All posts by james

Tassels!

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Our corn has topped our fence and is now almost 7 feet tall. It doesn’t look like it will get any taller, though, as it has finally grown tassels. This is exciting news, since it means the first ears of corn will start growing soon.

Charmaine and the Corn

In other news, we finally broke down and spread some fertilizer around the garden tonight. I guess this means we can’t say our garden is organic anymore, but at least we haven’t used any chemicals for killing weeds or bugs. I just hope we can stay ahead of the squash bugs.

I’ve decided to keep a tally of things we’ve harvested. I’m not sure how often I’ll update the blog with the current tally, but it will be interesting to see how things measure up next year. Here’s the current tally:

Radishes – 20 (I didn’t keep an exact count, but they’re done for the year)
Yellow Squash – 8 (4 were sampled by magpies)
Zucchini – 8 (1 was sampled by magpies)
Turnips – 3 (I’m only counting the really big ones)
Bell Peppers – 3
Red Peppers – 2
Beet Greens – 1 bowl
Blackberry – 2 berries (so good)

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how the yellow squash caught up to the zucchini so quickly, we have 6 yellow squash plants and only 3 zucchini plants.

Week 9

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I finally finished building the enclosure for the pole beans this week, and they’ve already climbed all the way up and over the top of the strands of twine we tied up as a temporary stop-gap until we get some webbing or netting for them to fill out.

Charmaine also added tomato cages for some of the larger tomato plants, and did a bunch of weeding. I’m not a very good helper when it comes to weeding, but at least I feel like I’m not completely useless after building that bean cage.

The onslaught of the zucchini has begun. In the past 3 days I’ve picked 3 that were almost too large, and there’s another 10 that will be ready this week. The yellow squash will probably start this week as well. The cucumber hasn’t started, but it’s spreading out and blooming everywhere, so I’m sure we’ll wind up with more cucumbers than we can use.

Maybe all my joking about building a catapult to toss some of this produce at the neighbors isn’t such a bad idea after all?

My Evil Nemesis

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While finishing some work on the pole bean enclosure, something caught my eye. It brought back bad memories of a fight I once had while growing acorn squash in Riverton. Squash Bugs. I know what it means to have squash bugs, and it isn’t pretty. So I stopped what I was doing and inspect the top and bottom of every leaf. It became painfully obvious just how many squash plants we have this year. I carried a pair of scissors with me as I inspected. Each time I found a pile of eggs, I cut off the leaf and brought it to my patio, where I ground the leaf and the eggs into the concrete.

Squash Bug Eggs

The eggs seemed to be limited to leaves near fruit. And I thought it was sort of curious that I only found eggs on the winter squash varieties, and none on the yellow squash, zucchini, or cucumbers. There is much more fruit on the summer squash plants, but no eggs. I don’t know if that was just a coincidence, but I thought it was sort of interesting.

I’m sure this wasn’t their one and only salvo. I’ll be waiting for round two.

First (of many) Zucchini

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Cedar Hills has pressurized irrigation, to which our sprinklers are connected. The past few weeks the pumps that keep it pressurized have been on the fritz. They replaced two of the four pumps a couple weeks ago, but the remaining pumps failed this week. That has kept us outside watering various things by hand, using a hose connected to our culinary water. This is not ideal, but it has given us a chance to keep a close eye on things.

If you’ve ever grown zucchini or yellow squash, you know how fast they grow. As I was outside watering tonight, I noticed we have a few zucchini ready to harvest, and a few that will be ready in a couple more days. I decided to pull the first one from the vine and have it for dinner tonight.

While I was sitting here waiting for the pictures to upload, Charmaine walked in the door with the first blackberry. Wow. It is so amazing. I don’t remember blackberries tasting this good in Washington. I now question the validity of my memory. How could blackberries be better in Utah? It doesn’t make sense, but it certainly seems that way. Amazing. We’re really going to enjoy having blackberries… now to get some more!

Week 8

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So here we are, two months into the process. Everything is growing extremely well. There are more than 10 each of zucchini, yellow squash, pumpkins, spaghetti squash, bell peppers, anaheim peppers, and brussels sprouts already on the vine. We even picked up some wood and started building a structure for the pole beans to climb. These are exciting times.