June 1, 2009 Progress Report

It's a beautiful start to June! I spent a few hours this afternoon taking care of the weeds and taking some pictures for an update. Everything is taking off and looking good except, again, for the eggplant. It might be time to admit defeat and try and put something else in it's place. The garlic spray was not effective against flea beetles at all. I think the eggplant was too far gone for anything but the most potent insecticide. However, it wasn't a complete failure: I spied a cucumber beetle on the eggplant one day and give it a squirt. That thing dropped right off and went crawling away. So I may try it again.

I have also given up trying to wait for the "carrots" to mature so I can find out what it was that took over. There were a lot of bugs coming from that little patch and it was time to thin it out. In a separate effort to reduce the number of insects, I took care of the weeds completely overgrowing the berry bushes adjacent to my patch. It was getting to the point where they were choking out every bush. They also were flowering and I didn't want them to go to seed and make matters worse! But the benefit of that is that patch was just covered in leaf hoppers and various other bugs. When it was all said and done I removed a bout a 4 foot pile of weeds.

I actually started removing the weeds last week. You can see how big the problem was in the picture above (the bare patch in the picture was completely covered). I ended up removing enough to put a few more plants in. So in the annex, I put in 5 Watermelons and two more little tomatoes (Thanks Olivia!!). They both have a big hill to climb to catch up the the rest of the tomatoes, but there's plenty of time for them to grow! I hope the watermelons have enough room there.

And finally, here are five pictures of how everything else is coming along: