This Is A Bug-Out!

I'm being attacked by bugs!  I hate bugs.  I know why organic produce is so expensive - BUGS!  You have to babysit each and every plant.  It's impossible for these huge farms to produce anything affordable and organic, pesticides are a must if you want to make any money - like if you have a family to support.  The best way to get affordable organic produce is to grow it yourself. 

Squash Bug - Master of Destruction!

My latest plight is the Stinkin' Squash Bug!  Yes, very similar to the plain old Stink Bug.  These things are almost as evil as the Imported Cabbage Worm.  Luckily my Neem Oil will work on the nymphs but the bugs and eggs need to be crushed.  Ick!  Last night I killed about 10 of them, at least they're big enough to see and grab.  You have to stay on top of these things or you could lose your plants.  I haven't been keeping an eye on my collards and the worms have come back full strength, I may just pull them up and dispose of them, plant more in the late summer for fall harvest.  Once the weather gets hot, the bugs become more abundant and therefore, more troublesome.

The wild & crazy sugar snap peas.

So, I've been experiencing this "writer's block" lately and it's taken me 3 days to get back to this.  Here's what I did during those 3 days.  I picked all the squash bugs off and sprayed the squash with Neem Oil, along with my cucumbers.  I pulled out all of my sugar snap peas, they're done for the summer - I'll plant them again in August for a Fall harvest - yum!  I also decided to do away with the collard greens, they were so destroyed by that dang cabbage worm and the weather is getting so hot I knew there wasn't much hope for them.  They are history!  I sprayed the dirt with the Bt to hopefully kill any cabbage worms and their larvae if they were hanging around.  I'm transplanting some of my kale so it has more room to spread out. 

Post sugar snap peas - all neat and tidy.

My garden looks so neat and tidy since I took out the sugar snap peas, they were so big and bushy.  Now my onions, kale and carrots can get more sun.  Woohoo!






Also found one of these little dudes living in my kale, a baby praying mantis.  I hope he sticks around, he will be fat and happy!  Very cool. 

I need to get going - we're having a music ministry picnic at our house on Saturday and I have a lot of cleaning to do.  I also want to hit the local Farmer's Market today, I saw one of the farmers is harvesting some garlic and I need to get me some of that!  Have a blessed day and get out there and plant something!

Easiest Pickles Ever!

A couple of weeks ago, my son John and I were at a local farmer's market and bought some homemade pickles from B'more Bill's Dills, they were called "Half Sours".  I had never heard of half sours before and questioned the gentleman extensively on the process because the pickles were quite yummy.  The pickles we bought had a crunchy, garlicky flavor but did not have vinegar or dill, which after eating a couple of pickles, I started to miss.  I started my search for a pickle recipe, I didn't want to make another mushy, flavorless cooked pickle.  I started seeing a lot of recipes for refrigerator pickles, I've never heard of refrigerator pickles.  A refrigerator pickle isn't cooked, it's soaked in a briney juice and kept in the fridge instead of canning and hot water bathing.  After reading several recipes and instructions, I got the gist of it.  Below is my recipe, I like it because it's easy to increase/decrease depending on your cucumber supplies.

Basic Dill Refrigerator Pickles

6 Cups Water
2 Cups Vinegar
1/2 Cup Salt
Onion  (1.5 medium)
Garlic  (8-10 cloves)
Fresh Dill  (1 oz. prepackaged fresh dill)
Cucumbers

Brine:  Bring water, vinegar and salt to a boil.  Turn the burner off after the mix is boiling and the salt is dissolved.

Pickles:  Scrub your cucumbers.  You can leave your cucumbers whole (if you're using pickling cucumbers - because they are small enough, just cut off the bloom end), or slice them however you like.  We did spears and slices.  The grocery store didn't have pickling cucumbers so we bought regular cukes and sliced them.  We had also bought some pickling cucumbers at the farmer's market that we cut into spears.   

After you're done slicing (or not) your cucumbers, slice your onion and garlic and break all the stems off your dill.  These are the quantities I used and how much I yielded from it, you can change the recipe according to your taste.  I used 5 regular cucumbers and got 2.5 quarts of pickle slices and 8 pickling cucumbers that we cut into quarters for spears and that made 2 pints.  I used 1.5 medium size onions and 8-10 cloves of garlic.  Hope that is helpful.

