Mid May Garden Update

Hello again! Its mid-May, and my garden is looking more like a jungle now.  Many of the cool weather plants have gone to seed, and I've let many of them flower so I can get seeds for next year.  This weekend, I got a bunch of broccoli seeds pods which I had allowed to dry off, and my daughters and I worked on extracting a bunch of seeds from them, and saved them for the fall.  I have some collard seed pods that I will probably harvest soon to do the same too. I am also letting a lot of my spinach go to seed, to see if I can save some spinach seeds too.  I had 2 kinds of spinach,  one the savoy kind, and the other a regular type leaf spinach...so the seeds I get might be interesting.

My snow peas have produced very well but are taking a beating from both the powdery mildew and spider mites.  They lower part of  the plants is completely infested, and the upper part is still producing. I might pull up all the plants soon to give more space to my Rouge Vif D'etampes pumpking vines, which are getting quite large now.

My son's flowers are doing pretty well too.   Here is some Germany Chamomile  in bloom.  We have already picked many of the flowers and are drying them out for use later as tea.  You can also make tea with the fresh flowers... they have a wonderful smell, sort of like apples. 

And here is one of his California poppies.   They are stunning, and are blooming like crazy.  plus I found out you can also use the plant for making tea...  supposed to be medicinal too.

The Cucurbits

Here are the Rouge vif D'etampes pumpkins.   They are growing real fast now, and the vines look real healthy.   I saw my first  Squash Vine borer moth today, and  fortunately was able to kill it.   I inspected all the vines, and just found one egg, on a sugar pie pumpkin vine.  

And here are some of my sugar pie pumpin vines, next to 2 volunteer sunflowers.  

 In dealing with SVB, I think I will skip the tulle netting over the plants. The plants are all very big now, and I have buried many of the vines, so I think they could probably survive some attacks, if my other preventative measures dont work as well.   My current battle plan then is:

1. Neem oil. - I bought some pure cold-pressed need oil, and began applications.  Its the real stuff, not the clarified hydrophobic extract, which has the azadirachtin removed. I got it from ROT Organics, a local company :   http://neempro.com/neempro.php

I started applying it a few weeks ago, and applied again today, especially after seeing a SVB moth flying around.  (Look at my 2012 Blog entry that deals with SVBs... that has more info on these pests).

2. Hand picking eggs.  I plan on inspecting the vines every few days to pick off any eggs.   

I still have a small patch of mustard.  I've picked some of the leaves, and we had some mixed mustard/collard green for dinner last week.  The pumpkin vines (both a sugar pie pumpkin and Rouge Vif D'etampes will soon overgrow this area, as you can see the vines in the background too).

Here is one of the acorn squash, the Table Queen Acorn.  I have about 3 growing, but some of my newer female flowers have recently aborted... I hope I can get more from these plants.

And here is the Hubbard squash. This one has been growing for about  a week now.  The ones before have aborted unfortunately but this one looks like it will stick.  The bad new is that my vines have been looking kind of sick recently.  I suspect it some sort of mosaic virus.  But I hate to pull up my plants, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens. The plant is still growing like crazy, about 3 - 4 inches a day, but the leaves come out blotchy looking and curled up.  Hopefully the plant can survive and still produce.  What a bummer though.. I was worried about the SVBs but didn't anticipate getting hit with mosaic virus...

Chickens

The other big news is, we have chickens now!  I love those little fuzz balls.  They love walking around looking for bugs, and pecking at stuff.    Here are 2 of them, an Americauna chick, and a Gold-Sex-Link chick.

Here is a Black Sex-Link Chick next to a  pumpkin blossom.

May 2nd - Cold Again!

Its been a pretty strange spring, we've had unusually cool weather at times.  Last night an unusually strong cold front blew in and its been in the low 50s all day, and will get into the upper 30s tonight.  Its also been really windy, and my poor snow pea plants,which are really tall, were blown over, so when I got home from work, I had to tie some rope along the fence to support them.

Its been a great spring in the garden.  We've eaten lots of cabbage, lettuce, collards, turnips, and spinach so far. Lately, we've also had tons of snow peas. Here is some of the harvest in the kitchen ready to be prepared.

We've also picked a few carrots.  Here is a really fat carrot we picked. Some have been real short but fat.  

I had my first Hubbard squash blossoms a few days ago. But strangely, they were female flowers! So since there were no male flowers around, I picked the flowers and used them in a salad.  Usually the plants put out a lot of male flowers first.  My theory is that the cooler weather, and cold blasts we've had this spring has made the plants think they better start making fruit quick, cause winter is coming.

This blossom opened yesterday morning.  There were a few males open, so I was able to hand pollinate this one. (in case the bees dont) I hope it sets, so I can have my first squash of the year growing.