Pick a Peck of....

All sorts of stuff!  Cucumbers, lettuce, swiss chard, beets, beans (2 kinds!), snap peas (2 kinds!)....and 2 cherry tomatoes....Ahhhhhh garden heaven.  Things are really blooming nicely.  I'm so proud of the garden.  Massive upgrade to last year's hot mess of dirt and plants where I quite literally threw plants and seeds into the ground. 

The hay that I put down is proving to be really awesome.  I have hardly had to do any weeding in the main garden and oh boy is that a relief.  I am still battling blight in several of my tomatoes.  I did pick all the leaves last night, and then again tonight we had more.  I sprayed the organic fungal spray that I have and I'm really hoping that will pull everything through and not damage my beautiful home grown Brandywine tomatoes!  (I have BIG plans for those suckers!  Hello, canning pot, what can we preserve for later?)

I also have been battling japanese beetles.  Wow, those are some hardly little stinkers.  They have really done a number on my pole beans.  The top leaves are totally damaged and I'm hoping they stay away from the plant so I get some beans from it.  This type of bean is really supposed to yield a longer more prolific crop of beans compared to the bush beans which I have also planted.  I followed the advice of many online gardeners and they all recommend using the bucket with dish soap and shaking the bugs into the mixture.  That does not appeal to me at all.  Mainly because I'm a little afraid of them flying into me!  So I did some bug squishing and shoo-ing....all proving to be futile.  So out came the organic spray and I tried my best.  Guess that is all I can do, right?

Sugar Snap Peas

Sugar snap peas from the garden make store-bought peas taste lifeless.  The difference is so amazing and the cost-savings is insane.  I picked 10 ounces of peas tonight which would usually cost me about $4+ and I only paid $2.25 for the packet of seeds which will provide me plants for 2 crops this summer and probably the next two.

Rust on Plants

In early summer I transplanted a hollyhock plant from my friend Becky.  I put it on the west side of my house in a super sunny area.  Thought the thing would grow like wildfire and really take off.  But it has never done well.  In 7+ weeks it started to develop this little yellow orangey spots.  I kept ignoring them, and holding onto the fact that the new growth was spot free.  Then finally I got off my behind and asked my neighbor Grace for some help identifying the problem....which she concluded as rust.  I took off the infected leaves and did spray it with my organic fungus spray that I used on my tomatoes when they had blight.  We'll see how things go and hopefully with the help from this article the infected plant,

will look like this.

Raspberries are a Little Gift

When summer comes the first awesome fruit crop you have is strawberries.  All you can do is think about how amazing they taste on cereal, on ice cream, or just by the handful!  And then when they die out it's almost like the saddest culinary event....until the raspberries come.  I have 4 plants in my garden.  One is a wild raspberry plant which I got at the Madison Farmers Market and the others are from my friend Becky's garden.  I only have had berries on the plants from Becky and will probably only have a couple of cups to show for the crop.  Next year will be better and I am most definitely going to be getting more plants.  Wouldn't it be great to have so many that I could make jam and Raspberry Cream Cheese Muffins?  Oh, yeah.  It totally would.

Green Beans, please!

I planted Kentucky Blue pole green beans in the garden.  My first time doing green beans of any kind.  Got an awesome bean pole structure from my neighbor, Grace, that she was no longer using.  I think I only have about 11 plants climbing up the pole, but I'm hoping it will be a very prolific crop.  I don't remember how many plants I sowed exactly, but I think I had about 5 open "spaces" where nothing emerged from the soil.  The pole is about 6 foot high and I would say that my beans are about a foot higher than that!

French Radish

I planted an entire packet of French Radish's from Jung with my carrots and beets.  It was incredibly fun to watch them come up so quickly and now, as predicted, my beets and carrots look amazing.  I can't wait to roast the beets in my oven and let my kids eat the carrots with the green tops on them.  They'll really get a kick out of that I think.

Bunnies....those cute little bastards

A good friend of mine is trying to get rid of a serious bunny issue.  She plants, they munch, game over and bunnies win.  My mother in law suggested putting carrots all around the plants so that the bunnies munch them and not the new seedlings.  I thought that sounded like a great easy, cheap way to deter the bunnies.  She said it worked great....anyone else think it's worth a try?