Fall = garlic planting time

No vampires will be in my garden this winter. With the help of my fiancé, I planted 56 Music and 53 Duganski garlic cloves.

Burrrr

It was a cold one last night.  We got our first frost of the season. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to protect the raised beds before the cold weather hit.  Alas, summer is over and it is time to take down the rest of the garden until next year.

First and third - best in show next year!

I decided, less than two days before the deadline, to submit some of my home preserved foods to our local county fair. I have never done something like this before. I had no clue what the rules were. BUT, I did have a lot of jellies and sauces preserved from this year's harvest so I decided, what the heck, I am going to submit something.

Last day of summer

Today marks the last day of summer. With this end, I harvested the last of the tomatoes and green beans before removing the spent plants. I held on to these sad looking plants because I was just dying to get 13 more pounds of produce out of the garden to bring my grand total to 400 lbs.  I wonder if I succeeded?  Time to weigh the harvest. Drumroll please...

Justice has been served

The proof is below:

Dead hornworm

It looks like the wasp eggs have moved from the dried portion to the more supple portion of the hornworm's body.  Very interesting.

To kill or not to kill, that is the question

I spent some time in the garden today, harvesting a jackpots worth of cherry tomatoes when I came across THIS:

Tomato Hornworm
Tomato Hornworms feed on the leaves, stems, and fruits of the tomato plant, causing extensive crop damage. 

YIKES!  My first Tomato Hornworm!  

I probably would not have seen the Hornworm if it weren't for the white specks of rice-looking projections covering its body. Part of me wanted to use my clippers to slice this pest in half to kill it (sick, I know). But, the other part of me knew to save its life because it was only a matter of time before mother nature took care of this for me (hahaha). You see, these white projections are actually wasp eggs from the braconid wasp, Cotesia congregatus, which parasitize the Hornworm. The wasps will kill the Hornworm and will seek out other Hornworms to parasitize. So this guy gets to live another day while the wasps work their magic.

Daylight is getting shorter and shorter

When I was a kid, I knew summer was over when I could hear the street lights start to buzz after a long night of playing outside. It used to feel like forever before this happened early enough for me to care. As an adult, there are just not enough hours of daylight to garden after Labor Day.

This evening, I spent some time in the garden...ripping out tomato plants, harvesting soybeans, and pulling some of the "big weeds." I certainly wasn't finished with any of my garden chores by the time I looked up and it was pitch black outside. So I carried my harvests to the house only to find out it was 8 pm! Really? I knew I wasn't in the garden long but it didn't seem like it was only 8 pm. Since the amount of daylight is getting shorter, I will have to spend more time on the weekends cleaning and prepping for the fall garden.

The hose is MY rain dance

We are getting a nice rain after not having a drop of water fall from the sky in the last couple of weeks. It seems that whenever I turn on the hose to water the gardens, about 2-3 hours later we get rain. I guess the hose is my rain dance.

ENDINGS and BEGINNINGS

Alas, all good things must come to an end.  It appears that tomato season is wrapping up at our house. For 4 weeks (all of July), the tomato harvest averaged about 5-6 lbs per day. But over the last two days, I have only harvested an average 1.3 lbs. Now you might think I am a bit premature in my proclamation that tomato season is coming to an end. But, there is a definite trend in the amount of tomatoes harvested per day, especially when taking into consideration how shabby the plants look. There are still a number of tomatoes still on the plants and provided that the stink bugs don't go sucking on the fruits of the plant, I will manage to continue harvesting tomatoes until the end of August.

When one thing ends, another begins. Today I started the fall garden. Oh yes folks, there is no time wasted here. Time is money. Err...wait, I don't make any money doing this....

Now comes the challenge: balancing yield (or lack there of) and valuable real estate space to determine when the best time is to cut my losses and pull out the dying plants to make room for the next crop. With that in mind, I started seeds (indoors) for the following cold weather vegetables today:

Something happened in the garden...

As I watered the bean plants this morning, I began noticing long strands of light colored pods dropping down from thin stems branching off the twisted vines of the pole beans. WOW! The pole beans have formed and are 9-12 inches long! While I have been waiting for over 2 months for the pole beans to be ready, the formation of the green beans has happened over the last couple of days.