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