The rabbits are becoming less cute by the day...

Seriously?  My fall crop of bush beans are all just stalks now.  I don't even want to think about my melon patch.

Rabbit damage to the now leafless bush beans.

Rabbit damage in the melon patch.

The vine this watermelon was attached to was severed by a rabbit.

I did discover a really cool place after my root canal on Monday though!  I was wandering around with my face half numb looking for the spot I had parked my car in Pittsburgh's South Side (if you've ever been there you'd understand) and I saw a giant poster with a kid or something on it and words like "sustainable" and "recycle" attached to a building that looked oddly retrofitted with green upgrades.  Considering the whole area is filled with giant 100 year old brick row house buildings, I knew this had to be something neat.

I went inside and found myself in a small lobby filled with information brochures with a glass door leading to a larger lobby with no one manning it in sight.  I started trying to process the brochures in an attempt to figure out where I was, when a nice lady who looked to be returning from her lunch break walked in behind me.

"Can I help you with something?"

I turned around, smiled a half-novocained smile in what I hoped was a very uncreepy manner and replied: "No I uz ust undering ut thiz place uz."

I then decided that the drool, slurred speech, and garden dirt stained clothes I wore due to an emergency tipped tomato plant right before my appointment might be giving the woman the wrong impression, so to combat that I managed to rankly overcompensate by telling her that I was looking for my car after a root canal and liked to garden and was intrigued by the posters outside all in one godawful slurred run on sentence.  I'm totally sure that I came across as a nutcase.

ANYWAY it turned out to be a green building that even collects difficult-to-recycle items like CFL bulbs and batteries.  I am still not completely clear about whether they are some type of outpost of the PRC (Pennsylvania Resource Council) or just a different non-profit that works with the PRC, but any place that has bags of worm poop in their lobby for a small donation is pretty cool in my book.  They also give tours of the building to school kids or anyone interested in seeing how it operates!

It's not every day that you leave the house to get a root canal and return with a sandwich bag full of  worm compost.

So I guess things aren't too bad since the worm compost seems to have been just what my ailing eggplants needed to perk up a bit.  However, if anyone out there is keeping count, this makes two baby water melons and four baby musk melons bitten off by the bunnies.  

Fall planting time!

It's a little late for fall planting in Pittsburgh, but I still feel pretty accomplished since this is the first year I managed to get a fall crop in the ground at all.  Getting everything planted meant pulling a lot of what was there, even some things that might have produced more if left in the ground.  Ultimately, I pulled anything past it's prime, diseased, or too crowded to really be worth the space.  Things I removed include:

1)  All bush beans - The yellow Arikara beans CAN be picked young and eaten in the pod, but we found them to be pretty fibrous and unpleasant.  We didn't plant enough to shell though, so I decided to pull them and plant the space with fall broccoli.  The other bush beans were past their prime, though it seems like the purple might have produced again if allowed...I decided to try and get a fall crop from new seeds instead.  We'll see if this gamble pays off.

2) Yellow Squash and one of the Pan Patty plants - The yellow squash were just covered in disease and the last few fruits had rotted on the plant.  The pan patty seemed generally healthy but was HUGE and showed many signs of Squash Vine Borer damage so I pulled it in favor of planting beets.  The area taken up by the plant can double the planting space for beets, plus I have 3 pan patty plants left.

3)  All cucumbers - These were pulled due to the unlikelihood of getting any kind of solid crop.  The leaves on many plants were wilting and several vines were killed by some type of bacteria.  The vines were also all clumped together on one end of a chicken wire trellis because I didn't properly direct them at the beginning.  There are several free buckets in which I will be planting cucumbers to possibly get a fall crop and I'll use the now vacated trellis for peas.  I have seeds but it might be a better idea to swing by Garden Dreams to see if they have any seedlings left.

Anyway, today we planted 3 buckets of carrots, 3 types of bush bean, 3 types of beet and 2 kinds of pea (snap and snow).  I also did a general clean up of the garden, pulled a bunch of weeds, and moved some things around.  I'll have bigger post after the fall planting is done tomorrow, but here are some of today's sights:

A mini watermelon cut from the vine by a bunny...a bunny that should be living in fear of me ever catching it.

