Project Garden Noob - Year 6

On Saturday, July 6th my husband and I attended a "Common Tomato Problems" class at Tagawa Gardens . It covered a lot of the usual that I've heard about, blossom end rot, cracking, etc.  Also covered some pretty gross looking bugs, which luckily we have not seen. But we also learned about Physiological Leaf Roll, which is pretty much how it sounds.  The leaves roll inwards.  It's brought on by a variety of environmental stresses (i.e., temperature, moisture levels, nitrogen levels, etc...).  So we come home and look at our plants, sure enough, looks like we got a bit of this going on. Good news is, this shouldn't affect our yields at all.  I gave them a little TLC today - pruned, side-dressed, and put mulch around the base of the plants to retain moisture. Up until this point, I'd been hesitant to apply mulch.  One, I just don't like it and two, since our soil is soooo clay ridden, I feel it should be retaining moisture a little too well.  ...

My peppers are looking funkified.  I know it's a horrible picture, but I'm sure you can see those blackish spots. I'm not sure if they have picked up the previous plant herp, aka fungus, that the broccoli and cauliflower had.  Or maybe some other kind of blight?  I'm treating it with the fungicide and rolling with it.  I've come to accept the fact, long before we even started this whole gardening thing, that not every plant was going to be a winner.  If they don't make it, they don't make it.  C'est la vie.  For a dose of good news, we had our first zucchini harvest this week. I made lovely zucchini ribbons with a meat sauce for a couple lunches this week. In the background, you'll notice a zucchini accident (young one I broke while trying to trim off dead) and a pepper.  Apparently, you are supposed to remove the first peppers to encourage growth.  So I lopped him off and here's to hoping between that and the fungicide, the p...

So I guess now that our garden has moved passed the infancy stage, we are starting to notice some issues as everyone is getting bigger. I had a mild heart attack taking a closer look at my zucchini this weekend.  Mainly this: Can you see that gnarly baby zucchini.  What the hell is that?? Called grandpa (duh), he said it just didn't pollinate correctly - trim off and move on.  So I did.  Here is close-up grossness. Otherwise, our zucchinis are looking beautiful.  I've been admiring all the blossoms and wondering if I should try and cook them.  I've seen it done on Chopped after all....   I hope that I'm complaining about how much zucchini I have in a couple of months, desperately trying to pawn it off on poor saps.  My poor parents - they are going to get it from me AND grandpa!

Am I the only one experiencing June whiplash?  It's July and I'm in complete and utter denial over this. I'm also mad at myself because I really want to be posting three times a week and my last post was 6/12.  Not cool. Not cool at all. Then again, at this point, we are really just watching stuff grow.  We've been harvesting sugar snap peas and lettuce as needed.  It's super fun to finally tastes some fruits of our labor.  And they taste pretty amazing. We've also had a couple of set backs: 1) A mystery sprinker decided to randomly activate last week in the garden.  It took out a broccoli plant, but my spaghetti squash seemed to bounce back from the deluge of water.  Said sprinkler has since been capped off.  How it even pushed through all the soil, I will never know.  Here's a blurry picture of that mess: 2) I missed a broccoli harvest, it bolted (flowered).  It's really shocking how fast that happens.  One day...