Snapshots: In the Garden

Who wants a garden tour? Thought so!

Did you know that carrots are on a two-year cycle for producing seeds? They grow the root we eat the first summer, and then if you leave the plant in, they'll make seeds the summer after that. And when they make seeds, they make A LOT OF SEEDS.

Three carrots, approximately 300,000 seeds.

Of course I saved some to plant next year.

I have these beautiful trumpet vines (I think) that come up every year by the front fence. The flowers are very nice, but they choke out the green beans I have planted against that fence. Next year, I will have to be ruthless in pulling them as they appear.

Pretty, but not edible.

This has been an absolutely brutal year for pests in the garden. Everything has been eating my plants. First it was the flea beetles that attacked the brassicas, then the tomato hornworms, then these nasty tomato fruit worms I was picking off plants by the dozens every day, then swallowtail caterpillars all over the dill, and now grasshoppers of every kind.

These poor cabbages I started about a month ago were plagued by the flea beetles in their infancy, and then the tomato fruit worms after I planted them out. I lost a few, but the survivors seem to be doing well now.

The weeds, of course, are unfazed by any kind of pest.

We put in rhubarb plants this year, which are doing very well, although they also have some holes in them courtesy of the tomato fruit worms.

We'll get a rhubarb pie out of this yet, disgusting worms or no.

Then there were the cabbage looper caterpillars that ate the basil. Basil! I didn't think anything ate basil!

These things sure did, though. They killed two of the plants, but two of the others that I thought were goners are coming back.

Take that, stupid cabbage loopers. (Basil only grows here if I plant it down in these sunken feed tubs, to protect it from the wind.)

The tomatoes, of course, have sustained the most damage. Everything eats tomatoes. Unfortunately, the tomato fruit worms eat the tomatoes before they're even ripening. So even though the worms are gone now (I suspect eaten by these black centipede-looking insects that started appearing under the tomato plants), almost every tomato I pick has holes in it.

It's very discouraging. I spy a hopeful glimpse of red, pull the ripe tomato off, and . . .

Sigh.

Some are only partially damaged, though, and I can just cut the holey part out. So I am getting some tomatoes.

Also on the positive side, the cucumber beetles that are swarming the squash plants out in the pasture seem mostly uninterested in the actual cucumber plants inside the wooden fence. So I'm getting some cucumbers, too, which is very exciting. This is the first year I've sucessfully grown cucumbers here. 

I've even harvested enough to make two quarts of refrigerator dill pickles, which is really the reason I grow cucumbers.

I win!

And there you have it! My garden, snapshotted.