May 20th Update

 May 20th Update

Flowers

Every spring, I leave a little space for some flowers. The ones below are actually in a bed that created for my daughter.  We sowed a bunch of Papaver poppy seeds after her spinach and lettuce had bolted and we pulled it out in early April.  They all started blooming this week and look very beautiful.

Papaver Poppies

We have also had many volunteer sunflowers every spring.  There were a clump

of them that I have let grow, and now they are huge.  The tallest one is probably 8ft tall now.

Volunteer sunflowers

Veggies

The cherry tomatoes are doing quite well. They just started ripening, so I picked about 8 so far this week.  I need to start looking out for tomato hornworms soon.  I saw something that looked like eggs under one of the leaves.  

My onions are still there.  I still don't see much in term of bulb formation.  The plants look healthy though.  Probably be mid-June until some of these are ready.  In front of it is a yellow crookneck squash.  Its gotten a lot of SVB eggs laid on it, but I have picked some off, and have injected some of older leaf stems with BT as preventative.  I've picked one squash and more are on the way. The smaller squash plant on its left is a round zucchini, which I also intend to inject with BT.

So I guess I am doing an experiment of sorts.  I have two of the round zucchini plants out in the open, and will try to inject them weekly as a preventative.  And then I have two other plants that I recently put under tulle netting.  These plants had recently been in pots, but I cleared out some space in the garden for them. We'll see how they do, in terms of yield, and work involved.

The Jumbo Pink Banana squash are doing great.  I've picked three huge ones, of 28, 25, and 21 lbs.

And the crazy thing is that there are about 5 other ones that are growing pretty quickly.  They are mostly on secondary vines, so I don't think they will get as large as my first one.  But I think I will have so much, I am not sure what I am going to do with it all!  I will break open the 25lb one, which is the first one I picked, pretty soon.

Here are two on the same vine segment

Another banana squash growing

I do find some SVB eggs on these but have not seen any damaged vines yet.  The vines are very thick, so it would take a lot to bring these plants down.  I did pick some small ones to eat as summer squash.  They were fairly good, honestly not as good as the yellow crookneck.  But I'll continue to do some of that too.

The spaghetti squash plants seem to be dying, mostly from powdery mildew.  We picked two big ones, and there are around 6 smaller ones that are on the vines, that are almost ready to pick.  The pic below shows a part of the smaller plant that is still fairly healthy.  I did find a spot on the other vine that had an SVB grub in it, and I removed it from the vine with a wire.  But the powdery mildew is real bad on it.  Its all good, because they have produced well, and its been a success.

The golden acorn squash have also done very well.  I've picked around 12 of them of various sizes. Below are a couple nice sized one before picking. The vines are doing well, except they are getting powdery mildew too.  No signs of SVB yet, although since the vines are very short, I have been injected some BT into the leaf stems as preventative.  So far I have done it just twice, just takes a few minutes.  The vines tips are getting pretty small, so I think the plants are probably going to give up soon.

A nice golden acorn squash

Early May Update 2017

The beginning of May is here, and we've had some fairly good weather this spring... a good amount of rain, and temperatures that have fluctuated between nice and cool, and pretty warm. It was in the upper 80s on Saturday and then upper 60s on Sunday.

Squash

Since we had some very mild weather this winter and early spring, I had gotten a very early start on squashes.   My Jumbo Pink Banana squash are doing very well.  The vines are huge and sprawling everywhere, and there are three squash on it. Two are probably full size already, and one is growing quickly.

I have them covered up in some netting to try and avoid anything from damaging the fruit.   The dreaded Squash Vine Borer moths are already out.  I have killed two, and have picked off a few eggs from the tips of the vines.  The bases of these plants are buried in leaf mulch, along with a lot of the major vines.  So I don't expect the SVB to start having a big impact on the plants until probably early June, when these three squash will hopefully already have been harvested.   The two big squash are huge, I suspect they are around 30lbs or more each.

My golden acorn squash plants are doing well too. They have started vining some now, and have lots of small squash on them.  I picked the first three yesterday.

And regarding my Spaghetti squash, one of my plants has 2 big fruit on it, and a smaller one.  The other plants is a runt, and doesnt really have anything on it.   

The plant with the squash hasn't really grown that much recently and has gotten hit by powdery mildew.  Its probably because its spent all its energy producing the fruit.  This one above is almost ready for picking.

Peas and Beans

My snap peas are not looking very good.  They got hit hard by powdery mildew, and I didnt try to stop it, so most of the plant is dying now, and the new pods are pretty small.  We've been able to pick enough for three good meals, but that's probably about it.  There are some volunteer pole beans  (from last year's bean vine) that grew next to them and they will probably take over the area soon

I started another area of pole beans by the area where the gourd trellis is.  Here are the plants, with the squash vines in front of them.  I planted a bunch of there beans, but unfortunately only about 5 of them are growing well.  

Tomatoes

Here are my cherry tomatoes.  We had major wind the past few days, which damaged some of these plants, so I had to create some reinforcement for them, as the vines have really grown long and tall.

There is a bunch of little green tomatoes on them.  Will have to keep my eyes open for the arrival of the tomato hornworms.  I'll have the BT ready for them.