It has taken a while, but the tomatoes are all finially ripening. I've been picking them all - Tumbler, WayAhead, Taxi, Japanese Trifle Black, Striped Romas, Marzano Romas:

We have had tomato pies, tomato salads, and salsa is on the list soon. Nothing beats home-grown tomatoes!

Over the weekend I had one of my largest harvests of the year yet:

There are carrots, cucumbers (pickling and slicing), beets, string beans, and tumbler tomatoes. Also not shown are the daily zucchini. The carrots were a bit short and stubby, but are very colorful. I'm thinking they are supposed to be short ones. They were from a free packet from the seed company so I'm not too sure of the details, but they look yummy. Some had actually split from getting too fat too quickly. I blame the weather. :)

Also my tomatoes are well on their way to being ripe:

That's one of my wayahead tomatoes. Since I have taken the pictures I have picked one wayahead and two taxi tomatoes, not to mention the several dozen tumbler tomatoes I have picked so far.

And what have I been doing with all of the extra zucchini that I haven't eaten or given away? How about zucchini pickles:

These are my first attempt. They are bread and butter zucchini pickles. They taste pretty good. I'll post the recipe shortly.

And as I am writing this blog entry I'm enjoying my my favorite summer salad. Yum!

We had a short yet rather violent thunderstorm roll through the Philly area last night around evening rush hour, complete with very heavy rain, hail, and lots of thunder and lightning. Unfortunately all of the heavy rain really gave my corn a beat down:

And even my planters, which have drainage holes at the bottom, were overflowing:

I left the corn like that overnight and this morning I started putting some bamboo sticks into the bed and staking up the corn. I don't have enough sticks to stake everything, but I was able to get the most horizontal stalks pointing back skywards. Hopefully the others will bend their way back up after some sunshine. Or I'll need to run and grab more bamboo to finish staking everything back up over the weekend.

But luckily it doesn't look like any stalks broke, they just bent over. Whew!

I've been getting quite the daily harvest from my garden. I'm averaging about 2 zucchinis, 5 cucumbers, and about a half dozen tumbler tomatoes a day:

And my beets are finally ready:

I've also added a bunch of new pics for July in the image galleries.

It seems that I have finally won the war against the ants in my veggie beds. The ants had infested 3 of my beds. Whenever I got near the beds the ants would start crawling all over my shoes and up my legs. Yes - ants in the pants quite literally!. They were aggressive little buggers and liked to bite too. Ouch.

I have been using diatomaceous earth as my plan of attack for a few months. It's a organic crawling pest killer that is completely human/pet/food safe. It ends up cutting and dehydrating crawling bugs as they walk through and eat it. I think I went through 3 boxes of it in total. But it was only recently that the ants went away. One problem with diatomaceous earth is that it cannot get wet. Once it is wet it needs to be re-applied. Since June was so rainy I ended up having to re-apply it several times a week, and it didn't seem to be helping.

When applying I pour it all over the ant hills and then use a hand rake tool to mix it in and disturb the ant colony. Needless to say I had to wear gloves while doing this because it would send the ants into attack mode instantly. Then I would apply some more on top. I was beginning to give up. I checked w/ a local garden center (Primex) and they said that diatomaceous earth is the only real safe and organic way (especially in vegetable beds) to fight the ants, and to keep at it.

But now that the weather has dried up the diatomaceous earth has done the trick. The ants are gone! I guess I just needed to have a few dry days for the stuff to start working.

Over the 4th of July weekend I spent an hour making my popular Refrigerator Pickles. I'm still following the same recipe - although I use larger cucumbers (about 4-6 inches) for them. I also usually spear or half them depending on size. It lets the brine soak into them faster so they are ready within one day. I took a jar to a BBQ on Sunday and they were one of the first things to disappear. But luckily I made a total of 6 jars, so I still have more to spare - and more for me.

When I arrived home yesterday I found that some major damage had occurred in my garden. I have no idea what happened. Perhaps we had some really hard rain or an animal (wild or unleashed pet) was running around loose in our yard.

One of my tomato planters (w/ the tumbler tomatoes) was knocked over. I lost about 6 tomatoes (of the tumbler - which are just slightly bigger than cherry tomatoes) but the plants themselves were OK. Whew.

