New garden 2018

[taboule]

Just a few more for today, the zukes are going crazy, i picked this big one a couple of weeks ago, made a meal out of it.
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I just picked these now, nice for grilling. Or better yet, my dear wife cores them, then stuffs with a meat+rice+herbs mix and bakes them in a tomato broth. A labor of love and another healthy way to enjoy life.

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Very small Ichiban eggplant producing, the fruit almost as big as the plant.
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[taboule]

Last but not least, the first pepper, a cayenne of all things.

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I hope you're all doing great, take care.

[bower]

Taboule, fantastic garden full of great eating!!! So worthwhile, isn't it.
There's always some little pest or disease in the garden, but if you can produce like that without needing to spray, it's wonderful. Everything looks super healthy.

[Nan_PA_6b]

Great garden! Are your snap peas stringless?
Nan

[taboule]

Thank you folks always for your kind words.

Nan, at least one of the varieties is stringless, although I have found myself eating any of them raw when still very young and tender right from the vines: pick the pods and send down the hatch, whole, no de-stringing needed.

[taboule]

Greetings and a quick update.

We've been picking a few nice toms the past few days, and reached a point where we no longer buy tomatoes. The last few we had leftover from the market ended up chopped and cooked.

The first big one -after the 4th of july- was a nice sized GGWT. DW and I had it as a side dish with eggs and breakfast over the weekend.

Then today on my after work round, I found a few turning, and then a nice red one that had been munched on. Probably birds, as I've been seeing them flying in the jungle and hiding from the heat. So I decided to pick the ones that started turning, a bird in the hand...(pun intended.) Another day or two and they'll be good to eat.

So here's the first small batch, and celebrating another milestone.
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Smallest are 4th of july, next in size are Greek Thessaloniki (a regular for us), then Sandul Moldovan, a few BW, a Cuostralee, a GGWT in the middle, and the winner to date: a pink Brandywine at over 750 gr/1.5 lbs. It's a funny heart shape, but trust me it's a BW. Amazing size for me in this area this time of the year.

Short and sweet for today, will come back with more in a couple days.

[Father'sDaughter]

Looking good! And it reminds me just how far behind schedule mine are this year. I started them late, grafted late, uppotted late, and planted out late.

[platar]

Fabuolous pics of the garden. The tree removal operation looks some serious bussines!
Do you use the wood to heat the house? At our place we do and we also have the equipment needed. 3 Stihl chainsaws and drill splitter but besides the chainsaws which are proffesional the other equimpnet is rather arhaic but effective. It takes us a week or two to make enough wood to heat the house all year around. But it is a dangerous job and not to be taken lightly.

[taboule]

Thank you again.

Platar, unfortunately we saved very little of that wood for a few reasons.

1) The bulk of it (all the large trees together) was of poor quality for burning, junk basically that wouldn't produce clean BTUs.

2) there were only two trees of good quality, the maple that you see hanging from the cable, and a smaller oak. The loggers who did the work are NOT into chopping these down for firewood, they simply ground them into chips It would have cost me more to get them cut and split, more than buying already seasoned/dry firewood.

3) I have neither the time, nor room nor tools to do the work myself (lots of work as you said.)

It's a sad waste I know, but c'est la vie.

We do burn wood occasionally for the ambiance, nothing like a hot blazing fire in winter with good company.

The guys saved me a small pile which I'm drying and will be using mostly for BBQ'ing / smoke cooking. I wanna be able to say I'm using wood from my land for the smoke, these maple logs when chunked up would last me a few years.
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[taboule]

We've had a few very hot weeks in a row, almost all of july and some of the plants started struggling, both from the growing number of insects and some rot or fungus. I share some less than attractive pictures in the hope you may be able to ID them, and advise what you'd do in my place -in addition to starting to spray.

Here are some of the bugs and damage, first pic isn't clear (but the best I could get) these buggers have been feasting on my cukes and have killed around 7-9 young plants in June. It's 1/4 in long, and now I found them on the chard
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Next one is about 3/4 in long, tough to kill with just soap, so I have stronger medicine I'll soon mix up and apply. Found them on eggplant and zukes.
big-nasty.jpg
Next one I only recently saw, little scarab like, ~1/2 inch.
scarab-1.jpg
I had the first sighting of this last one today, it's back resemble the face of a warrior mask, helmet like. It was running away before I could take the picture, then terminated him.
helmet-bug.jpg

tbc...

[taboule]

A second pic of the scarab
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Now that I decided to fight back and spray, I'm confident I'll put a good dent in these buggers -whatever they are.
But here below is my BIGGEST worry.
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First incident was very early in the spring, a few weeks after setting out, plant was under 30" tall. I noticed severe wilting, on one plant only, although I was watering well and all others were very healthy. At close inspection, i found some stems grey and brown and hollow, and when I handled them they were rotting on the inside and stunk. So I immediately pulled that plant out and replaced it with a spare.

Then a few weeks later, my biggest GGWT developed the same disease. But it was loaded with big fruit and I didn't have the heart to cull it. So I decided to just cut out the bad sections only. I may have sprayed a bit from a bottled fungicide. Amazingly, it recovered and produced the first full sized fruit that we enjoyed last weekend. It's still doing well and growing.

Then another one, then this one that I found today. Nasty looking, I cleaned all around it but kept the plant.

Do you know what this is, some kind of blight? I started looking things up to ID but haven't found the usual references. Should I pull the plant(s)?

[taboule]

Not to leave on a dark note, we did some paving work in the back yard and place was torn out for a while. We finally cleaned up the space and re-installed the bird feeders. We had missed our little neighbors and friends, and felt like we had betrayed them. And new to us this year are hummingbirds, they visit these flowers.
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So I filled the feeders with syrup, and sat quietly in the yard to absorb the beautiful nature, saw this fellow.
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He kept coming back and I was able to take several shots
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[taboule]

Then I noticed there were different ones, as this fellow doesn't have the ruby throat (maybe the female, I'll look it up.)
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At the end of the day, here's what it boils down to.
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Hope you're all doing well.

[bower]

Lovely tomatoes, Taboule. Lovely hummingbirds too! Life is good.
Even some of our pests are pretty. Although we may prefer to admire them dead.
That first one looks like the striped cucumber beetle.
http://ag.umass.edu/vegetable/fact-s...beetle-striped
Second one could be the dreaded stink bug??
The little scarab looks like Colorado potato beetle.

[Worth1]

Cucumber beetle stink bugs and Colorado potato beetle.
You have a zoo in the making.'
Place looks nice.