Slugs

I have two things in common with slugs:  I like eating the vegetables from our garden and I like to drink beer.  Unlike the slugs, I can keep from drowning myself in beer (usually).  Brad 6, Slugs 0.

Bugs

I find a lot of bugs in the garden.

There was a hole in one of our squash.  When I cut it open, I found this guy inside:

Later, while picking tomatoes, I found this caterpillar:

I put it in a jar for safekeeping until I could check the internet to see if it was a tomato-eater.  Then I found this one:

According to the internet, they’re both tomato hornworms.  The second caterpillar is covered with parasitic wasp cocoons.  The wasps will eat the caterpillar when they emerge from their cocoons.  The internet recommends I leave the wasp-infested caterpillar in the garden so the wasps will kill other hornworms when they hatch.  Go wasps!

Tomatoes

Janie and I got back from Spain today and found lots of ripe tomatoes in the garden.

Snails

Black Swallowtails

Yesterday I found this butterfly in the garden.

Today I found this caterpillar.  According to the internet, they’re both Black Swallowtails.

The Front Lawn

This is our front yard.  We never got around to doing much in the front.  Janie put in the boxes and (tiny) blueberry bushes.  There’s a rhubarb patch in there, but it’s hard to see.  The squirrels and birds planted the sunflowers.  We never really planned on having a yard, so I (Brad) refuse to buy any sort of lawn mowing device.  I figure, next year we’ll plant something that doesn’t require mowing.  So this year, the yard looks a little rough.

This is how we trim it.  Seriously.  It’s not as bad as it looks.  Today, one of our neighbors saw me hacking at the yard with my clippers and came over with a special present he found in the garbage (how did he know we like things out of the garbage?).

Works like a champ (once you use the clippers to hack the grass down to a reasonable height).  I forgot to take an “after” photo.  Imagine:  the yard looks better, but still doesn’t look good.

Any suggestions for the front yard for next year?  It’s a southern exposure so a moss garden is out (sorry Becky).  We like:  edible things, (relatively) low maintenance, & conceptual art.

Cicadas

I found the discarded carapace of this hideous monster in the front yard this week.

More garden (with Stewart for scale)

Sugar peas (green, purple, & yellow)

First zucchini

with Stewart for scale

First carrot (Janie jumped the gun a bit on this one)

With Stewart for scale

Garden update

Broccoli bolted.  Sad but pretty.

Beets

Cauliflower

Cherry Toms

Big Toms

Pepper

squash bloom

Garden Update

There are lots of sunflowers in the front yard.  They were planted by the squirrel that gets in our birdfeeder.  We’re just sort of going along with it.

Lots of cherry tomatoes on the way.  This is the plant that started growing around our little avocado tree back in December or January.  We’re just sort of going along with it (can you see a trend?).

This is one of our normal-sized tomato plants.  I don’t know anything about growing vegetables, but if we get a tomato for each flower, we will have lots of tomatoes.

Four different kinds of basil.

Lettuce.  The lettuce has been mostly eaten.  By us.

Snap peas.

Freakish purple snap peas.  I will assume that these are some sort of rare heirloom snap peas and not a Queens mutation.  I’ll have to ask Janie.

Teeny little broccoli.

Beans!

Zucchini.  It’s hard to get too excited about the zucchini.  Especially when the huge zucchini plant is choking out everything around it.