YUCK

'Nuf said.

Ok, one more thing. What in the world is this rotten snot rocket looking thing that I found writhing by my okra. What damage could it have caused and do I need to start looking for eggs or something?

Decisions Rendered

Several days ago, I was seriously contemplating ripping out the pole and bush beans in the largest trellised box and starting all over again. From what advice I was receiving, I gathered it was either a slug of sorts sliding off of the leaves or much rather an insect of sorts which was draining the leaves and then communicating some sort of fungus to them. I kept cutting off the infected leaves one at a time, until I felt like there was nothing left. Both the bush beans and especially the pole beans looked bare. I was a hairs breath away from ripping everything out to start again when I left to quell an argument between the boy and girl, or rather watch while they duked it out and then offer advice, and consequently forgot all about the beans.

Yesterday I noticed that from where I cut off the leaves, there seemed to be new growth so I left them. You can honestly tell that the bush beans are recovering nicely and I'm hoping the pole beans won't be far behind. I'm rather relieved that I didn't make the rash decision to rip everything out. The yield may be lower, but it looks like it will be a yield of some sort at least.

I took some more advice and bought some decanters of sorts to make pepper sauce with my peppers that I didn't know what to do with. I couldn't get some of the larger and fatter banana peppers in there so I cut them in pieces and shoved them in. I hope it will still work this way. Sad thing is, I don't see how the man is going to pull those things out to eventually eat them, himself.

I built two more unintended boxes today. Our bed is on stilts of sorts and years ago we had to build a box under the bed to keep the dog from crawling under there when it was time to go outside. Now that Vladimir is no longer with us...there's extra wood to be had. I put together two 3x2 boxes. One can go in front of the first box and will get about an hours more sun. I'm going to put another squash there since the other I have is not doing so well due to the shade. I'm going to level out the space to the right of the side box and put two more tomato plants there.

The sugar baby watermelon is doing its best to do absolutely nothing. I'm thinking that it's going to be a wash. Actually, nothing has seemed to grow well in that little box. However, I can't help being amazed at the number of female cucumbers and zucchini I've got growing. They're outpacing the males entirely. Last summer I never got a female cucumber, so this is amazing and very inspiring. I've got a few more weeks of decent weather before the brutal heat of July sets in. Hopefully things will mature before that.

Odd as well, I have one squash leaf that within an hour between my visits to the garden went from stiff, lovely leaf to fallen down limp leaf. It's the only leaf affected. Something seems to have sucked the life right out of it. I'd like to prune it back, but the stems are hollow and I don't want little critters crawling in there. How do you suggest to prune back squash?

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

Yellow

Yellow has been the boy's favorite color since he knew what colors were. It's not a slight infatuation; it's an obsession. Again, it's his preoccupation with the color yellow that got us gardening to begin with. He saw yellow pear tomatoes in the hardware store. Never mind that he won't eat tomatoes, nor did he ever eat these particular yellow pear ones to be exact, he was entranced by the color and so we planted them.

What can I say? The boy loves yellow; "Yellow is the sun," he proclaims. "Yellow is a happy color! Why doesn't everyone else like yellow as much as I do?" I don't argue with or blame him for loving yellow.

Usually.

For yellow has now undoubtedly become my garden's favorite color as well because every blasted thing out there is as yellow as the sun now that we've had all this stinkin' rain for over a week. Everything that's not living like the concrete, house and deck has all turned green.

*sigh* Oddly enough, things still seem to be growing, especially the mushrooms, and the slugs and snails are in overdrive.

Here's the corner yard in its entirety, and then a closer look at the squash and peppers.

I have two pots of ichiban eggplants. The pot on the right has two plants in it as it was purchased as a transplant and the second plant hadn't surfaced yet and I never thinned it. It's amazing to me the difference in size of the plants. The size of the eggplants are different as well. I suppose this should be the poster child for plant spacing and root space availability.
Here are the fruits on the smaller plant. Aren't they cute!
This is the monster I pulled off the larger plant today. This one came from the plant with only one in the pot. Again, the size difference says it all.

I was looking for something to put up against the eggplant like a quarter etc. to give you an accurate idea of it's size. All I could come up with was a remote control or Elmo.

Elmo it is.
We put the eggplant in a pasta dish tonight for dinner. It wasn't too shabby.

Here is the side yard with bush cukes and purple beans. Looks like those things are a bit crowded in there, but MAN are they growing fast. What a difference a little sun makes.

