Saturday, June 7, 2008

earth days


i have taken so many pictures of my garden over the last couple of weeks, but for some reason by the time i get ready to blog about it, the pictures are outdated. and now i have some bad news: we have not had rain in so long, so now some of my plants are dying. (in the pictures of my sunflower patch at the top of the post, you can see that giant yellow crickets have been munching away, which is part of the problem i'm sure.)

my butternut squash, which i planted from seed and had 5 or 6 healthy plants sprout, are completely dead.


my cucumber plants are on their very last leg, although i have to say they are still hanging in there for now. the bell pepper that i was waiting and waiting on to turn from green to yellow...well i picked it this morning and it's half yellow, half green, and inedible: rotten.


i do have 4 peppers on the other plant that are green and trying to turn red; we'll see.


the only thing i have really harvested so far are tons of grape tomatoes.

and i have a couple of rutgers heirloom tomatoes growing as well:


BUT there is a glimmer of hope in all this bad news: i have baby watermelons growing! here's the biggest one:



in other gardening news, i have a potted hydrangea on my porch. i thought it had died last fall; all the leaves got black spots on them and it looked just awful. so i stopped watering and worrying about it. lo and behold, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, i started to see tiny green leaves on it, and now look at it!

i don't have a before shot, but i promise, folks, this thing was BARE. amazing now, isn't it?

i swear that anything i grow is because of sheer luck. seriously. but i'm still excited and proud when it happens.

ok, the reason for this post title isn't just because of gardening...it's also because i just got these in the mail last night:

i just ordered two for starters, which i know won't go very far, but it will give me a chance to see if i can really do this. for some reason, i am almost terrified to even try. i'm afraid i will have bodily fluids all over the place. then i remind myself that before about 30 years ago, we ALL wore these things, and not these fancy pants ones, but the old-fashioned one-layer ones with (gasp!) clothes pins that could poke us! oh my!

anyway, i'm hoping i will feel confident once i start using them, and then i'll add to my collection and finally can stop feeling so guilty about all the waste i'm adding to landfills. i'll let you know how it goes.

and keep your fingers crossed that my baby watermelon grows to see adulthood so it can be eaten and then finally i won't feel like all the money i've spent on plants, seed, fertilizer, and water won't have been for naught.

have a great weekend everyone!

4 comments:

sewtakeahike said...

I hope your little watermelon has great endurance and make it to maturity!!!

krystal said...

Oh, so sad about the squash & the pepper! Now I feel really bad for giving you hard time about the poor green/yellow pepper... I can't believe the rain has been holding out for so long. Tonight it teased to it for about an hour but I think I netted about 30 drops. Frustrating.

Amy said...

oh, i do hope the watermelon makes it! we grew grape tomatoes two years ago and we had tons! and they were grown in a container!

Kellie said...

Is your bell pepper a variety that is supposed to change color? If it isn't then, while it may change, you may also experience rot because it was mature when green. (Bells will snap off easily when mature so that is any easy way to tell). I would suggest leaving one more to try & get it to turn and pick & enjoy the rest while green.

Next year you can try to plant some heirloom varieties with different colors. Peppers generally love the heat so I don't think that would be a problem.

Gardening failures can be disappointing. One year I grew 12 paste tomato plants for canning & all the fruit ripened beautifully - except for the scaby disease call "blossom end rot". I lost the entire crop. It's just part of the game.

Next time you're at the local farm, ask some questions - maybe you need to dump some peat/compost in a larger planting hole to aerate the sandy soil & hold moisture or maybe you could build a simple shade screen to put on during the hottest part of the days.