concoctions

I have made use of a few home-remedies (sort of) to treat the plants, and my cat! First, turned some dried Rosemary into powder in the coffee grinder and rubbed it in my cat's fur. It's supposed to deter fleas. (He didn't have hardly any to begin with).

Then this morning I mixed up several five-gallon bucket's worth batches of hot pepper spray to treat the garden plants, which are already getting devastated by cucumber beetles and japanese beetles both. The Pumpkins and Green Beans in particular are starting to look sick. My sprayer bottle conked out and wouldn't spray anymore so I just threw the pepper water over the plants until they were dripping. Mixed three kinds of hot sauce and a dash of dish soap into the water, is all. It was strong enough that the scent of it off the plants when I was done made me cough! I treated the pumpkins, green bean poles, chard (still not sure what's eating that), cherry tomatoes and the sole cantaloupe plant. Nothing's eaten the cantaloupe leaves yet but if the bugs get driven off the bean poles I don't want them to start attacking my cantaloupes.

I've also been simply drowning the offending bugs, but simply can't keep up with them.

herbs!

I opened all my drying herb bags yesterday and crumpled them into jars for storage. The only jar that got filled up was the Sage, so I'm going to have to pick and dry more herbs if I want to fill them up! Also, I don't know why I didn't dry any Rosemary yet...

Here are Parsley, Sage and Pineapple Sage (don't know if that will have any good flavor, we'll see!)

also Dill, Marjoram and Summer Savory

The Dill looks particularly ferny

when stripped off the stems.

two greens

The summer bounty has begun! I picked two nice Zucchini this morning

and a full basket of Green Beans. These beans are a bit different shape from the bush beans I grew before- they have flat sides.

Dismayed that I've been finding a few cucumber beetles here and there, but I don't have the time to come do early morning hunts. Nothing seems too damaged yet. The Pumpkin plants have loads of blossoms and the Cantaloupe is growing bigger too. The only thing still in sad shape is the plot of Okra...

hot trio

My Pepper plants are all fruiting now. Here's a bunch I picked this morning. The largest ones are Anahiems (turn red if left on the plant longer), the yellow ones I think banana peppers, the small narrow green ones serranos. They all smell wonderful, even though I'm not into spicy peppers. Good to flavor my beans, though!

I've also got a lot of bell peppers growing, but none big enough to pick yet.

spider

Found this tiny red and black spider in the bathroom. With white and black stripes on the abdomen. Even the legs are striped. I've never seen a spider in my yard before with such striking colors. It's a little ground spider! Small enough that the page of info I read said they're often mistaken for ants at first glance.

damage

We had the biggest storm I've ever been through in my life (I think). It was truly frightening to sit under the stairs and listen to the wind rage with two little kids in the dark (power outage). But thankfully no one was injured and nothing damaged beyond some plant life. In the morning when sun lit the world for us again we surveyed the yard. Lots of things got blown around.

This ball blown from the backyard into a front corner of the house.

The glass pane that makes the lid of my cold frame was flipped entirely upside down and not broken or even cracked. I was amazed!

Various garden plants and flowers got flattened

and my bean poles are leaning but haven't fallen down entirely.

I lost my clothesline to a dropped limb (ready to replace it anyways).

The big thing was that a third of a tree fell across my driveway. Luckily the car was parked further down and didn't get hit.

It took a team of neighbors (six adults total plus two kids whacking at things and cutting small stems with scissors) armed with long-handled pruners, handsaws and one heavy mallet two hours to clear the driveway. Then the guy across the street came home and he owns a chainsaw! Things went much quicker then. I am indebted to the wonderful people who assisted us.

But my poor trees. The nicest ones in my entire yard. The lefthand one had a few limbs broken from its center when the other tree fell into it.

The righthand one lost three of its "trunks" and over a third of its mass is now gone.

The limbs were literally twisted off by that terrifying wind. I don't know if I can save the tree- I'd have to trim off the jagged torn material down to a smooth surface and that might be too close to the heart of the tree. O dear.

But we are all safe, which is the important thing. And we only lost power for one day. Several hundred thousand people around us and in neighboring states are still without electricity, and that's just unbearable in this heat wave (it was 105 yesterday). Hotels are crammed full. I am glad that we have a solid roof and cooling air and I only lost half the food in my fridge, a few tomatoes and peppers off the plants outside.

And maybe one poor tree.

a beginning?

Planted the Rose seed in a few trays yesterday. It was hard to discern the little seeds from the bits of damp vermiculite. I'm not sure how many seeds I had originally but I sowed nineteen in the trays and that seems like a good bet.

new flower

New Daylily opened its petals today. Gorgeous!

