July 3, 2011 - First Crop

 

The garden is looking great an no real problems to report.  All the plants are taking off and starting to produce some goodness.  

 Cucumbers are looking bushy and healthy. 

 Here is one of dozens of little cucumbers growing. The Crystal Apple cucumbers are not nearly as strong at this point - no fruits to be seen.  I've already pulled off five cucumbers and made a batch of cucumber salad.  I need to find some more recipes involving cucumbers!

 Only one shot of the tomatoes, but all the plants are fruiting well.  No signs of any issues at all.  I spotted the first red fruit  today.

 I'm having a hard time taking a picture of the tomatoes that give them any kind of context.  They are huge this year!  All but the stunted plant are around 5 feet tall!  It's a tomato jungle at the end of the garden.  :)

 

No bell peppers, but there are the hot peppers and Italian peppers are looking good.

 The watermelon patch has gotten out of control! It's next to impossible to walk through it now.

  On top of that there are seven volunteer plants down near the electric fence.  I'm assuming they are from the patch that was here a few years ago, but seven more watermelon plants is NOT what I need?  It does seem like the deer have munched down the volunteers without touching my patch.  Strange!

 There are now around a dozen softball sized watermelons. Both varieties are making a good show!

 Squash plants are super healthy and productive.

Around ten yellow squash are growing.  I bet they're ready to pick in the next week or so.

 I've pulled six zucchinis off and will be making the second batch of zucchini bread this afternoon!

A few butternut squash are fruiting. 

 They also hayed the field last week.  It's cool to see the transition from wild field of five foot grass to bales on the lawn.  That machine baled the entire field in an hour or so. 

June 17, 2011 - Beach, Progress, and Fruiting Plants

Well the garden survived this years trip to the shore.  Last year there were some visitors that ate all the beans and cucumbers.  It was the beginning of the end for last years crop so I was a little nervous when we came back and first took a look at the garden - especially without the electric fence. 

R&R @ OC, MD

Garden Update:

 The long view of the whole garden.  I'm very pleased at this point!

After a week away the tomatoes have now completely filled their cages.  They are lots of flowers and a few fruits in the way.  Even the unhealthy looking Golden Jubilee plant has fruit.  

The cucumbers are climbing tall.  They're doing so good I'm thinking about thinning them out a bit.  There doesn't seem to be enough room for them all on the trellis!

The peppers all seem to have recovered from their near death experience.  They do seem a bit stunted compared to last year, but they are flowering and getting larger by the day.

I'm second guessing my locating the butternut squash so close to everything the eggplant and trellis plants.  They are getting huge fast.  

 Watermelon patch is getting full.  I wonder what the hell I'm going to do with hundreds of pounds of watermelons! 

Fruiting plants:

 Blackbird in the orchard.

 Banana Pepper

 Amish Paste

 Green Zebra

 Watermelon (not sure what variety yet)

Yellow Squash

Zucchini

Grapes

Berries

June 7, 2011 - Thermal Evidence

After a long day of cleaning out long forgotten equipment cages and back closets at work, someone found a thermal imager.  I convinced its new owner to let me borrow it for the weekend and see if I can capture anything string too close to my garden at night.

A cool side note: while using the imager to watch two bats do aerials I had aimed the device up to the sky.  While aiming up I saw a shooting star.  I was blown away by the chance just happening to be looking through the screen as a meteorite went by that particular patch of sky.  I aimed it at another point of night sky and sure enough another meteorite.  In the course of the few minutes of remaining battery life I saw a dozen or so meteorites!  You can see so many more by their thermal signature than you can with the naked eye.  I wish I had discovered this earlier in the weekend!

 Things just look cool though this thing!

If you look close you can see three deer on the screen.  They were almost impossible to see without the imager!  They are a ways out in the field so I guess they were behaving.  

Here's one that got pretty close just after dark.  He's within 30 feet of the patio but still a ways away from the garden.

And finally, here is conclusive evidence that the stupid deer are venturing into the garden at night.  Without the electric fence it's only a matter of time before I go down to check on the garden and get angry that my plants are eaten!  

June 7, 2011 - Flowering Vegetables

Everything is humming along fine.  We've been without rain for some time now after getting six straight days of it a few weeks back.  We are suppose to have record hear the next two days before breaking Friday.  I'm trying to be proactive and keep the soil good and moist.  Good thing that drip hose is working! 

Cucumber flower.

Cucumbers are looking pretty good!  You can see the crystal apple plants are noticeably smaller than the other cucumbers.  I don't remember there being so much difference between their growth.

 First pepper flower belongs to the banana peppers!

 My peppers are doing OK considering the start they had.  Two of the second round of peppers are flowering. The rest are just catching up.  All of the plants do seem fairly small compared to my parent's plants.

The butternut squash are starting to vine.  It's my first time growing them so I wasn't sure if they'd vine or bush.  I'm glad they're vining because they are a bit close to the zucchini.

 The zucchini and yellow squash are getting bushy fast!

Zucchini and yellow squash are both flowering.

Tomatoes looking good!

All but one of the tomatoes are flowering.  (Not including the one eaten by the deer)

 The watermelon is beginning to vine.

First watermelon flowers.  It's the only one of the twelve....

Beans are looking good, but no flowers yet.

June 1, 2011 - Pesky Pests

All the plants are in (again). The week following my last post, after all the plants were in, it rained continuously for about a week. A day after a break in the weather I went down to check on the garden.  Turns out they did NOT like all the rain.

The leaves had turned black/brown, some curled, others just fell off completely.  The pepper plants seems to be most affected by this condition, and one or two of the tomatoes also suffered enough to make me wonder if they were going to make it.  I suspect that all the moisture led to some fungus issues, so I purchased a fungicide from the local hardware store. This was on the Tuesday (May 24).  By Friday I was convinced that I would have to replace most of my pepper plants.  With the planting season already getting late I was worried the market would no longer be carrying new pepper plants after this week so I made sure to get there early on Saturday morning - fortunately there were plenty.

That afternoon I began to replace the dying pepper plants only to find that they all were starting to look better.  The black leaves had mostly fallen off at this point, but new healthy leaves had become to sprout.  I found myself unable to trash them so the new plants got moved past the tomatoes where some flowers had grown last year and was overgrown. Only two were permanently removed after buying six more.  At the same time I also planted the sunflowers I had started.  It'll be interesting to see how fast they grow relative to the peppers. 

I'm still unsure if the fungicide or the change in the weather made things improve, but I don't really care as long everything is doing better-a week on and everything SEEMS to be looking better!  No trace of the discoloration and all the new leaves that have emerged all have a healthy look to them.  Take a look at the difference in the above photo.

In addition to the weather/fungus issues, I've been battling a nasty garden pest: the Colorado Potato Beetle.  I've found it on my eggplant and tomatoes in adult, nymph, and egg stages.  Last time I tried growing eggplant it was a flea beetle problem that killed them, this time it's this little fucker.  I'm keeping a close eye on all my plants, but I would consider it a huge coupe if I could actually eat a home grown eggplant this summer!

Colorado Potato Beetle (not my pic, but I've seen them)

Close up of the nymph and their damage to a tomato leaf:

Close up of the eggs:

May 20, 2011 - Video Update