Cross-striped cabbage moth larvae

Does this look familiar?

I identified (at least one of) my pests!!!!! Read up on this guy here.

As usual, my control tactic is hand-picking. I guess I'd better troop out to the garden this evening and make sure there aren't more crawling around.

Even cooler, those yellow eggs that I showed you a post or two ago are cabbage moth eggs, so they are two parts of the same problem! I really feel like I've just learned and accomplished something!!!

What's Eating My Broccoli?

If you're asking yourself if you've heard this before - you have. Here's today's culprit. Actually, I probably killed 20 or 30 of them today, of varying sizes. What the heck is this? I've looked through web sites about broccoli pests; I've read descriptions and scanned pictures but can't seem to ID this guy.


I also found this nice little nest of sticky yellow eggs. Lovely. Gone...

Here's my spinach, coming along.

And one of the 4 or 5 kale plants that came up from seed, long after I stopped looking for them...

In other news, I pulled up a turnip, a rutabega, a daikon, and two long lost sweet potatoes that were about the size of my daughter at birth (or something that seems very like that....). I have tons and tons of greens to freeze. Things are really moing along now. I got my garlic yesterday and got that planted out. I ended up planting about 20 different cloves. We'll see how that all goes. I got a tarragon plant and set that out there in some of my empty space, and I also did another sowing of turnip seeds. What the heck. I have the space, I have the seeds, and I'm pretty doggone sure I have the time for them to mature, so I figured I might as well.

Weeding with a Hoe at Dusk

Ahhh...nothing like a few stolen minutes alone in the garden at dusk. The little one fell asleep last night at 6:30 and I was able to sneak out to pick some greens and check out the goings on out there. I have some huge Daikon, and it looks like I'll have some turnips in another week or two. It's no longer difficult for me to tell that this is the kohlrabi.



I came inside with a nice basket full of greens - collards, a little lettuce, some mini red bells (they're under the greens) and a generous handful of jalepenos.



Funny, I think I dreamed about peppers last night...I had a big bag full of jalepenos and serranos and I was handing them out to my father-in-law and brothers-in-law.....My serrano that I potted and that has been on the deck doesn't look fantastic, but it's putting out peppers lilke crazy, and has peppers all over it, and it's getting ready to bloom again. It's getting crisp around here in the evenings, so I brought it inside last night and put it in front of the window, where I'm hoping it'll live through the winter...

My cabbages look like they want to start heading up. I did find two little green worms on one head last night...

And this!!!! Yuck! This cabbage is FULL of eggs.

I checked out out all the others and this seemed to be the only one that was infested. So I trooped inside for a spoon and a big pitcher of water and I dug out and smushed the eggs as much as I could, and then doused the whole thing really hard with the water to wash the rest of the eggs away. I don't know if that was the best thing to do, but I had to do something. I figured that even if some of the eggs lived, hopefully without hatching on thier food source they wouldn't make it...

I did find some kind of clear slug-looking thing on a broccoli leaf too. Some of my broccoli and brussels sprouts are getting a little eaten, but not too bad. I haven't seen any more harlequin bugs. I hoping to get a chance this weekend to pick up some manure compost and give the broccoli and brussels sprouts a side dress of it. I could also use more straw (and some newspaper). I did weed quite a bit last night with a hoe, which went pretty well as the weeds are all small.

One additional note: I'm having so much fun doing this blog, that I've decided to start an additional blog chronicling various non garden-specific self-sufficiency issues. If you're interested in you can check that out here.

White Spot?

I think I'm getting some white spot on a few kale (below left) and collard (below right) leaves. I don't know for sure that's what it is, but my research indicates that white spot is the most likely name for what's going on. I pulled off the affected leaves, and it doesn't seem to be spreading much at all. Not sure at this time what to do about it or if I'll need to do anything about it at all. But it's a situation to keep an eye on.


I've been harvesting a few greens and radishes here and there, but yesterday, with great satisfaction, I brought in my first fall basket full of goodies: kale, collards, lettuce, easter egg radishes, mini red bells, and jalepenos.

Yes, I'm still getting a nice supply of peppers. I'm embarassed to say that I nearly killed my anaheim and did kill off my carmen plant trying to transplant them into pots. BAD MOVE. Though the serrano made it no problem, these other two were much bigger and I guess I disturbed the roots too much. It's really too bad, because I lost what would have been a bumper crop of both of them. I'll know better next time.

An update on my eggplant - it's still hanging in there, but I have yet to eat a single eggplant, since my daughter, in her great enthusiasm, kept picking my babies! I asked her to please not do that again unless I said it was okay. So the very next time we were on the deck, she was playing over near the pots and asked me if it was okay. A little distracted, I said, "Sure, it's okay", not realizing what I was agreeing to. The next thing I know, she'd popped off another baby eggplant. I have not one time fussed at her about this, because I'm happy that she thinks they're as beautiful as I do. But my hopes for eggplant this year have turned into a science experiment about whether or not eggplants picked prematurely will ripen in a window like tomatoes and peppers (they won't). And it looks like all I may get out of my eggplant experiments this year is experience.

But hey, that's okay. Next year I'll have so many eggplants I'm going to turn into an eggplant...

Industrious, and Overcoming Ignorance

Well, I am pleased and proud to announce that I do, in fact, have SPINACH!



I have 8 beautiful little plants which, now that I see them, I can clearly recognize as being spinach, as opposed to all of those ubiquitous little weeds that I was hoping were spinach. So I pulled all of those weeds out yesterday. One thing that I have learned over the past few months is how to recognize my most frequently appearing weeds. It's an interesting and useful bit of knowledge that quite frankly I didn't see coming.