Here's something I never, ever saw last year. For all of the cucumbers and hundreds of male flowers I had, I never had one blossoming female. I've got three in this bush batch already and I'm preparing to be a proud momma.
Hot peppers are doing very well. If I only knew what to do with them!

Banana peppers are doing amazingly. I've already taken one off for the man.

There doesn't seem to be much change for the forecast, so for the next week or so we're still in this rain pattern with little sun. It's amazing anything is growing at all.

When I was slug pickin' this morning, I noticed a few insects had taken the opportunity to spread their eggs all over the lava rocks between the beds. There was no way to pick all of them off or remove all of the lava rock, but I took the chance and sprinkled some insecticide on them since they're all on the ground. The eggs were small and white and others were a cream leaning to yellow. All the same size and relatively uniformly placed all over the surfaces. As much as I wonder what they are, I'm not in the gambling mood to let them hatch and see.

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

Being a Kept Woman

By this time next Tuesday, I will have formally transformed myself into a kept woman. The school year will be over and I get to morph into my life as a mother full time. I know why I work. In spite of the hours at work and the multiple hours on evenings and weekends that I have to put in to grading and planning, I am a better mother when I work. So the laundry may not get done and the used sippy cups may stay in the sink for a few hours, but I have more patience with my own children and am truly grateful for the time I get to spend with them. I think I tend to forget how important each minute is during the summers when all I want is a second to myself without someone saying, "Momma!"

Last summer, I seriously considered changing my name. I wondered if them screaming "Susan!" would grate on my nerves as much, but I digress.

All in all, nothing can beat the time with the children, but there still is one greater pleasure the summers afford me. I can go to the bathroom. It's not the ability to "go" and I'm most certainly never going to be using the facilities without one or both children in there with me offering helpful instructions, but I'll be able to enter the restroom when I want. That's right sports fans. Whenever I want to go to the restroom, I can just go. There's no more waiting for bells to ring and knowing you only have 6 minutes to make that mad dash down the never ending hallway all the while worrying if the kids have found that pop quiz yet which you forgot to stash before you shoved and elbowed the kids in the previous class out of the doorway to audition for your sprinting career.

It's the small things in life. Never the less, I know perfectly well when the summer comes to an end, I'll be just as willing to hurdle students in the hallways as long as it means using the facilities by myself with no one sitting on my lap trying to pick my nose.

On to gardening, those beans...all in the back...are looking pitiful. The leaves are shriveling and then falling limp. I honestly don't know what's going on. Someone suggested leaf hoppers, but I've never seen bug-one out there yet. I'm at a loss and trying to guess if I should rip them out and start over, or just ignore it and see if the new growth can withstand whatever is going on. I'm a bit bummed; beans were the one crop I was looking forward to.

The purple beans in the back are flowering! It's amazing the difference in two hours of sunlight. It makes me wonder if the corner back yard will be able to produce anything at all. We'll have to wait and see. The point is further made by the progress of the cucumber bushes in the front and then those in the back. The size difference is absurd.

I picked that first banana pepper yesterday. It was so cute, but I still say that plant smells bad. The Ichiban eggplant is about the length of my hand. Hopefully we'll be munching on that soon enough.

The morning comes early, my friends; but I get to wear jeans and a t-shirt to work and once I get my end of the year check list done, it's rolley chair races down the hallway for me.

Sweet gardening dreams.

Perspective

Where exactly do slugs go during the day? It's not like they pack up the kids, drop them off at school and go to work, but oddly they are always unseen during the day and abundant in the early evening just like fireflies. It's just odd, if you ask me.

I want to thank everyone for the garden's compliments. I'm hopeful, and by the looks of things, I'm doing a heck of a lot better than last year. Many of you know that last year was our first real foray into gardening. We had six pots in the front yard. Everything looked fantastic, but all I got out of it was one zucchini and a hand full of cherry tomatoes. The fall garden did well with its lettuce and broccoli and I was inspired to try again this spring and summer. The pictures and film were curiously misleading. I only photographed the good and never got close enough with the film to show you the bad.

Photography is a wonderous thing; it allows us to highlight what we want and ignore that which we don't. Then again, we can also use it to let out a little of our insecurities at a time in the hopes someone like-minded can help identify a problem without overexposing our ineptitude.

Ok, so I've skipped the hesitant part of our program and jumped straight to utter humiliation, but I'd appreciate as much help as I can get.

Something has been munching this cucumber leaf.

My peppers are riddled with holes, but this leaf and a few like ones on other plants have me dumbfounded. The okra leaf below had some brown patches.

