These pictures have nothing to do with anything. I just found them on my camera:
Square cookies!
Rotting salad mix. 'Nuff said.
Magic Eight Ball revealed.
Today, I took a tour of the squash-jungles of Virginia. The first critter I met was the Japanese Beetle.
Usually, these guys eat the leaves off my bean plants. I don't have any beans planted, though, so ha! They ate a few leaves off the peas, but by the time the shiny little guys showed up, the peas were on their way out anyway. Now they're just chowing down on the weeds. A right friendly arrangement, for the time being.
Unfortunately, the squash bugs are much less friendly.
This is a batch of squash bug eggs. The adults lay clusters of between fifteen and thirty eggs at a time. You can usually find them on the bottoms of the leaves, unless the bugs are getting desperate and decide to lay them on the stems of the leaves or on some nearby grass or something.
Here are more pics:
From what I've read, conventional pesticides don't work super well on the adults or the eggs. Of course, I'm much too lazy to dust every other day when freak thunderstorms are apt to wash all the junk off anyway. Instead, I opt to go out and brush the eggs off into a tupperware container which is then transported a safe distance from the squash plants and filled with water in hopes of, I don't know. Boiling them in the hot Virginia sun. Whatever. This is war.
These past few days, I've been pretty lucky in finding adults too-- they like to hide down under the squash stems and under clumps of dirt in the garden. I killed four high-level adolescents and three legit adults today.
Which reminds me...
Wow, this picture is stupidly huge. You can see the bug, though, right? Right. This is a nymph-- it's halfway from being a little spider-looking thing with a green butt to being a bigger-than-your-index-fingernail, camouflaged plant juice sucker.
Here's another nymph. He's a little smaller than the first one, but not by much.
They suck plant juices even when they're not adults, by the way. And both of these particular bugs are dead now. Sometimes I think about what I would say if someone came over while I was in the middle of squishing a bunch of these guys.
Friend: "Hey! What're you up to?"
Me: "Oh, just mass murdering a bunch of little blue bugs."
Fortunately, I'm not a lone killer. Meet Joe.
Joe is awesome enough for an oversized picture.
Moving on, here's the jungle.
There were supposed to be okra plants growing in that entire plot, but oh well. I'll take what I can get. Good news (sort of): the compost I used to try to add some sort of nutrients to the hard, red clay that was the new broken ground for this spot turned out to be... less than completely composted. Ever since I stirred it in there, I've been thinning out volunteer tomatoes and cantaloupe plants.
This is an unplanned cantaloupe.
Note to self: the pile looks bigger than it is when you're the only one turning it. 3x3 feet is the measure.
Second note: Buy a yardstick.
Third note: Ignore the first two notes if you want a zillion tomato plants to pop up randomly.
One of the pumpkin vines has decided to take over the porch. You can't see it, but there's a pumpkin growing on the outside corner.
This is the same pumpkin as before, a week later.
I think it looks the same.
It does have some impressive warts on it, though. (The seeds were from a little warty pumpkin. I guess it's in the genes.)
Some major weeding happened yesterday. My friend Emily is a beast. She did most of the work while I dug up sneaky-snake grass.
Magical, right? You can see the tomatoes now!
In other news...
We ate two of them at dinner tonight. Fantastically delicious.
Rocky's getting along okay. Once he gets up higher than the squash leaves, he's going to have a great time of it. He's just got to grow, like, a foot.
Also!
Rocky has a friend! I was burying sections of the pumpkin vine (to encourage roots to grow in the event of a squash borer killing off the main vine) when I found this little guy clinging to life down in the shade of the big squash leaves. Man. Did Rocky have a friend in the movies? Maybe I'll name him after the Punch-Out guy, whatever his name was. (Wikipedia, you are my friend~) Little Mac.
Right-o. Rocky and Little Mac are giving it a good go in the shade of the squash. Grow, little guys, grow!
The new okra I planted is already coming up on the other side of the garden.
Every now and again, I feel like an expert, being able to tell an okra sprout from the five zillion other little weed sprouts in the garden. Then I think of last year, when I mistook weeds for okra and had a whole crop of some plant with little red flowers that was quite distinctly NOT okra. Live and learn, I guess.
In case you couldn't see the ridiculous abundance of tomatoes on the vines in the earlier pictures, here's another look (from the other side).
The slugs have gotten at a few of them, but I have plans to put out traps in the very near future.
Also, look.
A small caterpillar has been wreaking havoc on the mutant broccoli-bean plant. Actually, the caterpillar and its entire extended family had turned out. You can see it a little better, right in the middle of these next two pics.
I knocked this one loos and it had, like, a safety thread, so it's just hanging here. I put them both on here because if you have both of these pictures open in separate windows and can switch back and forth really fast, it looks like the caterpillar's dancing.
I'll have more on the squash bug battle and the slug traps soon. Also, I've got the tomatoes propped up so they don't look like such a tangled mess anymore. Just have to get some pictures.
