Garden update - 8/16/09

So far we have been able to harvest some tomatoes, green beans, green onions, and a green pepper from our garden this year. My tomato plants are huge once again and I have to keep trimming them back because they are just unmanageable when they're so big! The big tomatoes are suffering from blossom end root rot again so I need to figure out how to solve that problem.

Yesterday I harvested my first green pepper ever. Green peppers don't like the heat and so every year until this year they have just dropped all of their blossoms and never developed into full size peppers. This year I decided to try something different and put my green pepper plants in between my tomato plants to try and give them some shade - and it worked. All 4 of my green pepper plants have peppers on them and I used one on some homemade pizza last night.

Some of the potato plants didn't sprout so I'm not sure what happened there, but everything else seems to be doing pretty well. I wish the corn was a bit taller, but there are a few ears on the first stalks that I planted. My pumpkin plants are being attacked by squash bugs once again this year so I have been going out periodically to kill any bugs that I find. I have also been smashing the eggs when I find them on the leaves of the plants. The weeds are still a little out of control but it's a full time job trying to keep on top of them and I just don't have that much time or energy every day!

We had a really strong wind storm a couple of weeks ago and several of my corn stalks were lying on their side the next day. I have tried tying them to the stalks on either side of them to help support them. Hopefully they will continue to grow but I'm not sure at this point.

I am going to try planting some lettuce or spinach and then some more green onions in the next week or so.