indoor care

I have started a new practice with some of my houseplants. The Dieffenbachia and Dracaena have burned tips (but not the spider plant, for some reason).  I mistakenly thought that boiling water would take flouride out, but I was wrong- that actually concentrates it! so now I'm just being careful to give these plants a huge drink once a week (or even once every two weeks) to flush them out well. They also like humidity, so just recently I started misting them every other day or so.  Already the leaves of Dieffenbachia seem to have a richer color.

I can't tell yet if the Dracaena is responding too,

but it does have little shoots growing out of one of the canes, and this one is almost ready to unfold a leaf!

celeries

My Celery patch is steadily growing and growing. From a low eye level it looks like a celery forest. The plants are just about eight inches tall now. They grow so slowly! But at the same time are so carefree. Because they're in a damp spot I almost never water them, and they never flinch. Critters don't seem to bother them either, and the foliage is thick enough it crowds out most weeds. So all I do is patiently watch them leaf out, give them a bit of compost when I feed the other plants, and focus on the veggies that need more tending. It will probably be fall before I can crunch into a fresh celery stalk!

second chop

I hate to cut such pretty leaves, as the secondary growth on the biggest Avocado is making lovely progress. But it's already more than six inches, and I want the plant to continue to branch. So today I cut off the leafy part of the tallest stem, here. What a shame!

yums

Isa picking Cherry Tomatoes.

wee pumpkin

Baby Pumpkin in the garden!

pretty

I found this lovely little butterfly hovering on the wall near the daylily foliage, and snuck close enough to get a shot of it.

I'm so pleased with the Tithonia flowers, now that they've filled out with blooms they look fantastic.

Some of the plants have stunted growth, though. The nicest ones are four feet high, but this one barely comes up to my knee. It's still flowering, regardless.

The hummingbird is a regular visitor now. I see him in the early evening, he flies in low and hovers a few moments over several of the bright Tithonias. I can't tell if he's just checking them out, or actually feeding. One of these days I'll manage to get a picture!

The flowers are so nice I cut some to put in this little blue vase, which I think looks striking full of red and orange. Tithonia and Cosmos.

death by vinegar

My daughter's experiment with Marigolds has been successful. If you call having two dead plants success. She has proved to herself that plants which get nice, clean water grow healthy, whereas plants that get contaminants (in this case vinegar) shrivel and die.

insects

29 cucumber beetles caught today. Not much better. I got one of the red ones, here's a photo. Can you see how I was fooled into mistaking them for ladybugs at first?

I found some nice bugs hanging around on the Basil, though. Lots of fat happy bumblebees which ignore me entirely

and this beautiful tiny butterfly.

What was really curious about this guy was that I watched him rub the tail parts of his wings together- they looked like little feelers, not just decorative parts of the wing, and he moved them independently against each other while the main part of the wing held still.

I also spotted a gang of these bugs on a Pumpkin leaf. They must have just hatched- were crowded all together. When I came close for a photo they scattered. I wonder if they're the same bug as this one? and if they eat a pest for me or not?

new leaves

The little sedum plant, goldmoss, that I brought in from outside, seems to be quite happy in a pot. Already both pots of it are growing pretty, new leaves.

I'm picturing it someday as a hanging plant with pretty little trailing stems.

And my Geranium stem that just recently got chopped, it's already putting out tender new foliage!

beetle count

Got 35 cucumber beetles today. I'm getting good at catching them when they fly, too- slap! between my hands. The usual half-dozen escaped me, though. Here's a clip of a pic from the ones I caught today- you can see all three types, the smaller striped one, the bigger spotted one, and on the left the bronze-colored one which until now I never noticed has a stripe on the outside of its wing cases, spots in the middle. If this is a new kind of cuke beetle in my garden, I'm afraid natural selection is working in their favor- as more of those escape me because they blend in with the dirt, they're going to breed more and be more of them next year. Augh!

bounty

Today's fresh pickings! One nice Zucchini, one fat Cucumber, a handful of young Green Beans and lots and lots of Cherry Tomatoes.

