10/27

Tomatoes are almost ready, some of them are starting to change colors!

The okra has gotten significantly taller in the past week! Some blooms were also spotted!!

The Kale and turnips are turning out great, although we were disapointed by the size of the turnip we pulled out. 

We harvested three cucumbers, but one of them was pretty eaten up by a caterpillar. I assume the yellow round stuff is fresh frass?

Sean, admiring his harvest before a bus ride. 

The tomatoes have gotten incredibly bushy, almost monstrously so.

Unfortunately we still have a lot of weeding/mulching to do...

A marvelous picture of Brandon and Camila holding up their cucumber children.

October 20th

This week we mulched down some of the beds, and checked up on our transplants from last week. We also checked up on some overdue pests that we should probably have been controlling for a while...

I found aphids on the bottom of all the okra leaves! I thought they had been growing slowly, maybe these are the culprit. I'm thinking we should maybe put some ant tape around the stems?

Behold! The culprit behind the aphids! I can't help but sympathize for them, since ants did start farming aphids before we started farming...anything. 

Unfortunately, I had to squish several leafroller caterpillars that were found under the cucumbers. This is a pupa, which I also... Exterminated so that it won't produce any cucurbit eating offspring in the future. 

While there were a lot of malignant insects, I also saw a lot of beneficial pollinators! The bee definitely seems to be benefiting from our endeavors as well. 

I also found this...? I have no clue what it is. It looks like it might be caterpillar frass, but I've only ever really seen dry frass, so I'm not sure if this poop or eggs or something else.

The turnips are also almost ready for harvest! I'm excited to make some turnip greens out of the tops as well as eating the bottoms, I'm a big fan of greens. 

10/13

We encountered our first real struggle this week as hundreds of weeds began to take root in our precious beds! We noticed the problem at the end of last week but could never have envisioned that they would invade so quickly. But no task is too large for the Veggie Tales! The four of us came together and managed to save the vegetables in less than an hour with only one minor speed bump along the way... darn you ants! In lighter news, we were gifted with five strawberry plants that fit perfectly in one of our unused beds and our kale keeps getting bigger and bigger. Our newest goals are to mulch all of the beds to prevent weed invasion and to try our hand at raising various herbs from seeds.

First week of October! October 2nd

Sean checking out the male and female cucumber flowers in his iconic gator hat.

Dr. Zhao suspects that the tomatoes are suffering either an Iron deficiency or a viral infection! Sean is taking it pretty rough, especially since his sweet 100 tomato is involved. We placed some fertilizer on it, however. Hopefully it gets better!

A couple of days later, it looks like it may have gotten better. We also placed a cage around the tomatoes for support. 

We mulched the kale and onion with some leaf mulch! The mulch should also help cool these cool season crops in the hot weather.

Our transplants are finally taking off! They look super happy, we can't wait to transplant them in the garden.

These are some of the tomato grafts that we did as a class a week ago! Hopefully they will do well.

We also planted some chrysanthemums from Sean's Gardening and you class. They're quite beautiful, and are a nice addition even if they don't produce vegetables.