The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

 

OK, first some triumphs!

First big red tomato in the garden today!:

 

I've had handfuls of cherry tomatoes for a week or so, but this was the first ripe full size 'mater.
Woot.

Next to the tomatoes, the scarlet runner beans are flowering and are so pretty!

This has been the week of cabbages and onions. The onions were starting to pop out of the ground and a few stalks were falling down, and the cabbages were continuing to get chomped by Sir Chomp-a-lot (the rabbit), his bunny friends, and cabbage worms, so I thought I'd just pull the whole thing and start fresh with some new crops.

Cabbage

 

More Cabbage. There were also two purple cabbages that we made into a yummy cabbage, crunchy Ramen noodle salad. Saved one leaf to show you how pretty they were!

Onions curing in the sun

Cabbages and onions before they were picked

A semi triumph/semi fail.... little purple carrots. I picked them early because once again, the rabbits found them and started nibbling through the netting I put up to protect them. They're small, but they're still pretty, and basically we have gourmet purple baby carrots. Which is cool.

This year I definitely learned that if you want to keep rabbits away you need FENCE.

FENCE around scarlet runner beans. It works! No nibbles!

Another good thing...there are some tiny melons growing!

Melon Vines

Baby Melon!

 This was taken a few days ago, the melons are already getting bigger!

OK, and now the bad... vine borers have attacked the pumpkin plants, and probably the zucchini too. You can tell because the plants get all droopy.

Pre attack: perky and happy

After attack: droopy and sad

What is a vine borer, you ask? A moth that looks a lot like a red bee kind of thing 

I've never actually seen one - this is from localkitchener.wordpress.com

It lays eggs at the base of your plant, and when they hatch, these little white grubs with black heads boreholes into the base of your squash vine, and basically eat the vine from the inside out.

GROSS.

Today I watched some youtube videos on how to do "surgery" on your squash/pumpkin plants to get the larvae out (Google it! There are lots out there!).  Then I went out with a sharp knife did my best to obliterate them. Brought my camera with me but it was so hot and they were so disgusting, I forgot to take pics. Plus, I didn't really know what I was doing. I found them and *think* I got all of them out (there were multiple in each vine) on the pumpkin plants above. I have another variety of pumpkin and some zucchini that are also wilting though. I'm sure it's because of the borers, but I couldn't find the entry holes. I cut the heck out of one of the other pumpkin vines, found nothing, and may have done terminal damage to that poor plant. 

Oh, by the way, after cutting a slit through the vine and getting rid of the larvae, the final step is mounding soil/compost around the cut up vine, covering up the cut. The vine (so they say) will  heal itself and the plant will recover.

A few years ago one of my friends was telling me that if you can't figure out where the borers are, you can go out at night with a flashlight, shine it behind the vine, and you'll  see them moving around in there and know where to cut. I guess that's my plan for the rest of the pumpkins and zucchinis. Could be a fun adventure for the kids too... Wish me luck!

I'll leave you with a view of the newly cleared out and replanted (with carrots and bush beans) area of the garden:

The boards over the carrots seeds are supposed to help with germination

 Those are ground cherries in the far back right. All started as volunteers in the garden and were transplanted over there. Yay free plants!

I'll fence in the areas where the carrots and beans are planted in the next week, before stuff starts sprouting and the rabbits visit.

OK, now I'll *really* leave you, with a picture of some new pink wave petunias on our back deck (with compost peeking through the deck slats), and our crazy Hungarian wood gnome dude. 

Happy gardening!

Two Pictures

 Just a quick update to show you the baby zucchinis..

And the very first ripening sun gold tomato.

This was from the middle of last week, actually. The tomato has since fully ripened and been eaten. It was soooo delicious. There's now a red cherry tomato that's almost ripe. There's bounty of green tomatoes, tiny and large,  that need to hurry up and turn red. Gardening teaches patience, for sure.

Early July Update: The Rabbit Wars Continue

 

As you can see, the pinwheels are a great rabbit deterrent. *eye roll*

The area he's lounging behind is the former pea area, nibbled down to stubs and then taken over by weeds. Behind him are transplanted ground cherry plants (that were volunteers randomly growing in other parts of the garden. Gotta love free plants - especially free plants that produce yummy fruit!). Rabbits don't like ground cherries, so those are safe.

I need to replant the weedy pea area with more stuff. I picked up cheap bean, carrot, lettuce and a few other seeds (including catnip!) at Target and Wal-Mart yesterday, and plan to build one of these over the new seedlings:

I don't have a raised bed in that spot, but I think just putting it on the ground over the veggies should work. There are easy instructions in The All New Square Foot Gardening  (awesome book!), and we have lots of extra chicken wire, because I finally gave in and bought some to fence in the beans.

I went out one morning shortly after the peas were eaten to find bites taken out of a few of the bean plants and ran right out to the hardware store. So much for being fence free! But it's working! The beans have been completely untouched since then. Woot.

And they're starting to climb!

runner beans running

The tomato plants are getting bigger by the day too.

And we have tomatoage!

