Monday, June 21, 2010

Learn by Growing


Finally pulled the rest of the radishes. Some had nice bulbs, some had no bulb and one turned into a Franken-radish!

Things are really taking off in the Grow Camp. I keep harvesting dill weekly and it still hit the top, so I cut them all down. I've never seen dill grow so tall.


We are starting to eat some lettuce. We have loose head and some gourmet.



Tomatoes are looking like a jungle! We might still need to thin those out more.



Beans are creeping up the wires.




We have peas ready to eat. Not a huge amount but they taste great as a snack.



We are having a little problem with the squash... 



It's overwhelming everything, including itself!
Some of the actual squash is rotting due to lack of sun.



So I trimmed them up quite a bit, hopefully I didn't trim too much. We want some squash, but not at the expense of other things in the garden.



This is what I meant by "Learn by Growing". We had no idea this squash, which was started from seed, was going to get that crazy for sunlight. Lets all try and play fair in there guys!


I thinned out all the yellowed bean leaves as well. 


Back on the porch things are growing a lot slower, but happily.




We have one corn stalk that popped up from 10 years old seeds. It's doing surprisingly well too...



And we have a new tomato planter that is supposed to let the tomato plants hang down, but so far they keep growing strait up.



Aside from the squash issue everything is still growing great. The water times in the Grow Camp are still set to 20 minutes two times per day and that seems to be plenty.


Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Bug problem

Somehow we are getting some leaf-eating bugs in the Grow Camp. Might be tiny aphids, which I've seen, or we might have something else like worms. They might have come in while we were working, snuck in through the screens or they might have came in with the new bean plants we got at a local greenhouse. I did find one tomato moth caterpillar and promptly removed it a couple weeks ago. Regardless they seem to be attacking the new bean plants the most.

They are also chowing on the squash and tomatoes a little.


This happened just today so it cannot go unchecked as we've seen plants get eaten in just a couple days before. So I sprayed lightly with some Ortho that has worked well in the past.


Bugs happen. Especially around here. We've lost many plants to them until we started researching and using some of the insecticides available.

Check out the growth in just the last 3 days. The squash leaves are pushing on the screens!