Garden Disaster

We're back from an incredible trip to Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National parks, plus some fabulous places in-between, and spending time with great friends. After we sort through hundreds of pictures, I'll pick some to post.

On the other hand, our garden didn't fair too well while we were gone. I'm sure there are many factors that played into the disaster. We made a special effort to mulch our plants well to keep the weeds down, keep moisture in, and for the garden to be low maintenance while we were gone. This must of back fired with all the rain. I knew the tomatoes had signs of blight that spreads quickly with a lot of moisture, so I also found an organic dust to use on the peppers and some tomatoes, which also may have caused damage instead of helping.?.

I went out this morning to begin assessing the damage and of course it started raining. I'll have to pull up all but 2 or 3 of the tomato plants. I haven't had a chance to see if the potatoes rotted and the peppers look like they could use some drying out as well. The corn and the sunflowers did love all the rain. Our second set of corn caught up to the first set and seems to look even taller. (Thanks, to Clay's mom for helping to harvest some of the corn while we were gone!) I picked a couple of cucumbers today that survived on a pitiful looking vine and I haven't ventured into our squash plants to see what is happening in there.

I'm sad about the tomatoes, especially since I grew so many of them from seed this year, but as I was pulling up the cages and plants I just thought this is one less chore I'll have later this fall when I'm trying to adjust to teaching a new grade and being at a new school. I also want have to stress about canning tomatoes or making salsa. We'll have a lot of thinking and reading to do before we plant next year. We may take a break from growing tomatoes or need to dig up a new plot for them in hopes that the soil is free from the blight causing spores.

Mid July

Just a few pictures before we leave for a two week trip in the mid west. I visited crows nest and picked 2 gallons of berries in less than 2 hours.
This is the first year we've seen blight like evidence on our pepper plants. The bottom leaves are turning spotty/brownish yellow and falling off. I did get an organic fungicide dust to use. It would have been best to have used it as a preventative measure, but I wasn't expecting to have problems with our peppers.
Butternut squash is coming in. This is the one squash plant that didn't look devastated early on by cucumber beetles and squash bugs, but they seem to be moving in and actually eating on the fruit not just the plant.
Our corn is still doing well, we hope to have some to eat when we get back!
One view from the entrance of the garden.
Little cabbage sprouts growing from the original cabbage plant, pretty cool, and they seem to be worm free for now.
Thanks Jessica, for all the pretty sunflower seeds. I love the shorter and smaller blooms that don't seem to get top heavy and fall over! This is such a lovely shade of yellow with the dark center!!! I think this is called Moonshadow.

Returning From the Beach

Clay and I just returned from a week's vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. We had beautiful weather the whole week and warm, Caribbean blue water. We spent most of our time out on the beach getting toasty in the sun and cooling off in the water. Rick took some of us crabbing at the Roanoke Sound. We caught and released several small fellows. They had to be 5 in. across the shell to keep and we didn't net enough for dinner, but had fun trying. We also did some kayaking on the sound and on the ocean. We didn't have any spills this year and although I don't have and pictures, dad made it out in the ocean just in time to hang out with the dolphins swimming by. We went to Roanoke Island and toured the Elizabethan Gardens one morning. Minus the mosquitoes we were really impressed with the variety of plants and how well maintained the gardens were. Their most showy flowers were all of the Hydrangeas. We took several pictures that I may try to post at some point, but I thought this view of the boxwood edged flower beds, through the archway was a nice one.

Clay and I spent one day driving from Nags Head to the Hatteras Inlet and rode the ferry over to Ocracoke Island. We lucked out on the way back and caught a beautiful sunset from the ferry.