When you're done slicing everything, start layering them in the jars:  cucumber, onion, garlic and dill.  I put onion, garlic and dill on the bottom of the jar, layered in cucumbers till the jar was half full, added more onion, garlic and dill and filled the jar with more cucumber slices, then added more onion garlic and dill on the top.  After that you take your brine and fill the jar to the top.  Continue until you're out of cucumbers.  I did run out of brine but quickly mixed up a quarter of the recipe to fill the last jar.

Let the jars sit on the counter for a few hours (3-4), then stick them in the fridge.  They are ready to eat in 3-4 days. 

We couldn't resist and had to try them - they are delicious!

Have a blessed day, I'm off to water the garden!

Potatoes and Fuzzy Gloves

When I asked my daughter what my next blog should be about she said, "Fuzzy gloves!".  I really don't see what fuzzy gloves has to do with anything else I've written here so I told her that was probably more her style and she should blog about fuzzy gloves if she feels so passionate about them.  So this ends the fuzzy glove portion of my post.

Fuzzy Glove Love!

Ok, so this post has taken me 3 days and this is all I have.  I want to write, I just don't want to write about potatoes so let's get this show on the road. 

I researched quite a bit on potatoes and how to plant them.  You Tube has plenty of folks who are more than happy to show you how to cut up your potatoes and how and where to plant them.  I thought about doing a deeper (10") raised bed but it didn't seem deep enough.  I saw some people planting them in tires and you keep piling tires up as the potatoes grow.  Didn't want to do that, don't want piles of tires in my yard.  I have a friend who planted hers in a trashcan and they are growing wonderfully.  I wish I would've seen this method before I planted but I had the chicken wire so that's what I went with.  I've been toying with the idea of picking up a couple of those Colored Tubs at Walmart and using them next year.  We will see. 




Chicken wire I had laying around.



I cut a 3' (H) x 10' (L) piece of chicken wire fence and made it into a circle-like shape.  I then covered the ground and about 6" up the sides with 3-4 layers of newspaper and started filling it up with a 50/50 mix of topsoil and compost, just like the raised beds.  I bought some seed potato from my local Southern States Store, you can order these through the mail also but I liked the convenience of buying them locally and not paying shipping.  I bought red, white and Yukon Gold seed potatoes.  I cut them so there were 2-3 eyes on each piece and placed them eyes up and covered them with about an inch of dirt.  Within a week they were growing like crazy!






Lined with landscape fabric.



The reason I planted them in this deep container is when they start to grow, you keep adding more and more dirt until they have grown up over the top and you can't add anymore dirt.  Then the potatoes start growing in the container.  As I started to add more dirt I lined the chicken wire with some nice heavy landscaping fabric I had laying around the yard killing grass.  This way the dirt won't just pour out through the chicken wire and it stays nice and dark in the containter - just the way those taters like it!

                                                           

The finished product (pretty, right?).

As you can see mine are in need of dirt and one of the bins is just about over the top.  The red potatoes seem to be the slowest growers but they were the first to sprout.  They will be ready to harvest when the tops turn brown and wilt, then we get to dig, dig, dig our potatoes!

So there you have it, now get out there and plant yourself some taters!









Grow Up!

While planning my garden, I learned that there are quite a few plants that you can grow "up" and save on precious garden space.  My thoughts were that some of these plants produce fruit that is way too heavy to have hanging, but I'm giving it a try. 

The first obvious choice for growing "up", for me, was sugar snap peas.  My family loves these, and I only say that when it's something we all love.  A vegetable that everyone in my family loves carries a certain amount of clout, so for me to plant sugar snap peas was a no brainer.  We tried 2 different fence plans, the first was straight up and the second was a tent-like shape. 




Straight Up!

The Tent!

After watching them grow, I believe the Straight Up plan works best for these.  They just didn't seem to get the whole "Tent" concept, they wanted to grow straight up.  I was just being cheap anyway, wanted to save a few bucks on fence posts, so now I know that I need to buy a few more.  I've already decided that next year I'm planting more sugar snaps, I may plant along the whole back side of the fence.  My husband doesn't think this is such a great idea, he says the deer will eat them if they are up against the fence.  I'll find a way to make it work, possibly hire my sharp-shooter son to keep an eye on them at night - ha!  I may just have to redirect my Scarecrow.