Although it does not bother me, the eggplant shows something has been dilligently gnawing on the stem. It also has leaf miner damage and you can see through that hole in a leaf.

Here are where most of my problems lie. These are my pole beans. The first few are the Fortex:

These are the KWonder

More KWonder

More KW

Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm most worried about both of the bean varieties in that they might have some sort of virus seems it appears to be spreading.

I suppose beauty in the garden is how you look at it. Today I chose to focus on the amazing growth of that Banana pepper and the eggplant, however these beans kept coming back to my memory and pressed me to find out, if possible, what was going on. I really don't want to loose them all if I don't have t0.

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

And the Oscar goes to...

anyone else, but me.

Oh my goodness what a boob you feel like when you're trying to film your garden and you fall flat on your tuchus. You'll have to wait until the second film to see that one. At least before it rained we got what was supposed to be two films, one of the back yard and one of the pots in front, but it turned out to be three.

Here in this first film Gibson and I walked around the back corner yard. I've pulled out the carrots and most of the onions, so it's looking a little bare back there. I didn't show the onion and watermelon box since one watermelon transplant died and the other looks pitiful. I have more that I've started from seed, but the slug I chased through the garden last night moved faster than they are growing. The mint is sprawling which is neat, but I really think the okra, toms and beans are going to suffer from only 5 hours or so of sun,but we'll see how it works out. Some of the peppers have been caged, but I still need more. The squash/zucchini is looking nice and you can see the start of flowers if you get close, something I didn't do in this film. I'm using my camera to do these, but in video mode you can't zoom in or out.

In this film I started from the overstuffed side box and went up to where the pots are on the front walk. I didn't talk about them, but you can see the soybeans in small pots to the right of the white pot. They just don't seem to be growing either. They look rather odd in my opinion because they're not sprouting many leaves. I tried to get on the ground to see the banana peppers, but wound up on the ground a bit harder than I had intended to, which qualifies itself more as falling than sitting.

I got up almost as gracefully as I landed, went back around the house, up the deck stairs and into the house when I turned around and realized Gibson wasn't behind me. I went back to the front of the house and Biggie (the girl's name for him) was just pitifully standing by the front door. The man says he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. I say he's a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic or a taco short of a combo plate, but he is a really good dog.

That's it for us now, and I know it's still afternoon when I post this, but the morning will still come early. Sweet gardening dreams.

Say "So Long," Carrots.

Help me with this one. Am I more frustrated that the carrots won't grow worth a darn, or am I just bored with them and not giving them a chance? They've been in the ground since January, and I think that's about enough time to forge a lasting relationship, which we have not. They have turned into a nuisance. The squash I planted behind them is getting incredibly leggy trying to grow above them. I pulled many of them this evening and got about six ounces out of them after I cut off the tops. I wasn't so thrilled, although I was really surprised that you could smell..well.."carrot" as you pulled them out of the ground. The boy, on the other hand, is beyond excited. He's eaten six of the little doo-jobies already. Notice the emphasis on the word 'little.' Eh, we'll try them again in the fall.
I don't know if this will work, nor really what I'm going to do with it in general, but this tall thing is the bean the girl brought home from the "master gardeners' fair." Of course, according to the boy, it must be placed in the same pot as the Lima beans he brought me for Mother's Day so as one child doesn't outdo the other. What will become of them? Who knows. They could be bosom buddies or terror roommates. What to do when they start climbing? Yea, I got nothin'. We'll see how they go.

Wolverine (the venus fly trap) seems to have found himself a few good meals. I'm rather impressed with him, myself.

At first, I was only going to do pictures of the whole yard once a month, but twice a month sounds good as well. It's grown quite a bit since the first of May. Some of the beans are already climbing over a foot. The peppers are really kind of tall and I'm worried they'll bend over since this is only May and we have a long time to go in the season. So far, no flowers or anything on the ones in the garden.Lastly, this is the moment I've been waiting for....do you see it?

The beans in hanging pots have reached the deck! They're small pots, so I'm hopeful that they won't get too rootbound and continue to grow well . In my perfect world, they'll vine around the slats of the deck. However, in my perfect world there is also always a cabana boy on call ready to provide me with that frosty beverage with a delicately placed umbrella. Wait!! I do have that. He's the man, and it's not so much a frosty beverage and umbrella so much as an iced martini and an olive. I'll take it any day. ...maybe there's hope for those beans after all.

The morning truly came early today...I had to be at the school at 4:00 AM to decorate for the senior breakfast. Hopefully tomorrow's won't be so terribly early, yet early enough to enjoy. Sweet gardening dreams.