I'm finally getting some Heirloom Tomatoes too, the plants seem to have recovered (although they have lots of drying, wilting leaves) from the blossom-end rot. I'm not sure which was the cure- lime, crushed eggshells or simply more watering, but something did the trick! Now we have plenty of small but very very tasty heirloom tomatoes.

bugs!

Anyone know what this curious insect is? I found it out in the garden walking on a tomato stem. I don't know if he's friend or foe. Something has been eating bites and halves of my Cherry Tomatoes, and if it's him I want him gone! (I keep suspecting a tomato hornworm but haven't found one yet).

Here's a picture of this bug on the window, when he flew away from me.

My kid caught a big grasshopper today. I tried to take a photo of him in the glass jar, but it was all wavy because she used a mason jar, with the writing on the glass. I think it looks pretty cool, though!

Here's a better shot, climbing on a twig.

The cucumber beetle war is not in my favor now. I wonder if I should spray again, or if it did any good at all? Yesterday I caught 18 beetles, missed three or four which flew away. Today I got 50! with six escaping. I think perhaps a new generation has hatched recently, as a lot of them are small. And I keep missing the bronze-colored beetles on the Green Beans, when they drop to the ground I can't see them well.

rhubarb!

Today I turned over my compost pile and fed most of the garden plants with it, also the hostas and the single peony. The Rhubarb patch got an entire five-gallon bucketful, for just those three big plants. They've mostly recovered!

I finally realized my main error was not enough water. Now I make sure to give them a good drink if it hasn't rained in two days. I've also trimmed back most of the random plants that were growing against the fence and shading this spot. They seem to appreciate the extra sun exposure!

Of course, I still haven't figured out what's eating holes in the leaves, and each plant occasionally has one or two leaves just yellow and wither up, but they're also still producing plenty of new young leaves.

So I still have hopes of eating my own Rhubarb next year!

shells

I have a new defense in the garden. It is eggshells!

Not crushed to deter crawling insects with soft tummies (which never seems to work anyhow) but as a visual signal. Those white butterflies with little black spots called the cabbage moth? that lay tiny eggs that hatch into teensy caterpillars that I can never find until they've chomped everything? Well, it turns out they're territorial. Or so I read. So if you scatter halves of white eggshells around the garden, the moths think others of their kind are already there, and they leave! And it works! I put eggshells out (skeptical, but willing to try. My previous method, of chasing them with bug nets, was not very effective) and the next day saw plenty fluttering around like usual, but not landing on plants as often. And after that, they're all gone. I haven't seen one in my yard since. I almost can't believe it. Now if only I could find a signal that screams to cucumber beetles: scram!

After a few rains the eggshells get dirty so then I just smash them into the dirt and put out a few fresh, brightly white ones.

What I really want now is a bat. I hear that only do bats eat hundreds of mosquitoes an hour, but they also eat cucumber beetles all night! One of my husband's coworkers had bats living in his attic (dripping guano all down the side of his house) and he spent hundreds of dollars trying to get them removed. I said, get someone to trap them and bring them over here! But I was too late... So I'm saving up for a bat house. (My husband says his friend's yard has no mosquitoes at all. I wonder if he'll notice a difference now that he got rid of his bats?)

canning beans!

I canned Green Beans yesterday! In spite of bug damage, the plants are producing a lot now so after only two pickings I had this bowlful.

It wasn't much compared to what my canner can actually hold, but I went ahead and did a small batch anyways. Here they are just before I locked the lid on.

My pickings were so meager (though they feel like plenty compared to what we eat in a day!) that I only filled six small jars, half-pints leftover from the jam project. But they all made a lovely ping sound!

It was surprisingly easy compared to the extra cooking and sticky mess that is jam-making. The only thing I really had trouble with was keeping the pressure at the right point once the processing time started. It never dropped below what it was supposed to be at, but went one or two pounds higher when I tried to adjust the heat and hold it steady. I sat babysitting that pot the entire twenty minutes it was processing, and still couldn't get it even. According to what the book says, too much processing is safe, it will just loose some nutrients and flavor. Hopefully with a few more batches I can get the hang of it.

Next I want to do carrots and beets!

transplanting

I've dug up some Cosmos from the row between the sunflowers and the pumpkins, which was sown pretty thickly and getting crowded.