The second veggie I decided to grow "Up" is cucumbers.  I didn't plant a lot of cucumbers because I don't like them very much.  I like them in salsa and sometimes in a cucumber salad but for the most part, not so much.  I planted them using the "Straight Up" plan, they aren't big enough yet to see if this will work, but I'm pretty confident it will.

Cukes.

Cukes with Zucchini

As you can see, my cucumbers share space with my zucchini squash.  I'm hoping this will work out well, the cukes only take up a small amount of space at the end of the box.

I have two more veggies I'm growing "up", Butternut Squash (this is the one I was concerned about) and my Rich Sweetness melons.  I'm not too concerned about the melons, their full grown weight is only 1/4#.

Rich Sweetness Melons

Butternut Squash

We shall see.  The fences are plenty sturdy and quite simple to put together.  We just used 2 - 5' T-Posts and about 5' of 4x2x48" welded wire fence.  All we did was wrap the ends around the posts.  I highly recommend wearing gloves when you work with the fencing. 

We are growing one more vegetable "up" but I'm going to share that in another post.  They are so special, they deserve their own page. 

So that's it for me this week, I hope you all have a blessed weekend.  I'll be working at the Farmer's Market on Saturday selling cheese from Bowling Green Farm.  So get out to your farmer's market and support your local small farms!

To Spray Or Not To Spray

When planning my garden, I decided I wanted to go organic.  I knew it would be challenging but if I want dangerous pesticides on my produce I can buy them at the store.  Lately I've been having some problems with some very destructive beetles and worms.  The first bug I discovered was chewing away at my green beans, it's called the Mexican Bean Beetle. 

My beans - eek!

As you can see, those little suckers tore up my beans pretty good. They only chew on the leaves but can do a lot of damage.

I started picking the beetles off every day and dropping them in a little pan of soapy water to kill them.  I was also squishing the eggs as I found them.  I was having trouble keeping up with those little boogers so I did some research into organic pesticides and found something called Neem Oil. 

Life cycle of the Mexican Bean Beetle.
Eggs (right), larvae (bottom), beetle (top)

Neem oil is extracted from the seeds of the Azadirachta indica (or the Indian Neem) tree.  In India (and surrounding countries), people harvest the fruit of this widespread tree, take off the green husks and sell the seeds to facilities where the oil is pressed and sold.  The remnants are solds as "neem cake" to use as organic fertilizer.  Neem is a great renewable resource that is a replacement to our dangerous, petrochemical pesticides. 

I bought a ready to use spray and used it immediately.  So far, so good.  I haven't seen any bean beetles in the last 2 days and my beans already look healthier, that could all be in my head but I think they look much better.  I believe I'll have to spray them about once a week or after a heavy rain.

The next bug that was getting into my goods was the Imported Cabbage Worm. I seriously hate this bug, it destroyed my Collard Greens in no time at all.

Ugly littls suckers, aren't they? 
When you pick them off the plant they poop - always wear gloves!

They were moving on to my Kale as well,
I had to do something quick!



My poor Collards!













Back to the research.  I found a product called bacillus thuringiensis or Bt. Bt is a naturally occurring bacterium common in soils throughout the world used to kill leaf- and needle-feeding caterpillars.  It was developed in 1911 and made available to the public in the 1950's.   Bt insecticides do not kill beneficial insects. This includes the natural enemies of insects (predators and parasites), as well as beneficial pollinators, such as honeybees.  The major advantage is that Bt is essentially nontoxic to people, pets and wildlife.  Yay! 

I bought a bottle of concentrate and mixed it up myself, I used 1 teaspoon to 42 oz. of water.  After picking all the worms off the collards, I sprayed them and the kale and am hoping for the best results - no more worms.  I'll probably have to spray every couple of days since Bt is susceptible to sunlight degradation (big words, right?). 

So far, those are the only major problems I'm having in the garden (other than weeds).  I'll keep you posted as I move forward and hopefully save you some time and heartache in the future.

Now I need to get out to the garden, I have some potatoes that need tending to!