Garden Update

Mother Nature watered the garden very thoroughly for us this weekend - quite thoughtful of her!  Some plants in the garden are doing quite well, others not so much.

Our zucchini plants have been more or less wrecked by a type of moth called a squash borer.  They lay their eggs inside the stems of the plant (how, I have no idea), and as the caterpillars mature, they eat their way out, basically destroying the stem.  We've lost one zucchini plant already after only getting one zucchini out of it.  Another plant is not faring so well but has produced yet one more zucchini that we are watching.  Apparently these are the bane of zucchini growers, but Nick's grandparents in Vermont never had them so we were unfamiliar with them.  They go away in the fall, so we'll try again then, but next summer we're going to have to rely on row covers.  I also want to try parasitic wasps: they're tiny and they don't sting people, but they lay eggs inside the eggs of other insects and kill them before they can hatch and do damage.

A third zucchini plant appears to have mostly withstood the squash borers (sheer luck), but has an infestation of squash bugs.  I've been spraying them with soapy water and plucking them off the plant to drop them into yet more soapy water.

It's not all bad news, though.  I've been making some headway killing flea beetles on the eggplants, and we have our first actual eggplant growing!  We're also having decent luck with the carrots, even though I suspect I planted them a bit too close together so the actual carrot root part is a bit too small.  Nick roasted some last night along with some beets and they were quite tasty.

The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen, and we've had the chance to eat a few of our Sweet Chelsea cherry tomatoes.  They are amazingly sweet and delicious.  The Roma tomatoes are ripening as well and I look forward to making pasta sauce.  Sadly, the Green Zebra plant appears to be dying from something...we're not sure what it is.  Nick picked the green tomatoes and we're hoping that they will ripen a bit more.  If not there may be some fried green tomatoes in our future.  Nick found a recipe for a BLT using fried green tomatoes as a substitute for bread and prosciutto instead of bacon.  Mmmm...

The cherry tomatoes ripen in rainbow sequence - love it!