Better Boy

Sungold

The cabbages and onions look happy:

Cabbages

Onions

I'm trying melon for the first time this year. Lots of flowers, but no fruit yet!

Pumpkin, Melon and more Pumpkin

Melon Flowers

To keep the rabbits away, I cover the melon plants with netting every night. I use the rocks to hold down the netting!

pumpkins-to-be

The pumpkins are coming along too. You can already see baby pumpkins-to-be getting ready to flower.

The purple carrots I planted are doing really well - maybe in part to my crazy thrown together rabbit blocker made out of netting and sticks. I think the mint surrounding them might also help confuse the bunnies.

carrots and mint

Some of them are starting to poke out of the ground!

By the way, a mint leaf chewed with a stevia leaf (forgot to take a pic of the stevia plant) tastes great and is a wonderful breath freshener!

Finally, we have the zucchini/cucumber bed.  It was just going to be zucchini, but there seemed to be a lot of space in two corners, so I  went ahead and planted cucumbers there (from seed), a little later than they normally would have gone in. I've had crazy bad luck with cukes the last few years. Either they don't germinate, the plants turn yellow and wither, or the rabbits get them. These are a variety developed especially for container gardens, called "patio snacker". I was planning on putting them in a pot on the deck... but a raised bed is a lot like a container, and so far so good!

The arugula on the outside of the bed is still going strong too!

happy baby cuke plants

I need to go get more netting before the rabbits find these!

One final note on the rabbits:  I have a theory on why we have so many all of a sudden. Our dog passed away this year.  I'm thinking she was probably (unbeknownst to us until now) the best rabbit deterrent in the world. When I first started the garden we had no rabbits. Back then the dog was young, healthy, loud and fast. These past few years as she got older, slower and quieter, we had our first rabbit visits. Now that she's completely gone they've taken over.  And not only do we have rabbits, for the first time ever we also have chipmunks. LOTS of them. They've always been in the area, but never in our yard. Now they happily frolic, chase and chirp to each other while I'm out puttering in the garden. So cute!

Gotta love a chipmunk

We're planning on getting a new dog (puppy or young adult) in August... so I'm hopeful that he or she will clear out the rabbits but that the chipmunks decide to stick around!

Garden Update 6/8/16 - Volunteers R Us

Welcome to the garden!

We have strawberryage! I added netting to the bed to try to thwart the birds and chipmunks. So far so good!

Arugula and Zucchini

I'm super thrilled about the clumps of volunteer arugula that have popped up around this bed (that's zucchini sprouting *in* the bed itself). Arugula is yummy and I didn't plant any this year, so this was an awesome surprise!

Carrots are growing well in the little round bed. I planted mint there last year that looked diseased and brownish all season. I cleared it out before planting the carrots, but I guess there were roots left on the edges of the rocks that decided to take off - so bonus mint! And it's healthy too! Woot!

Carrots and Mint

Mini Ground Cherry

And to add to the list of volunteers... here's a little ground cherry in the pumpkin bed. As usual, a bunch popped up all over the garden. I planted them for the first time... 3 years ago?... and haven't had to buy seeds since. They just show up! I'll move a some to the pea bed when the peas are done.

Peas!

Speaking of the pea bed - here it is.  It was heavily nibbled on by rabbits. I ended up clearing the back half out and replanting, and am leaving the front half as is to see if it recovers. I think it might be?

Recovering peas? I see some tendrils.

Beets

The beets continue to do well. I've thinned them out twice so far. Love beet greens in a salad! Some of these look like they have leaf miner - gotta get out and do some pest management.  But dudes - I don't think I've ever had beet greens get big enough for the leaf miners to want to eat them. This is a huge accomplishment.

Cabbages and onions with beets in the background

Pretty cabbages. They're so much bigger than they were in my last post!

Pumpkin and melon bed

Pumpkins in the back, melons in the middle (started inside 2 1/2 weeks before the last frost - so they're bigger), more pumpkins in front and the baby ground cherry.

Beans and tomatoes

This might be my favorite part of the garden to blog about, because it starts out looking sparse, but by the middle of  summer ends up overgrown and jungle-like.  Three teepees of scarlet runner beans have been planted to the left, and tomatoes in the middle and right, with some basil and habanero peppers mixed in.

Scarlet Runner Bean Seeds

Chomped Tomato

I'm excited about the runner beans. They're supposed to have gorgeous red flowers but also produce lots and lots of edible beans. The seeds were pretty too!

I'm missing two tomato plants in the middle bed. Both got chomped by something in the early morning hours. I'd blame it on the rabbits, but I don't think they like tomatoes. I thought maybe cutworms, but they haven't bothered plants this big in my garden before. They like tender, just sprouted things. Plus I didn't find a worm under the soil around the plant like usually do. Just to be on the safe side I made little toilet paper roll collars for the rest of the tomatoes (cutworm protection) and haven't had a problem since. *knock on particle board*

Update! Looks like it was a cutworm. Found this picture on the web. Nasty things!:

The composter's up and running!

I'll  leave you with a picture of our rabbit frenemy in one of our neighbor's yards. So cute but so destructive, dang him.

Sir Chompalot