Garden Update

This is a picture of our cushaw plant.  It's a type of squash, kinda like a cross between butternut and pumpkin.  As soon as the corn was done and cleared out, this thing took over!  But for the longest time we only got male flowers.  It wasn't until about 6 weeks ago when we first saw some female flowers.  Now we are expecting around 4 cushaws that is, if the plant doesn't die.  The squash borers got to it.  I hate those bugs!  So we will see what happens.  Our garden is pretty much done now.  The zucchini produced one last humongo zucchini before it died (thank you squash borers and squash bugs) and the tomatoes are pretty much done producing and is now being eaten by grasshoppers.

Our green pepper plant has also been discovered by I'm guessing grasshoppers too, or some other kind of hungry bug that was so hungry it ate half a pepper.  Sometimes I wonder why bother having a garden.  Definitely not to save money!  We spend more watering it than we would ever spend on the amount of produce we get.  I just hope we get some squash before the plant dies.

Update 8/21/13:  We decided to pick our squash since the plant was infested with squash borers.  We got a happy little family of cushaw squash!  The weird thing is right after we picked the squash, Brent cut the vine right where it was coming out of the ground, and half a week later the plant is still alive!!!  We think it must have shot out some roots from elsewhere on the vine which are helping it to stay alive.  Now we are having fun trying to see how long it will be before it wilts and dies.

In other news, Emma is walking about 50% of the time now.  She really took off at the beginning of this month.  I had to go and buy her some shoes.  She loves to play outside.  Adam does too, it's just too hot to play for long periods of time.  Even in the shade.

 These are the most recent pictures of the kids, taken at lunch time almost 2 weeks ago.  Yes, Emma is sticking her finger up her nose to be funny.  She also does it for what I'm guessing are security reasons.  Some kids suck their thumb, she puts her finger up her nose.  We will find her randomly sitting around with her finger up her nose, and when we pull it out she puts it back in because she thinks it's a game.  Hopefully she'll grow out of it.

The Garden

Okay, so I originally started writing this post at the end of March.  And then I forgot about it.  Until today.  I am SO behind!  Ugh.  I need a personal historian.

We are attempting a garden again this year.  Last year we did pretty good with squash, zucchini, cherry tomatoes and sort of watermelon.  I say sort of because we only got about 3 melons and we could have had like 12, but somebody (not me!) used weed killer to kill the weeds in the garden instead of pulling them and I think it hurt the plant.  I also think we didn't water it correctly.  The ones we did get were pretty good though and I really enjoyed eating them, especially since it was so hot and I was big and pregnant with Emma.  This year we kinda got a late start again, so we bought plants from a nursery instead of growing them with seeds. We will try champion tomatoes, grape tomatoes, spinach, zucchini, and bell peppers.  We also got some herbs: rosemary, thyme, basil and sage.  We will see how that goes.  I also planted some corn from seeds and maybe they will sprout.  We will see.  We (Brent) put some new manure in the dirt and we have an irrigation system close to being set up (maybe this week) so watering will be easier.  Brent also built a shade thingy so that the garden will get morning sun and then partial shade during the afternoon.  Maybe we will have more success this year.

I have really been enjoying this time of year.  The weather outside is awesome, except apparently I have allergies now and they are driving me sort of crazy.  They could be worse so I'm not going to complain too much.  But it's kinda annoying when you go outside and then that evening and the next day your eyes are burning and your lungs have junk in them.  I suppose I could take allergy medicine but I don't want it to interfere with my milk production so I just suffer a little.  And wear my glasses more often.

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Our garden in mid June

Our corn harvest.  We ate it within 2 days.

Fast forward a few months.  It is now the middle of (hot) July and monsoons are in full force, which basically means it is a little cooler (upper 90's-low 100's) and humidity at 70% with a 50% chance of rain and some cloud cover.  My allergies are better now and I can wear my contacts (yay!) most of the time.  Our garden has been fairly successful.  We harvested our corn about a month ago.  We got about 7 measly cobs of the 40+ we planted.  I guess they just didn't get fertilized very well or something.  Our tomatoes are doing great!  I've already made 2 batches of spaghetti sauce.  We also got a bonus cherry tomato plant from some seeds that were from our plant last year.  It just started growing randomly between the other tomato plants, like it knew where it was supposed to be.  Our zucchini is doing well with one zucchini every few days, the beans, rosemary and spinach tanked (to be fair, our spinach did well for about a month, then it got too hot) and our pepper plant is struggling to survive.  We also have a cushaw (kind of like a butternut squash) plant that is taking over the yard but it only has male flowers on it with maybe 3 or 4 female flowers that haven't opened up yet.  So we will see what that does.  Adam loves the corn and zucchini.

Boys Like Dirt

     We planted a garden about a month ago.  The plants are pretty big, but our produce isn't.  So i don't know if we just got the pygmy version of zucchini, yellow squash and roma tomatoes, but I expected them to get bigger than they have been getting.  The only thing that seems the right size are our cherry tomatoes, but none of them are ripe yet.  And our yellow squash has this brown stuff on the ends, like it's dying and withering up there.  But they are only about 3-4 inches long and 1 inch in diameter so I don't know if they are ripe or not.  The ones that we had growing up always seemed bigger.  Anyway, we have some corn in the works and some watermelon but those haven't produced anything yet.

     When Brent was getting the soil ready, Adam wanted to help but Brent was working in manure and I didn't want Adam playing in it too, so I made him play in a different pile of dirt.  He seemed to be ok with it. 

Brent seemed to enjoy the dirt as much as Adam.

So far we have harvested two roma tomatoes about the size of golf balls.  Maybe we planted them too close to the cherry tomatoes and they got confused.  I hope we at least get something good.  It is quite expensive to water every day so we need some good produce to make it worth it.