July Harvest Update

If it feels like it's been a really long time since we've posted, trust us, we feel the same. We've both been on the road a lot lately for our (non-farming) day jobs; Greg was in Atlanta last week, with Stacia in Dallas right now. That makes it hard to keep up with even maintaining and caring for our garden, much less finding time to blog about it. So here's a brief (and overdue) update on our fruitful July harvest, after which we should be back to our regular posting schedule.

As we mentioned last time, it seems that we have all the zucchini plant pests you possibly can. But those plants are real troopers, and just keep churning out zucchini after zucchini. We've been pretty diligent in harvesting them before they reach baseball bat-size, but it's still a heck of a lot of zucchini. This shows just the amount we happened to have on hand this evening, not counting the many we've already eaten or the three that are almost ready to pick. Considering the duress they're under, these are some pretty incredible plants!

Not surprsingly, zucchini lead the way in the harvest totals. Overall, in July we harvested:

0.4 ounces of snow peas
0.7 ounces of Poblano peppers
1.1 ounces of Roma tomatoes
9.8 ounces of Anaheim peppers
12.2 ounces of strawberries
12.3 ounces of kale
12.7 ounces of cherry tomatoes (52 tomatoes)
13.9 ounces of green beans
1 pound 13.1 ounces of garlic

And... 11 pounds 12.5 ounces of zucchini (8 zukes)!

Unfortunately, while the zucchini haven't seemed to show any sign of slowing under the attack of the various bugs, the same can't be said for our tomatoes. We've had a lot of the fruits split, most likely due to uneven watering with the intense drought we've been having this year. Well, the cucumber beetles have been using those soft spots as entry points into the tomatoes and just wreaking havoc. They don't all look this bad, but we do have our share of tomatoes that end up looking tunneled through and chewed up like this.

We should probably keep a better eye on watering so they don't split so bad to begin with, but for now it's been necessary to cut out the good bits to keep around the damage. They taste great, but it would be nice if they didn't look so terrible.

And of course, we still have chickens, and have probably been criminally negligent in not posting photos of them. The ladies still haven't laid any eggs, but according to what we read online and in books, we're very very close to that happening. Most likely within another couple of weeks we should have our first egg. Other than that, they're doing well - they may not enjoy the heat we've had but they've been dealing with it very well. And how's this for a fun chicken discovery: they seem to love the taste of Japanese beetles! Thankfully we don't have very many of those around the garden but when we find one, we pluck it off and give our hens a snack. With tastes like that, who wouldn't want backyard chickens?

The Zucchini Axis of Evil

When you grow food in a home garden, a big part of what you're doing is trying to create and manage order from the chaos of the natural world. We arrange raised beds in tidy rows, carefully select vegetable breeds that have the characteristics we desire, and water regularly when Mother Nature doesn't provide enough rain (especially this year!). But some unpleasant discoveries this week reminded us that in the end, we're not really in charge.

First, we've got these reddish colored perfect spheres on the underside of the zucchini leaves. These we are able to identify as squash bug eggs. You know how we can tell that's what they are? Because some of them had already started to hatch by time we found them, and they looked like this:

As adults, squash bugs are kind of shield-shaped insects with pointed snouts and an unfortunate appetite for squash leaves. An otherwise healthy zucchini plant can usually withstand an attack from these bugs, but you'll still want to get rid of them if you spot them. We don't like to use chemical pesticides, so we've been simply removing and squishing any eggs we find.

This is the next culprit we've seen around our zucchini, which are probably a bigger problem. These are cucumber beetles, but they're apparently open to eating zucchini and other squashes as well. Their larvae tunnel through the roots and stems, then the adults munch on leaves and flowers. That's not good, but the real trouble is that they spread bacterial wilt, a disease that can kill entire plants. Thankfully we haven't yet seen any signs of this disease but with so many beetles around, it's a concern.

The last scourge of the squash family is the squash vine borer, possibly the most terminal, and one that we worry we might have. As their name implies, these insects also tunnel through the stems of the plants, disrupting the flow of nutrients. Once these are inside the stems, there's no real way to see them, but you'll see the damage they cause. Stems will start to get wilty, and eventually the base of the plant will turn orange and porous in a material called frass.

This is almost certainly vine borer frass, which we can confirm by splitting and looking inside the stems. If the plants die, we'll try to do that. But if the borers are already in there, we're pretty much out of luck. We should have been on the lookout for adult borers (which are moths) in the early summer, and could have used traps to try to preemptively kill them off.

For now, though, it's a race against time, to harvest all the zucchini the plants can produce while they can. We also plan to pull and destroy any plants that do die off from apparent borer attacks. This might slow or stop their spread.

On the plus side, we have already harvested more than 10 pounds of zucchini, and are finding many delicious ways to use it. We've sliced and grilled it, we've made a chocolate-zucchini cake, and just today we baked a loaf of zucchini bread. We might not be able to completely control the insects that are attacking our plants, but we can take charge of enjoying its bounty while it lasts.