Monthly Archives: July 2008

My Evil Nemesis

While finishing some work on the pole bean enclosure, something caught my eye. It brought back bad memories of a fight I once had while growing acorn squash in Riverton. Squash Bugs. I know what it means to have squash bugs, and it isn’t pretty. So I stopped what I was doing and inspect the top and bottom of every leaf. It became painfully obvious just how many squash plants we have this year. I carried a pair of scissors with me as I inspected. Each time I found a pile of eggs, I cut off the leaf and brought it to my patio, where I ground the leaf and the eggs into the concrete.

Squash Bug Eggs

The eggs seemed to be limited to leaves near fruit. And I thought it was sort of curious that I only found eggs on the winter squash varieties, and none on the yellow squash, zucchini, or cucumbers. There is much more fruit on the summer squash plants, but no eggs. I don’t know if that was just a coincidence, but I thought it was sort of interesting.

I’m sure this wasn’t their one and only salvo. I’ll be waiting for round two.

First (of many) Zucchini

Cedar Hills has pressurized irrigation, to which our sprinklers are connected. The past few weeks the pumps that keep it pressurized have been on the fritz. They replaced two of the four pumps a couple weeks ago, but the remaining pumps failed this week. That has kept us outside watering various things by hand, using a hose connected to our culinary water. This is not ideal, but it has given us a chance to keep a close eye on things.

If you’ve ever grown zucchini or yellow squash, you know how fast they grow. As I was outside watering tonight, I noticed we have a few zucchini ready to harvest, and a few that will be ready in a couple more days. I decided to pull the first one from the vine and have it for dinner tonight.

While I was sitting here waiting for the pictures to upload, Charmaine walked in the door with the first blackberry. Wow. It is so amazing. I don’t remember blackberries tasting this good in Washington. I now question the validity of my memory. How could blackberries be better in Utah? It doesn’t make sense, but it certainly seems that way. Amazing. We’re really going to enjoy having blackberries… now to get some more!

Week 8

So here we are, two months into the process. Everything is growing extremely well. There are more than 10 each of zucchini, yellow squash, pumpkins, spaghetti squash, bell peppers, anaheim peppers, and brussels sprouts already on the vine. We even picked up some wood and started building a structure for the pole beans to climb. These are exciting times.

Corn Killer

I have never been very fond of cats. I especially don’t like cats in my yard. For the past 20 minutes, I have been researching cat traps. You see, my neighbor doesn’t keep track of his cat. It jumps the fence and tears up my garden. This makes me very upset.

When I awoke this morning, I realized the cat had destroyed 25% of my corn. Enough is enough, I thought. With some careful work this evening, I may have saved some of it, but only time will tell.

Corn Smashed

Needless to say, when the cat hopped the fence tonight and ducked into the rows of corn again, I grabbed an 8 foot 2-by-2 that I was measuring (pole beans need something to climb) and gave the cat a surprise of my own.

In other news, we decided to do some more thinning to the turnips, beets, and carrots.

Turnip One

Micro Carrots

Week 7

I was at work last night until after dark, so I had to take the weekly photos 12 hours late this week. That may not sound like much, but at the rate some of these plants are growing, it may be a lot.