Not nearly as spectacular, but just as pleasing are the pink Cosmos under the window, which are starting to branch out.

globes

Pulled some more Turnips this morning. I think they look pretty nice.

kids in the garden

I love to see the girls playing in the garden. They like this spot with tall green beans on one side, lush chard and broccoli on the other.

okra

I haven't mentioned the Okra in a long time because it hasn't been doing well. It kind of got planted in a corner as an afterthought and either it doesn't like the soggy ground there (near the rain barrel) or there's some pest nearby that really likes it. The leaves are nearly all eaten away. I decided yesterday to try and save it by moving it to the empty patch on other side of the yard, that held garlic earlier in the year. Covered the plants with cloches for the first few nights here, to keep bugs off while they're still vulnerable. I don't know if they'll recover or not...

dressed up

My older daughter used parts of plants to dress her barbies the other day. Just scissors and a bit of scotch tape and she made some pretty outfits! This first one with an orange Daylily flower:

The other two with Plantain leaves:

I thought it was rather creative!

green eatings

First picking of Green Beans! Not much, but I can see there's a lot more to come. And the kids ate it all up, which is great.

Even though my Pea plants look terrible- bad case of downy mildew- the peas are still edible, so we're still picking them. I've re-tied the plants up on their twigs and am making sure they get watered every single day (insufficient water can make the plants susceptible to mildews because they can't absorb the nutrients they need to fend it off). The growing ends are lush green again.

Just to be safe though I'm probably not going to save seed off these plants. These had already dried in some pods but I've decided it's better not to.

jade plants

My experiment has borne itself out. Jades do not do well in sub-irrigated planters, at least not for me. The pair of plants I had in the SIP never looked happy and now are collapsing.

I took them out today and repotted in a sandy mix. The two other plants I had earlier in regular draining pots with sandy mix are doing fantastic.

And my row of little babies on the mudroom windowsill just grow quietly without any fuss. They have salt exuded on the leaves (at least that's what I think it is) because a few times I forgot to give them rainwater and gave them tapwater....

and this one now-dying leaf on the right looks like it's produced another four or five plantlets again! I really need to stop growing these things.

horror

I have found another terrible pest in the garden. This one might be as bad as the cucumber beetles were. Japanese beetles. On my green beans. I squashed one but saw two more that escaped me. They apparently eat everything and the larvae live in your lawn and the only way to get rid of except spraying pesticide is hand-picking. Groan.

I have not yet discovered if they spread disease.... They are kinda pretty, though.

dried stevia

Checking my drying herbs hung in paper bags every few days. The first to be dry enough to store in jar was Stevia.

After stripping all the leaves off the stems it was a simple matter to crush them into powder between my fingers (I don't have a mortar and pestle yet).

Not sure what I'll do with this- after reading up on it, seems a complicated matter to replace sugar with stevia in baking. But it will be easy to put a pinch in my dandelion coffee!

green green

Cut handfuls of Green Onions for the first time a few days ago. I was pretty impressed how beautiful they are, how strong the onion scent. Chopped them up into enchiladas and it was pretty good. Diced some more into eggs with a bit of cheese yesterday and that was even better!

peony green

I never got a photo of the Peony plant when it flowered this year. The flowering time is so short- it seems like just a few days and then the heavy blooms are gone. The plant looked different this year- it didn't grow nearly as big, and the flowers looked darker to me- I swear last year they were a deep pink and this year they looked darker purple to me.

The good news is that I might finally get some peony seed to plant. The pods are looking nice and fat, which I've never seen before. Might wonder why I want to grow more peonies since I'm not really crazy about their short-lived flowers that flop all over the place. But I do like the foliage. And probably one year I'll remember to put supports out to hold up those flowers!

things doing great!

On the flip side of last post, these are the plants doing wonderfully this year.

Chard and Broccoli. I have never had such lovely Broccoli.

I ate another pair of heads the other day

and already the plant I cut them from is making new side shoots.

My daughter currently thinks broccoli is so awful it makes her feel nauseated, and my husband thinks this broccoli tastes like buckwheat (he doesn't like the buckwheat honey) so I have the broccoli all to myself.

I have caught a few harelquin bugs on the plants, but hopefully before they laid eggs- these three were on the same plant and none found elsewhere so I have suspicions they were meeting up to make more bugs! They are beautiful, though. There's also a spider living under one of the plants, I hope he catches and eats lots of pests.

My big Tomato plants are looking lovely. There are lots of tomatoes forming and I can't wait to eat them! I did plant them a bit too close to each other, though...

The Peppers look fantastic. Working among the plants the most lovely pepper scent overtakes you. I don't like hot peppers, except to put the serranos or jalapenos in beans, but I love the scent they make.

and the Pumpkins are growing quickly! I'm eager to see them fruit as it's pie pumpkins this year, which will be a first for us.

The Brussel Sprout plants seem to be doing well (except that little one in the back left corner- not enough sun?) I'm just waiting to see them make sprouts...