The garden was not too out of control when we returned, thanks to Clay's parents for checking on it for us a couple of times while we were gone. We had 5 large yellow squash to harvest, one zucchini (our poor zucchini plants are looking pitiful), and 10 cucumbers. The cucs are coming in great, but the plants look like they may not last long. We directly planted some seeds to have plants producing later in the season, but they didn't survive the long week of hot days with no rain. Although they don't exactly look very pretty in the picture, our best surprise when we got back, would be the potatoes. I was afraid that the potato beetles would take over while we were gone and they did a fine job trying (I probably picked off over 50 easily, I couldn't find any rubbing alcohol on hand so I used a cup with vinegar and it did the trick), but they didn't keep the potatoes from growing down below. We dug up one plant and found six tennis ball sized, red potatoes and a couple smaller ones. The roots still had several buds waiting to grow, so I think we will have a good crop to harvest later in the season.
Our last red cabbage was harvested while we were gone, I will have to try to plant those more spaced out next year to extend the season.
The corn silks are showing up, so we need to add some mineral oil to them asap, to help keep the worms out.
The tomato plants do have signs of the blight, but still look pretty good at this point. I've been trimming the bottom leaves that are looking spotty. There are tons of small green tomatoes, but I have noticed a few that appear to have the blossom end rot problem.
Peppers look ok - not a lot happening with them so far.
We have a ton of weeding to do tomorrow and some other general maintenance.

Harvesting Red Cabbage and other Random Happenings

Clay was away this evening so I needed to fix a quick easy meal for myself. I ended up with a baked potato and sauteed cabbage. Last year my new favorite vegetable discovery was okra and this year my new favorite has to be red cabbage. I sauteed a small amount of chives (easy substitute for onion - we never use an entire onion when cooking and the chives are on hand in the garden) then added the cabbage and seasoned with salt and pepper. After it wilted a little bit I added some red vinegar and continued cooking for another 4 min. or so. It makes any dinner plate colorful and has a load of health benefits. I also love the stuff raw, especially in salads.

So as I was eating I started thinking about the yucky slimy, green eggs that I've spotted on our cabbage in the garden and just what might be happening inside their growing heads (lovely thought over dinner). I decided that they were getting big enough to harvest and if left alone too much damage could be done. I learned about harvesting from this site. I only harvested two of our four, the biggest one and the one that looked like purple Swiss cheese it was getting so many holes. I did find a few cabbage worms, but I don't think the damage was too extensive. We will have to eat one soon, because I cut it in half to see how far in the worms could get. I definitely want to try cabbage again next year but I will be more alert for worms - once again I blame it on the rain this year.

Now the random stuff. I'm probably the only one that will know there is a cool insect in this picture. Hopefully you can see it if you click on the picture. I spotted a Familiar Bluet Damselfly hanging out around our sunflower bed. I'm thinking it was a male, they are more colorful, and this guy was an incredible turquoise color with black stripes.

I also spent some time this evening watching the lightning bug show outside. I forget how amazing these insects are, check out this site! The site mentioned that firefly larvae like to eat earthworms, slugs, and snails - well they should be feasting in our garden then, they can have all the slugs they can get! It said the adults feed on plant nectar, I noticed today that they seem to like eating basil.

One insect I haven't noticed until this year that I found is the Golden Tortoise Beetle. It is related to the the ladybird (ladybug) beetle, but unfortunately it does eat plants.


Pretty shot of a Wild Geranium bloom!

I did go to the Farmer's Market today with my friend Rose to look at some Native Plants from the Enchanted Gardens stand. I ended up getting two plants:
Butterflyweed (Asclepias Tuberosa)
Sundrops (Oenethera Fruticosa)
I still need to find homes for them and hope they become well established.

One more thing I enjoyed reading about today: How to Grow Tea!

Clay and I used my car and lots of digging to pull out some old shrubs from in front of our house. As we were getting ready to replant, Clay remembered that he needed to check on the old pipes that drained water from our gutters. Sure enough he found some busted cast iron/terracotta pipes that needed replacing. So that delayed putting in our new flower beds but why dig up the area twice? He took a day off of work and his dad came down to help dig tunnels and put in new PVC pipes. They also extended the distance that the pipes drained, and all of this happen just in time for monsoon season here in Montgomery Co.
I wish we would have taken a picture of the front before we dug up all the plants, but below is an after picture. The grass seed has loved all the rain. Clay did a combination of tall fescue and Kentucky bluegrass, which made it look more natural when it came up. We also planted a Minuet Mountain Laurel, Elsie Lee Azalea, and Russian Sage on each side of the porch with a few other smaller plants.
I did two mixed flower pots. This one turned out to be my favorite. I decided they didn't have to match exactly. I can't remember the names of all the plants off the top of my head for these.
We planted some Nasturtiums in the front bed. They like well drained sandy soil, which is not at all what we have in the front, but so far they seem ok. We can always put some in the garden next year, but they added some nice color to the front.
We found a Cecropia Moth near our potato patch last week. It wasn't living when I found it, so I relocated it to a better spot for a picture. It is the largest moth in North America. Shortly after the moth was found, we saw some strange white eggs attached to one of our potato plants. I didn't make the connection at first, but after IDing this moth I think the eggs may have belonged to this moth. At the time I was only interested in removing the eggs and I didn't try saving them. These moths like to feed on deciduous trees, but they might have enjoyed the potato plants as well??
Random pictures of our neighbor's cat again. He really is a cute cat and he keeps Dave entertained. He is an incredible hunter, so I try to discourage him from our bird areas as much as possible, but you can only do so much.


