Zucchini and eggplant harvest!

These are going into stir-fry tomorrow with some left-over great northern beans and whatever else we have in the house.  I picked them a tad small because I just couldn't wait  :)

We've given up on peas until fall and yanked all of these out of the pea circle today.  In it's place I direct seeded a zucchini called "Sure Thing Hybrid".  I'm thinking I will just plant beans and zucchini where ever I have room at varying intervals since they grow so quick and we could never have too many.   Plus last year we lost all of our summer squash after the first few harvests.  Also, check out the little volunteer tomato in the lower right part of the picture...I'm going to leave it alone and see if it can compete with the grass).

 Ugh.  My eggplants are all covered and this is the plant that looks the healthiest.  I think I'm going to lose my only traditional eggplant, so I need to make a plan.  Even my tiny little Turkish eggplants in a different area of the garden have been totally destroyed now by the flea beetles.

I'm pinning all my hopes on finding replacement seedlings at Garden Dreams later this week.  I have my heart set on growing some Turkish Orange stuffers, and it's included in their list of seedlings.  As a bonus, they are having and end-of-season sale with all seedlings at 50% off PLUS a free tomato, eggplant and pepper plant with each purchase!  If you're in the Pittsburgh area, go check them out...currently they are Certified Naturally Grown, but are working towards becoming Certified Organic.  If I come back with new eggplants, I will be potting them in an entirely different part of the yard and covering them until they get to fruiting stage.  

Out with Aphids and in with Flea beetles.

My second round of eggplants are now being full-scale assaulted by flea beetles.  It seems like the organic soap spray I doused them with has eliminated the beetles on the plants in the back yard, but the ones in the front are now being feasted upon as well.  I hadn't looked too closely at them in a few days, so several leaves on each plant look like some jerk sat in my yard and poked the crud out of them with sewing needles.  I tried to manually squish some of the little bastards to be a warning sign for the rest of the flea beetles, but they just hopped away while giving me the buggy-finger.  Hopefully the thorough dousing in soap spray puts them in their place.  Mwahahahahaha...

On the plus side, the ladybug release has seemed to eliminate the aphids from the garden entirely.  The number of holes being eaten in my bean and pepper plants by mystery bugs has also decreased greatly, which is comforting because the beans were looking pretty questionable a few weeks back.

I couldn't bear thinning every single broccoli, so I saved one in a bucket.  It's the last on the right here and seems to be doing well so far.

The pepper bed is lush and green and seems to have recovered well from the bug that was eating holes in the leaves.  I won't be putting down straw since it just makes it harder to weed.

The space miser plants have produced two squash that ended up being unpollinated.  I cut them off today and will be watching the bee status of the garden a bit more closely.  This might just be the result of not having a male flower at the time, though it does worry me that I got rid of almost all of the pretty flowers that bees like in order to make room for more veggies.

I thinned the pan patty squash down to three pants and the cucumbers down to two plants per spot.  The royal burgundy bush beans are nice and bushy, so I hope to see some flowers soon.

This one kohlrabi is way bigger than the others.  No idea why.

My tiny pepper!  Last year peppers were one of the latest things to set fruit.  Expect new pictures of this guy on a semi-frequent basis until he's ripe...

Progress of sorts.

It's so exciting to see stuff actually growing!  We got such a late start that I don't really expect to harvest much except for herbs for the next few weeks.  Peas would be nice, but with the scorching hot Julyish weather we've had recently I am pretty sure those will be a bust.  I'll give it another couple of weeks and then pull it all for more bush beans or possibly something else.

Last year I only grew tomatoes in pots, until late in the season when I allowed a bunch of volunteers to grow and ended up with a mixed bed of peppers and roma tomatoes.  Those roma produced like gangbusters, so this year I started a tomato bed in the sunniest spot of the garden to try and get my heirlooms producing that well.  So far, the plants seem very squat and bushy.  Few (if any) flowers yet, but multiple thick, strong lower branches that just want to sprawl with tons of leaves but very little height.  They are all different types as well, so I'm hoping it's just a stage.  I did notice those bumpy proto-roots on all the thick ground-level stalks, probably because the straw mulch is tricking them into thinking they are laying on dirt.  Tomorrow I will be removing the mulch to pull weeds, so we'll see if I can get a better handle on what's going on then.  Right now I don't know what to make of it.

