In the Garden Today...

Harvest before the arranging.

Garden Harvest...August 8, 2014

Tomatoes. peppers, eggplant, okra, cucumbers, white scallop squash, lemon balm, kale

Excited to find one more German Queen tomato. We harvested 17 tomatoes earlier and then she had to recharge. There are several more tomatoes coming on again. Yay!

August 8, 2014

There are several more tomatoes left in the lady. 
I was also happy to discover one more white scallop squash. The plant was plagued with mold. I picked off the offending blossoms and tossed them. I wondered about pulling the plant, but there were male blossoms attracting the bees, so I decided to leave it alone. I'm glad that I did. 

Baby Eggplant

This is my first year to grow eggplant. It has been so prolific. I wish I had grown it before now. One Japanese eggplant plant put off quite a few eggplants and then stopped. It's back producing again with two baby eggplants and several flowers. I also have a few Black Beauty eggplants. I am harvesting an eggplant or two a day. 

Today there were several interesting things to see in the garden.

We have a kitten that we call, "Count Rugen"  because he has six "fingers" on his front paws. He loves to climb the corn...sigh...






I also found in the garden today, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly... and the dead...

When my sunflowers first started blooming, I saw these pesky little bugs on them. When I harvested the flowers, the bugs followed the flowers to my basket. I didn't realize until I saw a picture that these are actually Mason bees. This is a "good bug" for the garden. I posted an article earlier about how to make a Mason Bee house and attract your own pollinators to your garden.

While checking my plants, I discovered that worms had eaten almost all of my kohlrabi leaves overnight. GRRR! I checked it yesterday and removed a few worms. I looked up an organic pest control for cabbage worms and decided that I would try it today. Whoops! Too Late!  

 I still tried it on the existing worms. I used salt water. That seemed to wake them up, but what got to them was the spray that I use on squash bugs. I mix 1 tsp. Dawn dish soap, 1 tsp. olive oil to a quart spray bottle of water. This year I learned that if I add a few drops of lemon essential oil to the mix, it will kill aphids. Notice the picture in the corner with the yellow cucumber flower? Aphids! Seriously! And squash bugs on my NEW squash plants. Thanks to my squash bug killer, the bad and the ugly are...the dead.