The nest over my composter is now empty, but this little birdy was roaming among my hay.  It seemed young so I think it's one of the chicks, but I have no idea if this is normal bird behavior or not.

Okra!  No idea when to pick it, but I don't think it's ready yet.

This little yellow lemon cucumber was left behind after I pulled the plants.  I have to cut it out of the wire.

This weeks CSA box and garden update.

Our CSA box is now bringing us tomatoes each week!  Woo hoo!  Of course the kids end up eating them like apples the minute they're ripe enough, but I'm not complaining.  If you look closely you'll see a container of blueberries that was half eaten before we took the picture...we made blueberry pancakes for dinner that night, and even the two year old ate them, which is a feat since 90% of his diet is peanut better and jelly sandwiches.

Our amazing Kretschmann Farm CSA box this week.

The lady bugs on the eggplant...hopefully they'll go eat that flea beetle.

I have a few tomatillo flowers on each plant, so we should have purple and green tomatillos soon!

The broccoli is setting out side shoots, though I can't imagine them getting very large in this ridiculous heat.  

The mystery melon is getting larger.

A baby watermelon starting.

These volunteers look nothing like any of the tomatoes I've ever grown or bought.  They're probably some hybrid of a roma.

Those two had blossom end rot so I picked them.  Look how weirdly long and skinny!

I though I saw squash vine borer fracas there, but now I'm not sure.  The plant is definitely sick but it seems to be more of a leaf issue.

That is another volunteer that is an obvious hybrid of last years Black Prince and some other tomato.

Sweet Mother of God.  I should have pulled these all last week...look at all the powdery mildew.   This is the worst case of it I've ever seen, and it's bizarre because the weather has been super hot.

My black beauty eggplant was looking very sick so I picked the two little eggplants  pretty small.  

Mid-Summer Garden Status Tour.

Tonight I'll be finalizing plans for the fall plantings, so we took a bunch of pictures of what the garden looks like now before we start ripping things out over the next week.  The kids also got to harvest a lot of fun things today, including the first broccoli that we left in for just a smidge too long (one little yellow bloom on the green head).  

It's funny how this garden did a complete 180 from where we were last year.  I planted broccoli, cabbage and kohlrabi last year and all of it was eaten by bunnies or bugs.  This year I did lose some but they were mostly plants I would have been forced to thin anyway.  The broccoli and cabbage have all bounced back from early bug damage and are pristine now with no treatment required.  We even harvested every kohlrabi we planted.

Peppers produced maybe one or two fruits per plant last year, and this year I have buckets coming in.  I will lose a few plants (and have lost one already) but the ones that are healthy are LOADED with fruit.  Even the beets did well this season when last year they were filled with bug trails on the bulbs.  I didn't really do much different.

The tomatoes on the other hand, are producing about the same amount of total fruit from 14 plants as I got last year from 4.  The weather did delay the transplants a few weeks, but even the later harvest will be less than stellar because the plants are all slowly dying from various blights.  The beans seem to have tapped out a lot quicker than last year, and the onions (which did amazingly in 2010) are small and pitiful.  Don't even get me started on the eggplant again...last year it was my best producer, and this year it's more of an ugly ornamental that produces a few things here and there.

Anyway, here's where we're at currently:

First broccoli!

Harvesting Green Bell Peppers.

Baby birds nesting on the wall above my composter.

Some of the eggplant are beginning to flower, though they are weirdly short.

The front yard garden to the right of the sidewalk.

A cucumber visor?

I only left that green cabbage because I thought it was doomed and wanted to distract the bunnies from the purple one...turns out to have quite a nice head on it!

Pepper Bed.

The bean and broccoli bed.

Searching for yellow beans.

The first Black Krim is about ripe....though the plant is on it's last legs.

I think the volunteer there is a musk mellon.

Banana pepper city.

Beans and broccoli are his favorites.

Pan patty squash and cucumbers are his favorites.

Beans fresh out of the garden (isn't it nice not to have to wash a bunch of chemicals off  first?)

Hidden fruits...

The first of the white pan patty summer squash.  It was so hidden that I let it get a bit too  big.

Little Romas starting to grow.  This is my only roma tomato plant, and it seems least affected by the garden diseases decimating my other plants.

The first melon.  No idea what kind since it's growing on a volunteer.