The first pepper!  A gypsy bell...it should turn orange.  You know you screwed up when one of the first veggies you get is a pepper.

This is an okra plant grown from seed.  I don't know if anyone in my house will eat okra, but I figure it's worth a shot.  I think it survived the seedling apocalypse that took place a few weeks back because it's one of the few plants I started in a pot outside...next year I hope to have a small area of the sun room just for starting plants so I don't lose them all.

Ichibahn Eggplant (last year's MVP of the garden).

WAY more of the cucumber and squash seeds came up than I was expecting.  Tomorrow will be thinning day.

The kohlrabi seem to grow a quarter inch each night!  They're working out so much better than expected that I am thinking about getting some seed and keeping them planted in succession.  My grandfather and father both grew kohlrabi when I was a kid, so I remember the taste well enough that I never dared buy it from the supermarket.

One of my volunteer tomatoes in the pea bed.  There are three with fairly large healthy stalks that I'll be leaving and trying to tie against the wall to the trellis for the peas.  I've pulled out dozens of volunteer tomatoes, and something HUGE that I think was a volunteer pumpkin from Halloween seeds.  I would have left it if pumpkins  didn't hog so much space.

Lawn murder on my mind.

I am seriously considering killing off the rest of my front lawn.  There isn't very much of it left, but what there is just breeds weeds and invasive grass that needs to be chopped up weekly with a weed whacker because the areas between beds are too narrow to mow.  I'm so new to this gardening thing that I don't really know the names of all the nastiness growing in my lawn, but there are several distinct "problem plants" that I feel like I'm in a losing battle against.  Some are vines, some are grass-like, and some are weird and spikey....all of them have very deep roots and grow like...ahem...weeds.

Considering this is my FRONT lawn, and that all of my neighbors have nice, green, landscaped lawns I do feel kind of bad about it, but I just don't think I can take the hours of pulling invasive stuff from the edge of all my veggie beds each week.  I can't even have straw mulch because now my tomato plants are being climbed by the horrid vining weed from under the straw.  I have to remove all of it from the bed to find the spots where the vines are rooted.

My plan is to put down weed cloth and then pine mulch on all of the grass.  I may start with layers of newspaper first to guarantee that the whole thing is smothered.  This project isn't happening until I'm done with the actual planting, so check back around early July for details.

Lemonbalm, Flea Beetles and CSA box #2! Woo hoo!

So I found out that the weird citronella smelling plant along my back fence is actually lemon balm.  I've never had lemon balm before, but I found out you can make lemon balm pesto and a bunch of other neat and yummy things, so I guess we'll be trying out some new recipes.

Lemon balm also repels insects, which might be why they are all living on my potted plants along that fence.  Now that the aphids have been destroyed (along with my original eggplant and cherry tomato plants) and I have replanted with seedlings bought from the most excellent Garden Dreams Urban Farm & Nursery, my poor replacement eggplant leaves are being made into swiss cheese by flea beetles.  Ugh.  I bought some neem oil spray so tomorrow we should be able to test it.

 The Space Miser has new blooms daily!

Our Kretschmann Farms CSA box had fresh strawberries, herbs, radishes, garlic scapes, kale and lots of different lettuces.

The kids were most excited about the new lettuce.  They're pretty used to the bland tasteless iceberg that we buy, so this was a very flavorful treat.

A view of the whole box.

Summer Squash!

I have AT LEAST 3 baby Space Miser Squash appearing! We would have stuffed and eaten the blooms if they weren't crawling with aphids. We just did a ladybug release, so hopefully the aphid problem will subside, but in the mean time we are eagerly awaiting our first garden stir fry.

One of the small pan patty squash I transplanted to the corner of the onion bed.

Baby in the garden!

The tomatoes need staked.

Squash!

We almost have food!

Things progress (slowly).

I've been doing a lot of uploading while holding a cranky baby, so if I haven't typed up the description it might appear the next day when I have a free arm.

Anyway, things are going as well as can be expected with the horrid weather here. It's like Pennsylvania is having an identity crisis and doesn't know whether it wants to become Seattle or Phoenix. It's either too damn wet or too damn hot.

The buckets are slowly getting filled. I need to move several to the back yard so they don't block my light.