One of my favorite plants at the house is our black raspberry. It is producing early this year with all the rain and I haven't had a chance to protect it with bird netting. For one it is much taller this year and when I went to get the netting it had a layer of neem oil on it that had spilled from last year. We really need to clean out and take inventory of everything in the smokehouse.

The garden is loaded with weeds even though we have tried all sorts of extra mulch to keep them at bay. We did black mulch paper which helps hold in moisture as well. Then covered that with either straw or grass clippings. I think the weeds come up too easily with the straw and the grass clipping tend to mold easily, but better than nothing. We did not do black weed paper for the walkways this year so they have thicker layers of grass clippings. We put in a second set of corn and you can see here the differences in the two, so hopefully we will have corn for more than just a two week span.
Just a pretty picture of some lavander that we bought from a guy in Asheville last year. I love perennial herbs.
I have this great children's book called "It's an Ant's Life," it is written like a journal from an ants perspective. I wouldn't have realized with out the book that these were the worker ants cleaning the grubs, which is the larva stage for ants.
Our neighbor came by one day a few weeks ago to warn us of a football size swarm of honey bees hanging out in one of our Leyland Cypress trees. We didn't get to see the full mass of bees but we did catch a few still hanging around the next day. I don't know much at all about keeping bees, but I think somewhere in the middle of one of these masses is the queen bee and if you can catch her then you can farm the bees, but that is not on my to do list.
I have mixed feelings about how well plants are doing in the garden. The squash plants were being eaten on pretty bad, squash bugs are so ugly and stinky, and one of my least favorite to try picking off by hand. I did what I could and then I did spray an organic insecticide on the plants and it did seem to help some. I still see several wilted leaves and suspect a warm borer has already done some damage. Cucumbers are doing ok, but the seeds we put out later did rot so I will need to put in some more tomorrow. Potato plants are waist high, but who knows what is going on down below. Our pepper plants haven't grown a lot, but seem to be bug free and happy. The tomato plants have grown a lot, but some of the stems seem to have gotten too much water and appear to be ready to bust, like they are rotting from the inside out, hopefully this is not the case for all of them. I saw some pretty ugly stuff in the garden when I checked on it Wednesday after the last long rainy day. There was a layer of green slimy eggs in one of the cabbage plants, probably hundreds of them. I saw several slugs and threw a few out of the garden today when I could finally get in there to do some weeding. I always wander if all of my other gardening friends have as much trouble with garden pests as we do???

Memorial Weekend Garden Images

Red Cabbage - Ornamental and tasty.
You can't see much from this shot, unless you click on it. Front left we have lettuce, spinach, then peppers. Back left we have potatoes and tomatoes.
Our corn is coming up nicely.
Not so nice looking - our potato plants have been hit hard from the beginning. When they first came up the potato beetle's set in strong and I picked them off almost daily. Then a small black mite looking insect has done the most damage and they are too numerous to pick off. So to fight these guys we have used an organic spray and some neem oil.
We have stopped harvesting asparagus and we have not been able to control the weeds.
Our strawberries are starting to ripen up. The oldest plants have always produced small strawberries, but they seem even smaller this year and may need to be replaced for next year, but they are still very sweet and tasty. The plants we put in last year have not started producing much yet.
Thanks to Clay's co-worker, Dewey, we now have a new giant heap of horse manure mixed with pine shavings to use for compost. The pile to the left is all the sod that we have been digging up around the yard to fix our gutter runoff and from starting new flower beds.

Bonkers and Dave have an Encounter