Sunday, August 2, 2015

Pasta's Gardening Adventure

Meet Pasta.


Pasta is an Enderman.


He is almost 14 inches tall, if he raises his long, noodle-y arm.


Almost.

 He tries.

Pasta is going on a garden adventure.

He's thinking of titling it "Pasta and the Beanstalk".


Pasta appreciates beauty.

 Okra flowers hold no creepiness for an Enderman like Pasta.

One time, I looked right at an Enderman by mistake. I almost died.


Pasta is good at climbing.

 Moderately good, anyway. Okra forests are difficult to climb.

 Very difficult.

Pasta finds a watermelon.

Did  you know that Endermen love tomatoes? 


I didn't. But now you know.

Pasta is in tomato heaven.

Roma tomatoes are especially delicious when they come in varieties as big as your head.

Speaking of heads, Pasta has a new friend.

This praying mantis is an expert at camouflage.

 Or he would be, but he lives in this purple shiso bush. (It's a type of Japanese basil.)


Pasta does not judge his friend.


But he will judge you, if you do not appreciate the beauty of this Chinese hot pepper flower.


 Pasta is overwhelmed by green hot peppers.


So he chills out with Patch, the elderly queen of the outdoor animals.

The queen is not amused.

Fully recovered, Pasta decides to try cat-wrestling.

 A good start.

 The ferocious feline is on the ropes.

Definitely on the ropes.

Oh crap.



Pasta is defeated.

Tune in next time for more gardening adventures!

Friday, August 24, 2012

Catch up photo dump.

 Here's a lot of pictures from the past couple weeks of my non-blogging life.


If only this pumpkin would last to October.


Cucumbers are coming along.


Cantaloupe? Possibly honey dew melon. (These compost vines are mysterious.)


Mating squash bugs.



Okra.


Wheelbarrows make great homes for black widow spiders.


While we were in New York, my brother looked after the garden. This is the zucchini I found when we got back measured against two pumpkins. 


Giant zucchini next to our cat.


And next to our other cat.


 There were two of these, by the way.


18 inches. That's a foot and a half long vegetable.


Also, the war continues.


These are squash bug hatchlings. Now they're dead.


They also lay eggs on tomatoes. Tricky, tricky.


Quite tricky.


Even along the stems sometimes. TRICKY.


And on a cantaloupe (honey dew?) leaf. It was gross clearing all these off.

To recover, I washed my stuffed tiger, Bradley. 


Having fun in the washing machine.


This is a tomato branch, stripped of leaves. A sure sign of a tomato horn worm invasion.

 

Epically camouflaged.  Note the horn.


This horn worm has been parasitized by a wasp. Gotta say, if I ate caterpillars, these would be probably the biggest, juiciest caterpillars around. 

Instead, I  eat pumpkins.


Baked!


After like an hour at 350 degrees, you can just stick a fork in.

Pumpkin is actually delicious. For some reason, it never occurred to me to eat them. 

They're extra delicious in pie form.


Baking is messy.


Or maybe I'm just a messy baker.


This is what a cooked vine borer looks like. (There was a hole at the top, so I was expecting this. As in, I hunted it out and composted the whole bit surrounding it. It didn't go into the pie.)


Though if it had, no one would have ever known.



Above: Yum!

Below: We shaved our cat!




Spaghetti squash.


Crazy grape tomatoes.




Cucumber.


 Rocky's huge!


Lil Mac is holding up, like, four tomato plants, but he's doing alright too.


Zucchini. It's got some kind of leaf mildew, so I trimmed back a bunch of the leaves that were bad off.


Baby cucumber!


Our partially shaved cat.


The beer squash. It turns out they're zucchini plants.


For some reason, they're not looking so hot. Not sure what's up. More research may be necessary.


These tomatoes went from almost ripe to rotten in, like, a day. Sad...


Wild pumpkin vines.


Okra blossoms will steal your soul.


YOUR SOUL.

Actually, they're quite beautiful, and bugs don't seem to be super interested in them, which is great.





We had a week of rainy days and I slacked in my squash bug killing. These mostly eaten leaves are, unfortunately, the result of that.



Happy tomato party.


Severe leaf mildew.

Note to self: when white, powdery spots appear on squash leaves, "Ah, that's probably normal" is not the appropriate response.


Above: Mildew.

Below: Healthy plant.



Cantaloupe?


Cantaloupe???

 

Cantaloupe!


Single serving size.


Morning glories.



Giant tomato horn worm. Two and a half inches long.


These guys are actually pretty cute. For big-as-my-finger caterpillars that strip tomato plants' leaves like nobody's business. You know.

Frankenstein tomato

Ha, I can attach captions straight onto pictures. Go figure.


Anyways, it's been a good couple of weeks. Time to sign off and make some dinner.