Then continuing through the garden I noticed 3 corn stalks knocked over! Luckily the stalks were not broken, just bent. So I bent them back up and added some extra dirt around the bases for extra support. But I have a feeling that I'm going to continue to have this problem. I may need to add an extra layer of dirt to the entire bed to stabilize the stalks. I guess I could stake each and every stalk with a bamboo stick, but that may be a bit excessive. I've already lost about 4-6 so far this year due to the stalks breaking - again either from a hungry or rowdy animal.

So I thought everything turned out OK, but then I took a look at my yellow zucchini. Oh No! The stalks of one of the plants was snapped 3/4 through at the very base!

Now I do have an extra yellow zucchini plant (each 'plant' is really two. I have two yellow planted in a group, and two green planted in a group.) but I was very upset. I decided to try to save it. I ran and grabbed some rooting hormone and applied it liberally to the break. Then I mounded dirt over the whole base of the broken stalk, and gave it a really good watering. Here's after my 'patch':

I hope that it will survive, although I'm doubtful. But this morning when I went outside the plant still looked OK - no wilting or limping, and the flowers were wide open and being enjoyed by bees. So maybe it will pull through. Only time will tell.

Slacked off yet again, but not without purpose. I was away on vacation for two weeks, and have started up school again. But that hasn't stopped me from my garden work. I've been busy weeding, planting, and fighting ants.

I've uploaded my June 2009 gallery. I'm going to try to start posting more (famous last words) but I'm going to try to make the postings more specific - rather than just a quick summary as my last few posts have been.

Anyways, here's a pic of the garden as of now:

Everything has been going pretty well in the garden. I've still been working on it steadily even though I fail to update this blog.

I've transplanted all of my seedlings into the ground. I've planted my corn seeds about a week ago and still have not yet sprouted. I've also planted my cucumbers and beans which are just beginning to sprout.

My peas are just beginning to flower. I cannot wait to have some sugar snap peas in my salads. My radishes are doing well too - other than the fact that the squirrels enjoy them more than me. While the organic animal repellent that I sprinkled around the yard helped, it has not stopped the invasion completely.

The ants are also back in full force. I've picked up some diatomaceous earth and have been sprinkling it near the ant hills. Hopefully that will stop some of the onslaught. They typically appear around the corners of my raised beds, but some have begun digging within the beds as well.

The strawberries are doing well. I'm still picking the flowers off of them and will continue to do so until about July. I've mulched the entire strawberry bed with straw. The herbs are doing great too. I have a lot of cilantro that went to seed and is coming back this year. I think I'll have more cilantro than I'll know what to do with. Cilantro anyone?

I'm continuing to pick lettuce from the garden. The romaine is just about ready and one square of mesculin mix that I cut for harvesting is just about fully grown back and ready for another harvesting.

There are lots of new pictures in the galleries so check them out. Hopefully once things start sprouting and blossoming I'll have lots more to show and tell.

Unfortunately the aphid situation I mentioned earlier had gotten out of control. Almost all of the seedlings that I was keeping in a 20 gallon aquarium got them and died from them. I lost my tomatillos (doh!), 3 tomato plants, and all of my dill, cilantro, and fennel. I kept applying the hot pepper wax, but I think there were just too many aphids and the seedlings were very susceptible to them.

But the good news is that the aphids pretty much stayed contained to the seedlings in the aquarium. My peppers, basil, and most of my tomatoes were all kept under a grow light a few feet away, and I only noticed aphids on one tomato plant.

The three tomato plants that died were essentially backups, so that's not too major. Over the weekend I planted some dill and cilantro seeds directly in my herb bed. Hopefully they'll do well using the direct sowing method - we'll see. Worst case I'll need to go out and buy some herb plants - but what can you do. I'll obviously be tomatillo free again this year. The live plants I bought last year didn't do well so I won't try that again. Oh well.

I'm keeping an eye on the surviving plants and checking them daily. So far so good - they've all been aphid free for about 5 days. I've moved them outside onto our front porch to start the hardening off process. I also purchased some organic sesame oil spray to use if I notice the aphids coming back. Hopefully I'll be putting these in the ground within a week or two.