I moved two to sit between the tomatoes and zucchini, and a few more against the wall under my window where there's gaps in the row of Tithonia.

They look pretty sad right now, but I'm hoping with the clouds today and rain promised tomorrow, they'll lift their leaves again.

beetle war

The cucumber beetle count this morning was 20. Better! But in spite of the cloudy and relatively cool weather they were pretty agile and five or more flew out of my clutches.

cukes and the beetle

Picked four nice fat Cucumbers from the garden this morning.

The night before last I sprayed half the garden for cucumber beetle control. I used an Ecosmart organic insect killer, which is very soapy and its main ingredients are the oils of rosemary, peppermint, thyme and clove. The very next day it rained hard, and for the first time I was dismayed at rain, fearing it would wash all the spray off the plants! But I started keeping beetle count again, and the results are encouraging already.

The first morning after spraying I picked 54 cucumber beetles total off the garden (and I didn't spray the pumpkin patch, ran out of stuff). Today I only got 28 beetles, missed three which flew away too quick. That's remarkable. Even when I was searching for them I was thinking: there seem to be less! but I wasn't sure until I counted my catch. The bugs seemed to be moving slower, too, though I'm not sure if that's from the effects of the spray or because of the lower temperatures with incoming rain.

The bees seem to be okay; I still see plenty crawling happily in and out of flowers. Funny, I did notice that on the cucurbits most of the beetles are the striped variety, with just a few spotted ones (which are bigger and fatter). On the Swiss Chard and Green Beans I only find spotted cucumber beetles. I wonder if they have more of a liking for certain plants?

chard eats

I've been experimenting with the Swiss Chard. The other day we made a pizza of it, using it like spinach. I put finely chopped Swiss Chard, finely diced garden Garlic, a bit of cheddar and mozarella cheese and some sopressata salami (pre-cooked in a pan to get the grease off) on it, with a sprinkling of feta on top. It was yum!

We also tried in in omelets recently. My husband makes the best omelets! He whips the eggs with some heavy cream, salt and pepper, cinnamon, curry and garlic powder. When the eggs are first poured into the pan, adds the chopped Chard, then folds the eggs over diced onion, a bit of Garlic, feta, Tomato, sweet lebanese baloney, cheddar cheese and fresh Oregano. Fantastic! (and that recipe used four homegrown ingredients!)

apples

My daughter's young Apple trees (grown from seed out of an apple she ate!) are getting too big for their pots

so today we repotted them, into the biggest pots I have.

Here's a picture from above.

 They really are starting to look tall and nice. I can't wait to see them begin to branch out next year. But I don't have any larger pots and still don't know where a good place to plant them in the yard would be...

indoor plants

I've propped up in my mudroom some boards with an old shelf atop them, to make a ledge so my plants can sit near the window where the best light is.

One one end I've placed these little pots of trailing plant matter

set on top of glass cloches behind the pot of Mint (which looks sad because we ate some of it recently).

I don't know what this trailing plant is called. It's a groundcover, and looks kind of like a succulent to me. It grows in long runners that root down at intervals. I'm starting to not like how it looks in my front flowerbed, because it's the same pale-green color as new crabgrass, so every time I glance over I think oh no, there's more crabgrass in the bed! But then I wondered if it would make a nice trailing houseplant, and as there's so much of it I didn't mind experimenting. We'll see. It usually goes dormant in the cold and comes back in spring; what will it do inside? (if I knew its name I could just look this up! anyone know what it is?).

On the other side of my shelf is Isa's little plant experiment. It's from this Green book she has; supposed to demonstrate how acid rain and pollutants affect plants by watering each with a different concentration of clean water, or with varying levels of vinegar in the water. She's excited already to be seeing results that after one day of watering, the poor little Marigold getting the most vinegar is already looking sad.

And in the middle is my big Avocado plant.

Look how much the new young leaves are growing! They reach out sideways in a funny arching motion.

On the other side of the room, atop my shelf I've got a few pots starting some indoor Cilantro, as it's too hot outside and none of the planted seeds are germinating. I was curious to see if they grow better from fresh seed just picked off the plant, or from the ones that had been chilled in the fridge. So I've marked them.