Hot Holiday Weekend

Saturday, I had the first "fruits" of my labor - red tipped lettuce leaves in a salad. Had some rain Saturday night. Sunday (yesterday) thinned eggplant and beans, weeded and fertilized all with a balance 10-20-10 or something close. Also soaked the plants in the big side pot with solution of NH3NO3 to see if they perk up (they're lagging the big box and hay gardens). Also built a small wire support for the cukes, tied a few tomato branches and and gave everything a spray of dilute soap to deter insects. Pictures below taken today of cukes and whole garden.

Failures and successes - so far.

First - failures:
Beets a bust. Something eats the leaves as soon as they emerge. I may try and re-plant
Cauliflower - fail. Terrible caterpiller infestation that sevin dust nor soap solution helped. Gonna yank 'em. See photo and you'll agree
Upside-down Tomato - fail. This was a surprise. I just returned from 5 days in Austin and it looked fine when I left. Seems moist, maybe too much water? Dunno. See photo.

OK the things that look OK so far:

Tomatoes - look healthy, some flowers but wish there were more.

Beans look good, will thin this week

Eggplant is oK, just going slow - need to thin.

Lettuce- oK, need to pick before it goes to seed

The above are all in the normal box garden

The hay plants all look pretty good. Flowers on squash and cukes (I think), peppers too. Note: Hay bales down to less than half original size. Really like mulch piles now.

The "side garden" in the big black pot has peppers and cuke plant which don't look as healthy as those in the hay.

Need to weed and fertilize this week.

After 4 days...

...of being away the garden has grown a lot - but the beets may be a lost cause after the insect damage done (see earlier post) and caterpillars are snacking on the leaves of the cauliflower. I picked a few off by hand and asked Robin Willis for her advice. Let's see what she says.

I don't think it rained while we were away - the rain gauge has only 3/4 inch of water in it and I have an automatic sprinkler set to go for a hour each morning. Soil seems nice and moist though.

The hanging tomato is doing well as are the regular tomato plants. I need to tie them up again. The straw garden plants look good too as do the ones in the black container.

here's a couple of pictures taken today about 6PM.

Uh-oh

I'm behind a few days so this is catch-up.

Had my first serious garden pest problem about 5 days ago. Overnight, some critter ate the tops of all (most anyway) of the beet seedlings. So, we'll see if they recover or I have to re-plant. Gave up on the idea of an organic garden (with regards to pest control) - dusted everything with Sevin dust.

Also news: Beans have germinated, at least 2 or 3- Unlike the beet and eggplant sprouts they are big and robust looking.

Weather: we had 2-3 days of unseasonably cool - 50 degree- weather and some rain, maybe an inch, probably less. It's warm today though, high near 85 predicted.

Going to look for an automatic timed sprinkler before the weekend.

Out with the beets!

..at least 2 rows of them, which I pulled out and replaced with string bean seeds after soaking them overnight in warm water.

We had about an inch of rain overnight on the 2nd so I didn't water until this evening. It's warm - about 88 degrees at the high today

Rain, rain

Finally got some decent rain- maybe an inch in all. Tornaoes and t'storms moved through the state, but no real drama here. Garden looks good, the straw bales have cooled a bit and the plants therein look OK. Eggplant very slow to germinate, only have a few above ground. Beets coming along, havent reassigned any rows to something else yet.

It's been cool this past week - highs around 75- but that's changed today, hot and humid. We turned on the AC. Currently at 11:20 am it's 78 deg.