The kids help with the watering with their animal cans provided by gramma.

I LOVE the silver on that Space Miser squash.

FIRST CSA! WOOHOO!

Today we picked up our first box from our Kretschmann Farm CSA subscription. Being early in the season (and because they got a late start due to the rain) it was mostly greens and rhubarb, but hey that's cool with us! They also included some extra goodies to make up for it:

The big bag on the left is mixed greens including pea shoots (which the kids really like). There is also a bunch of fresh basil, rosemary and thyme. The white bag is full of organic mushrooms, the stalks are rhubarb, and the bread is 7 grain from Friendship Farms in the Laurel Highlands. The little-kid-hands were not included in the box.

mmmmmmm....mushrooms

This bread would have been great with a soup, but it didn't last long enough once it got here.

Butter with fresh chopped herbs on 7 grain bread.

Our first CSA dinner. The Friendship Farms bread with fresh herb butter and mixed greens in a dressing made with herbs, lime, and olive oil. We also added chicken and sliced mushrooms. It was gooooooooooooood.....

After dinner I ended up finding some amazing plant deals while trying to find replacements for the eggplant and tomatoes I killed the other day. I found a dwarf Moonglow pear tree, a semi-dwarf Ayers pear tree, and a white heirloom eggplant and green-with-white-stripes eggplant along with melon seeds to direct seen once the bed is finished in the next day or so. Hopefully I can get some pictures up tomorrow.

Garden Progress at the beginning of June.

My husband and I have been referring to these past few months as "The Spring from Hell" for various reasons that I don't wish to rehash. Basically, anything the could go wrong, did, and there wasn't much we could do about it. This, plus the constant rain, delayed all gardening activities except seed starting, and seed starting went REALLY poorly.

As such, the garden is WAY behind, and we're weeks away from having any type of real harvest. Still, we're hoping to get a big enough harvest later in the season that we can freeze a bunch for winter, and possibly can some sauce and pickles. If things keep moving forward we should be right on track.

This is what remains of our seedling starts. We also had some volunteers pop up that were added to pots vacated by other plants. We'll see how those do.

The three side beds are doing well. Some of the onion starts have died, but I think it was because the kids smothered them with straw before I could clear it off. It's all one area and I may put a cabbage there when I thin the other bed.

The long grey container is spinach, but it doesn't seem to be coming up yet. We still have some cleaning to do, and need to dig two drainage channels to keep the sidewalk from flooding and pooling, but it is looking a lot better.

The squash bed (triangle by the yellow buckets) is coming along, and I moved the thinned yellow summer squash to the cucumber/bean bed by the water barrel. At the time I had forgotten what I planted and thought I was transplanting some pan patty squash. Now I need to find a new place for the pan patty squash or take down some of the yellow squash.

The pea and bean bed is fully weeded and the tomatoes and basil are looking good with their straw mulch. We had some issues with blossom end rot last year, which seemed to be caused by the ground getting so dry so quickly. We're hoping this helps a bit.

Something is eating leaves from my beans and peppers. There are any possibilities, so I need to catch whatever it is in the act.

Beans all seem to be doing well except for the holes in some leaves. The kohlrabi is oddly untouched.

This is the side of the house where we stash all of our supplies for now (except for tools and anything that can't get rained on...which go in the sun room).

The water barrel is now set up. How unfortunate that it's been bone dry and a million degrees for the last few days when the whole rest of spring was nothing but rain.

We moved the herb pots to the area where the water barrel had been sitting out front. It looks a whole lot nicer now.

FAIL

So yesterday I tried a spray for green peach aphids that consisted of vegetable oil, water and dish soap on my row of potted plants out back. I am expecting an order of ladybugs on Wednesday, but in the mean time I wanted to get rid of the bugs I already had.

Here's what 4 of my 5 potted plants (2 eggplant and 3 tomatoes) looked like last night. I know it's hard to see, but they are all leafy and large and green.

Here's what I found this afternoon (the kids watered the plants in the morning):

Ouch. I'm guessing spraying oil on the leaves during the most freakishly hot May weather Pittsburgh has seen in years has essentially deep fried my plants. Oh well, live and learn. At least the aphids died too.

While we're talking about fails, here is a picture of my puppies trying to eat bees off of the flowers on my fence. They're not the smartest dogs in the world.