Category Archives: front yard farm

After a couple summers of watching my dear heirloom tomato varieties die slow deaths from blight after a month or so of big yields, I was becoming disheartened.   I started looking at the “disease-resistant” hybrids at the local garden center, and wondered if they’d indeed be able to ward off the various blights that got my plants every year.

Wilting.... (image: Wikimedia)

Among various other attempts to keep my heirloom plants healthy, I’d tried organic fungicides, watering only at the base of the plants (and only in the mornings), and one weird planting technique: putting a couple tablespoons powdered milk, epsom salts, and compost in the hole in the ground before putting the tomato plant in. However, nothing really seemed to work.

So, I started buying hybrids in addition to heirlooms to see if they fared better. Nope. They all started getting the yellowing leaves with brown spots starting at the bottom limbs, which eventually climbed up the plants, at which point they stopped flowering.

Then I got all into pruning off the diseased limbs.   Tomato bonsai!   I think that was the best tactic.  It seemed not only to prolong the life of the plants, but they also didn’t look so sick.

 

 

Squash vine borers in action

Just when you think you’ve got a great, strong set of vines going, you look out on your garden one July afternoon, and see this.  Your first thought is, “wait a minute, I thought I watered this morning…”   Then you remember that you actually DID.  But you go water them again anyway because you figure it is just so ridiculously hot, how could any veggie plant withstand it?

While you’re watering away, there’s a grub gnawing away at the inside of the squash vine (and I imagine he’s laughing too…can you tell I anthropomorphize garden pests?  Helps me cope…).    My dad anthropomorphizes too, but in this case he speaks of the squash plant “writing and twisting” as if it were in pain from the attack. It all starts with the squash vine borer moth.  Looks cool, but isn’t.

You’ll see this wasp-looking thing casually flying around your garden acting like it’s just checking it out, but it’s really laying eggs at the base of the vines.  They hatch, then bore away and leave frass (a mealy waste residue) on the outside of the vine, right near the base…ick…

Borer larva in action (photo: Wikimedia)

In the past, I’d tried cutting open vines and smushing the borers.  But by the time they make themselves known the plants are so far gone that they’ll only produce a few more squash.  However, I read about injecting beneficial nematodes into the vines…and this is what I ordered from a gardening catalog:

Inside each syringe was a little sponge, full of nematodes.  I have no idea what a

Nematode syringes

nematode looks like or how big it is, but I do know that after injecting the squash vines with the solution, the vines continued to grow and produce lots (and lots and lots) of pattypan squash. This coming season I’m stocking up on the nematodes.

Late July harvest

Things really got going in my garden late July.  This photo was one of the first big picks of the season.

I’d never had success with eggplant in previous years’ gardens.  Tiny, shiny black beetles would turn the leaves to lace in hours.

Ever tried to squoosh one of those critters?  They are so fast!   I didn’t see as many this year, but I had sprayed the plants with some sort of a neem-oil based pesticide.  I think it worked.

Also in the basket:  several varieties of tomatoes, peppers, the first generation of pattypan squash, lone carrot, stray cucumber, bush beans.

Note:  not all my plants were in the raised beds:  I planted the tomatoes and bush beans directly in the ground, and the squash in the hay bales.

What I wouldn't give for one of those fat tomatoes right now

Oh what a joy to spend time looking at the plants growing in the beds instead of fretting over the wiregrass that used to inhabit this spot in the yard!  Raised bed gardening is so much easier than any kind of gardening I’ve done before.  It’s an especially good match for parents of toddlers as time for most things is pretty limited.

Dinosaur kale, arugula, lettuce (romaine, black-seeded simpson, red leaf)