Mid July 2010

It has been almost a year since my last garden post. A lot has changed, which kept me from keeping the blog updated. I switched to a new school, going from Christiansburg Elementary to Price's Fork Elementary. This also included a grade change from 5th to 1st, which was no easy feat for me. Early June, Clay and I found out that we were going to have an addition to our family!! My due day is Jan. 18th and that puts me in the middle of my 14th week. We knew this would speed up our need to make some changes to the house. We started with wanting to add a dishwasher, which meant we had to change the cabinets, which meant we might as well redo everything in the kitchen, hence the pictures of the gutted walls. The brick below was put in when Clay's grandparents used a wood stove. We are debating on cleaning it up and leaving some of it exposed??
Last year too much rain saturated our garden and caused our tomatoes to succumb to the blight and literally rot from the inside, stems, fruit, and all. This year Virginia is officially having a drought. Below you can see where the lack of rain has caused our septic pipe line to show, and has kept our corn and sunflowers from getting any height, but the tomatoes have grown nicely and are beginning to ripen.
Knee high corn that is beginning to put out tassels. We've had terrible luck with cucumbers in the past and this year two of our three vines are doing fairly well. The spotted and striped cucumber beetles are my nemesis. They are too little and quick to hand pick off, and love to hide down in the base of a new bloom. (In the background of this picture you can see the bottom of the fence that Clay had his friend Ryan Vaden put in. It has kept our neighbors ducks and dogs from coming over daily to do their business. The ducks liked our place so much they decided to nest and lay 13 eggs under our canoe!)
This is our sacrificial lamb, the eggplant. These little nasty black bugs just sucked the life right out of it. Maybe next year we will come up with a netting system to protect it.
One of my students gave me a thoughtful gift certificate to Crow's Nest so I went shopping in late June and most of the plants were pretty root bound and not looking their best, but I found a happy home for this sunny one.
I few items from the garden. We love how versatile red cabbage can be and planted about 6 this year. But what can you do with 6 cabbages at once? Luckily they don't rot quickly after ripening up so we just pick one about once a week. What I did discover was that they are a favorite home to earwigs. I pulled one out of the garden yesterday and turned it upside down to carry it it and probably a hundred earwigs came raining out, they were so quick to scatter somewhere for shelter, I had them crawling up my legs. Just like cabbage worms they do damage, but I have found that they rarely make it into the heart of the cabbage and after removing a couple of layers you are good to go. I probably should look into how to avoid providing an earwig hotel.

The potatoes have started to die back, so I figured it was time to go digging. The plants started out thriving. They were bombarded with the same little black bug that killed the eggplant. I think we sprayed once or twice and did a lot of handpicking for potato beetles. I noticed a few more predator insects this year, probably coming to feed on all the squished potato beetles I left behind. One was a shield bug and some different wasp like guys. When the days of 90 degrees heat and no rain hit, the potatoes were often left out of my efforts to water the garden. So I wasn't too surprised to find that they didn't produce very big tubers.

We still have lots of zucchini that need to be shredded for bread and enough cucumbers that I need to experiment with cucumber dip.
Clay's first summer project was outfitting a canoe that his buddy Todd is letting us use. It had one rotten seat and was otherwise nothing but a shell when we got it. So Clay replaced both seats and put in two support bars. He also spent a lot of hot hours trying to seal up a tiny crack int he bottom. Luckily it doesn't go all the way through, because the sealer popped lose on our first trip out, but it is not taking in water and seems to be working really well!!
Dyed Queen Anne's Lace made for a nice 4th of July bouquet.

New Garden Pest Discoveries
Striped Blister Beetle - I have seen this beetle mostly on our Roma tomatoes.