. Why so many you ask? Well, I like to can juice, we use it for salsa, stews, chilies, meat loafs, and many other yummy things. . . And we like to give away any extras we have. We planted several different varieties also. Most of which J's dad started in his green house. I planted 2 early girls from the green house down the road early as an experiment and they were not the first to produce :(. And I don't think mulching them helped a lot but that's fine as I said it was an experiment. . . We also planted 12 homestead that we got from J's grandma, she started them from seed using manure and miracle grow dirt. They are doing the best! We've gotten several tomatoes off of them and very few off of the others. I think the 2nd best would be the big beef and they are not big and the have yucky cores. We had some kind of problem with the leaves curling up, not sure why but we sprayed with neem oil, and we had some kind of black beetle bug, we sprayed and it helped them go away! I'll normally take care of the plants until harvest time and then he takes over harvest and I take care of putting up.

This is our "water rig". We are not able to use the pool this year because of leakage so J is pumping water out of it into barrels. It works great and isn't putting a strain on our well in this HOT weather!

Watermelon anyone? No because EVERYONE of them busted before they were ready to pick. :( very saddened by this. I have NO idea why. But I will experiment with them again next year!

The bees LOVE the blooms!

Not sure what kind of larva this is, I'm assuming "squash" bugs but because of the bees I couldn't spray them. . .

Row of cucs, used cattle panels to train them up, which would have worked great if I wouldn't have got the bright idea to lean them so the cucs would hang and be easy to pick. They weren't. Cattle panels good, but put them upright. Also 2nd & 3rd row is peppers. Need to do something different with the cups. They were great but the plants need planted and then the cups put around them. It made hoeing easier and watering. . .

4th row is half 3/4 green beans and 1/4 squash. The beans were beautiful, but it got hot, we only got one mess off of them before they burnt up. The squash did fine. Maybe next time we should put diotamasions earth down before we plant so it's under the leaves. . . Rows 5 and 6 is corn (please discard the weeds in the middle of the row, it's hard keeping up with it all!) Corn didn't do very well, but again, it was due to heat and no water.

Row 7 was tomatoes (see notes above). row 8 and 9 and 11, is onions, they did better than ever before! The red ones were my favorite! Row 10 is lettuce and cabbage. Lettuce was good, too much for us. . . Cabbage was a lot of work and then I never got anything done with it when it was harvested.

Row 12 was potatoes, 13 and 14 peppers, and 15 tomatoes. Potatoes did good but I need to find another way to store them. They got too hot and rotted. Peppers need water and it's not happening this year.