First Harvest

Wow! Two weeks into harvest and we have pulled over 240 units (tomatoes, peppers, squash, basil (pkg), bell peppers and beans from the garden. It adds up to almost 20 pounds! At no time in my imaging of what it would be like to fulfill this plan did I consider this scope. It's only a 100 sq ft garden and only 75% is actually being used for production.

Through a member of our church we have found a way to bring about 80% of our harvest to Safe Place. We learned that the families are able to cook for themselves there. But expensive veggies and herbs are tough to purchase, so our litle bit works out. The next step is to find others who have more than they can use from their garden and to bring it to bear to help others.

I have been keeping very detailed data on harvest from each plant. My goal is to learn about which plants provide the most yeild from the resources they take up and the return on my annual investment. In other words, what it takes every year to raise a crop. That way when it comes to put a garden in somewhere else to possibly help others to grow their own crop we can recommend plants that offer the greatest return on the investment.

Other news from the garden. The squash were just not doing well. So instead of having soil nutrients pulled out into dying plants I pulled them. The eggplant has come back from the ant/aphid invasion and about doubled in size. The tomatoes got a fungus from all the rain. I cut out all the infected leaves, but did not treat with fungicide. I chose to wait and see if the plants would handle it better on their own. They did and started to sprout new leaves where I had cut out.

That's about all for this week. I'll try to post some photos later this week.

Apparently squash plants have a nasty moth that likes to lay their eggs in the stem of the plant where their larva later eat out the core of the stem making the squash plants do all sorts of things other than produce healthy fruit. This also works as a definition of my squash plants.

Being a first time squash gardener, I asked someone else and they told me the above and then what to do about it now. Dig out the worm then bury the part of the stem you cut open. Not a surgeon so I am going with plan b, go back in time and throw row cover over the top of it for the first six weeks to keep the moth from getting to the plant. A valuable lesson learned for this fall.

I am going to keep the squash plants around because they are still trying to make squash just not as vigorously as they normally would.