I went to the lovely community garden today to check on our plots, where I haven't been able to invest nearly the time and energy I would like.  But I was able to pick some beautiful, deep orange sun sugar tomatoes and pull up one square foot batch of garlic.  I planted a lot of garlic this year.  I love the stuff.  The garlic in my container garden stayed pretty small, but the garlic in our raised beds did pretty well... at least in comparison.  :) 

Our community garden is seriously awesome.  It even has chickens now!  Which means I can't stop at the garden anymore with the kiddos unless I'm ready to spend at least 5 minutes in the chicken coop.

Check out this sunflower.  It's 12 feet tall or I'm smurf.  I've heard that sunflowers draw up toxins from the soil, besides just providing yummy seeds.  But nothing is more impressive to me than the insane heights they reach. 

And here's the sad reality that is my watermelon vine... it had some blossoms last week, but I'm not holding out much hope at this point for fruit.  I just haven't been able to keep up with watering it.  I weeded last week with a vengeance, but they're all creeping back.  I'm wondering if it's too late to put down some newspaper and mulch...  my efforts at the community garden this year are rocky combination of honest, rookie effort and over-extended-mommy-doing-the-bare-minimum-to-grow-something.  Which means I probably won't make it over there with newspaper.  Or harvest a melon this year.  Did I mention that it was 110 degrees today?

Speaking of which, I'm going to try growing melons in the areas of my backyard where I had deemed the hours of sun inadequate.  In north Texas heat, a little shade (and backyard access for consistent watering's sake) might be just what the doctor ordered.

Poor little plant...

Ripening

Watching my tomatoes and peppers turn colors has been enthralling.... it's miraculous in a way.  The next time I need a miracle, maybe I'll just walk around a farm.  This is the first day I saw my brandywine tomato start to turn.  I can hardly wait to eat it.

Follow the Instructions

This is good advice actually.  How often do you hear people talking about how great it was when they DIDN'T follow instructions.  Let's be honest, usually it's the opposite, which is why spouses tell stories for years on each other for how catastrophically wrong things once went as a result of NOT following (or even) reading instructions.

Which is what I did (or didn't do...?) with our live beneficial nematode treatment and ladybugs.  Sigh.  To be fair, the ladybugs that I ordered on Amazon didn't even come with instructions.  So I should have looked some up!  As should anyone who wants live insect organic treatments for their gardens to actually set up shop and work.

Release them AFTER watering in the early morning or late at night.  And DON'T release them in the heat of the day.  I think those are the highlights.  Oh, and 10 or 11 am is NOT early morning.  Having a 2 month old baby who is actually letting you sleep in, is the best excuse I've ever had for not following these instructions... but I wasted about $60 total.  That's some expensive sleep time. 

 

I bought my nematodes at a fantastic local shop in Fort Worth called Elisabeth Anna's Old World Garden, who gave me great instructions, which I followed very poorly.  Wherever you get your nematodes, the instructions are the same.  Live beneficial insects are supposed to be an amazing help to organic gardening... hopefully, I'll be able to speak from experience on this next time I give them a whirl.  In the meantime, I'm an growing expert on what NOT to do. 

Eating from the porch

I'm having a hard time finding time to blog.  Too busy living life and all.  :)  BUT we are finally enjoying the fruits of our labor in a literal way.  Tonight's supper was black beans, feta, lime and basmati rice wrapped in fulka roti, plus homegrown tomatoes and onions and garlic from the community garden.

I'm officially a fan of the upside-down tomato growers.  I have two hosting cherry-sized tomato plants, and the one on the shadier side of the porch is producing like gangbusters.  The one in the sun has been battling blight (I think), but is still providing a small handful of ripe tomatoes every day.

If we had to live off our harvest, obviously we'd starve.  We have the luxury of gardening simply for the joy of it.  And I've been enthralled with every ounce of our homegrown produce.  We've had good luck with mesclun and romaine lettuce, a total of four sweet peppers, handfuls of cherry and sun sugar tomatoes, and herbs (basil is my herbal obsession this year).  I'm still waiting to harvest the garlic, though I suppose I could pull it up in a pinch.

My pride and joy of the garden is my only surviving heirloom tomato... To anyone else I know the plant is spindly and pathetic, but I see honest effort, both on my part and that of the plant.  It's survived me, cutworms, slugs, flea beetles, inadvertant overwatering, and crazy Texas weather ... I will definitely save the seeds.

First Fruits!

I came back from a 4-day vacation last night and could hardly believe my eyes!  Two peppers have somehow evaded cutworm execution and the perils of my inexperience, and are truly growing.  Maybe when I'm a more seasoned gardener I'll be disappointed with the potential harvest of only two peppers, but right now I'm ecstatic.

My cornmeal bait traps (an idea I got from Good Bug, Bad Bug - see previous post) are somewhat effective... probably better than nothing.  Supposedly the cutworms are attracted to and eat the cornmeal, but are unable to digest it.  This is supposed to kill them.  But I'm unclear about how long it takes, and if it kills them before or after they move on to eat more of my plants.  I catch anywhere from one to four cutworms each day in each trap (I have three traps in various places at the moment), but still find a few cutworms on or around the plant as well.  My little trowel is bloodied with the green guts of countless cutworms.  In fact, you can see one on the underside of the leaf of garlic directly above the trap, which I didn't notice until I posted this picture.  Hilarious. 

My first tomato!  It'll be a red, cherry tomato before too long.

Early Indoctrination

I'm slowly working my way through every last gardening book at the library (or so my husband thinks), and a few weeks ago I picked up a great book by Jessica Walliser: "Good Bug, Bad Bug: Who's Who, What They Do, and How to Manage Them Organically in Your Garden."  My 2 year-old decided the book was awesome, too, and every day he looks at the pictures and asks questions.  He's become truly helpful outside, eagerly identifying aphids and cutworms so that he can dispatch them. 


Yesterday, I managed captured one of those moments that I delight in as a mom.  Gideon wanted to read to his baby sister.  And not just any book.  The "bug book."  He might not have all of his facts straight yet, but it was pretty sweet.  (Ignore my messy house.  I've been recovering from a tonsillectomy this week, so I was glad to simply have everyone occupied, fed and happy.)

Compost & Fruit Flies

I started composting 5 years ago, and every spring since then fruit flies have managed to find their way to my kitchen.  They irritate me the fire out of me.  I keep my kitchen clean (okay fine, as clean as I can with 3 kids adding to the messes as fast as I can deal with them), I carry the fruit and veggie scraps to the compost bin daily, I add more "brown" to the pile outside, etc.  It doesn't matter.  The fruit flies never totally go away.  

A few weeks ago, I saw an advertisement in my Gardener's Supply Company magazine for a $20 fruit fly trap.  The colorful pear shape is definitely an attractive solution to a nasty problem, but I'd rather spend that money on seeds, plants or tools.  So I poked around online and spent 2 minutes throwing together a trap that has worked amazingly well.  And didn't cost me a dime.

I used an old sparkling grape juice bottle, some apple cider vinegar, and a small paper funnel held together with one little piece of tape.  The funnel being small was key for me.  I jammed it into the bottle securely enough that it didn't require a seal of any kind.  My original funnel was made from an uncut 8x13 piece of paper, and it was apparently too tall for fruit flies to bother exploring.  I cut the funnel down to about 3 inches and started catching flies immediately.  It's been sitting innocently beside my sink for weeks now, has no odors like I was afraid it might, and is the ONLY place I find fruit flies in my entire house.