On the subject of recognizing things, I think this is the kohlrabi. I do have a map of what I planted where, but things have gotten so mixed up from floating around in the rain that I am kind of confused still about the rutabaga and kohlrabi, and will probably remain so until they start to form thier bulbuous roots and the difference becomes obvious to me.



This is cabbage. Lovely. Although one of the plants looks like something is seriously eating it. I haven't been able to catch anyone at it though.

And here's a big beautiful collard plant. I took a few leaves off of one of these this morning and had them with jalepeno and onion in an omelette. It was delicious! I have also been harvesting lettuce.

Here's one of the easter egg radishes...it looks like someone's already had a bite...

And I do have carrots popping up in various places. Nowhere near as many as I planted.

But things continue to pop up. With almost two weeks of lovely moderate weather and intermittant rain, a lot of the seeds I put out seem to be germinating now. Interesting. Every time I walk out there there's more going on. Still no more sign of the Harlequin bugs. And no indication that anyone is eating the broccoli any more. That's it? 4 little bugs were doing all that damage? Must have been some hungry bugs.

The Official End of Summer

Well, this weekend I pulled out what was left of the tomato plants, and harvested what I think are the last of the sweet potatoes. It's possible that there may still be some sweet potatoes in the ground. I won't know for sure until I really start pulling out the vines.

This weekend I managed to get two bales of hay into the garden. I'm doing a much thicker mulch than last year. As my root veggies get a little bigger so that I can do it without squashing them I'll be mulching around them too.


Here's some sweet potatoes I prepared this weekend. I wanted to show you this because there are a couple of the potato ends that broke off during harvesting and I wanted to show you how they kind of scab over (the white part). I think it's called "corking". I was surprised at how incredibly easy it is to scrape and nick the sweet potatoes when getting them out of the ground. They really are thin-skinned. I've been "curing" them (I put that in quotes because I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I guess time will tell by how long they last me) in the vestibule in cardboard boxes in front of the window because it's been both warm and humid in there. This weekend my Root Cellaring, Natural Cold Storage For Fruits and Vegetables book by Mike and Nancy Bubel arrived. It seems to be awesome and unbelievably comprehensive. After reading about sweet potatoes I decided to leave this weekend's batch curing where they were, but added a damp towel to drape them with for extra humidity. I have to redampen this towel every morning. But so far so good.

The verdict is still out about whether or not these green sprouts are spinach or weeds. If they're weeds, then not a single spinach seed sprouted. It seems reasonable to hope that it might be spinach, as I covered this area with spinach seeds. We'll see.

Here's a few tiny heads of red-speckled romaine lettuce coming up from seed.

Ah...and this is the piece de la resistance, my GRAND IDEA. I want to actually start composting, and I'm going to do it in this.

When I say "composting" I mean as opposed to what's going on above in the left of the picture. This is a dog kennel I bought last February that the dogs refused to be kenneled in. We've been using it as a double fence along one of our fence lines to keep our dogs and the neighbor's dogs from scratching and digging at the fence line and getting into a barking frenzy, and it's actually worked great, but it's in the way of the addition we're putting on the house right now and so needed to be moved. Since I needed a space big enough to build an actual compost pile this fall, and I also needed to keep the dogs OUT of it, this will work great. It's 10x10, big enough to build a 4 x6ish pile on one side, and have room to turn it to the other side. It's full of grass clippings right now. My next step will be to get out there and get all of the grass clippings heaved up in a pile in one corner, probably the front left one, so that I can start piling up other kitchen scraps in the back. I have found a "recipe" for building a compost pile in Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts, Growing Food In Hard Times so when I get around to actually doing that I will be sure to fill you in. That'll be great because it involves me getting a new toy.....a pitchfork!!!!!

Just to reiterate....

In case anyone needs a visual of why I'm leaving empty space in my fall garden this year, here's a few shots of my partner hard at work!

And the Harlequin bugs?

I forgot to say, that after discovering the Harlequin's on the broccoli, that I went out with an envelope and picked off three, dropped them in the envelope and gave them a smush. I've been out looking since but haven't seen any others.

Still Growing....

Here's a nice shot that shows that all the transplants are still alive and well and getting bigger. I'm still having seedlings popping up, but they're not filling in that long bed to the right nicely like I had hoped. We had SO MUCH hard rain after I planted them, that they kind of ran off all over the place, and I think a lot of them didn't germinate because of the heat.


These are rutabega I think. There are two big ones (below) and then some other coming behind them, probably from the second sowing.

This picture is pretty hard to make out, but because of all the rain I was talking about I seem to have a few big kohlrabi plants coming up in my chard bed. The rain must have washed thier seeds there.

Yesterday I picked up a bale of straw and did a thick mulch on the broccoli and brussels sprouts bed. I'll get another bale today (I can only fit one bale in my car at a time) and mulch the chard, collard, lettuce and cabbage. Possibly I'll have enough to also mulch the kale. But my daughter wants to "build a straw house" a la The Three Little Pigs, so I have ended up with mulch on the one bed in the garden that I never did plant, and I expect there'll be more mulch there later today. That's okay. Maybe it'll keep it from filling back up with grass. I had intended to plant that too, but things are less stressful for everyone if she has somewhere specific in the garden that she can play, so I think I'll just leave that one empty this go-around. Pictures of the mulched garden to come. My intention is to continue throwing in more mulch during the next few months so that I don't get those weeds!