I'm testing out some new blogger features and plug ins, and need an excuse to babble on about stuff to I can see what all the features do. Soooo - let's talk about gardening...
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The
cucumbers have all died off thanks to the
cucumber beetles. The few vines that are left are withering and probably won't have the cucumbers fully develop. I finally hit the plants with Sevin, which will hopefully kill off the cucumber beetles that are still dancing around on the plants. I have new plants I've started from seed, and just put those in the ground the other day...so hopefully with this heat and humidity the plants will start to take off and grow and we'll get another round of cukes before long!?
Image by detsugu via Flickr
The eggplants are doing great! So are the okra. I have to say I've never ever had as much success with these two plants as I have this year - and I attribute that to growing them in raised beds. Two years ago I tucked some
eggplant plants into some spare space in the
raised bed and they did really well. Last year I put eggplants into the in-ground bed, and they were swallowed up by weeds and the soil was too heavy and they didn't do well. This year? The tallest they've ever been! And I interplanted okra with them, and aside from the leaves being nibbled up by
Japanese beetles, the okra plants are tall and pretty healthy looking (although a bit leggy - thanks to the smothering eggplants!).
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The
peppers are also doing really well. I grow about as many hot peppers as I do sweet peppers, but with sweet peppers you often want to leave them on the plant to ripen up - so you get the cool colors and sweet flavors (otherwise they're just green peppers). It seems like the hot peppers produce more fruit faster than the sweet ones do - so the CSA shares this year will definitely be getting more hot peppers than sweet from me. That's ok - Mary can cover more of the sweet peppers in the shares.
The
zucchini and summer squash have also been doing fairly well, but I'm worried that the squash bugs and cucumber beetles have caused them to suffer some (I'm constantly picking off squash bug eggs - and who knows what all I've missed?!), plus I tend to overcrowd the plants, which isn't helping them.
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I wish I could say the
tomatoes are doing great. Tomatoes are one of the big things we all look forward to in our gardens, and after last year's hit of late blight, the hope was that this year would make up for all of last year's losses. Instead my tomatoes aren't doing great this year either. No late blight, but they're just not producing many flowers or fruit. Sure, I have a problem with purple nutsedge (a weed) - and while I had it under control early on, it's really starting to take over in the garden. But I'm not sure that that's the only issue. The plants just don't seem to want to bloom very much. I need to do a soil sample test to see if maybe the soil composition is off....I forget if it's potassium or phosphorus, but one of those two influences the blooming in plants, and perhaps my levels are low in the one the plants need?
Hm, so the new Blogger features, combined with the
Zemanta plug in, are really kinda cool! Note that none of the pictures above are from my own collection - they're just recommended pictures Zemanta pulled from that I chose to include. I wonder how things will look in the final layout (which, you've probably noticed by now, has drastically changed - we're quite pink at the moment I'm typing this!).
Boy all this talk about veggies and food is making me hungry! I think it's time for a late lunch!
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
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