kindergardens - week 8 {baby cats, baby veggies, baby cabbage moths}

Fair warning:  this post is going to be long-winded - our garden has been busy over the past week or two, and I'm feeling chatty.

When they aren't being mowed down by pests (more on that later), the plants in our garden are really starting to take off.  This part of the summer is so fun, as it seems like there is something new out there each time we traipse out to the garden patch. 

Unfortunately, Kiddo isn't terribly impressed, as he has recently been distracted by the kittens in the barn next door.  He is over there daily, checking on them and playing with them.  Last night "Mikey" and "Petey" came running when they saw him in the garden, and that was the end of his gardening for the evening.  Kittens are much more fun than boring old plants.

(By the way, if you find a recipe for an organic home-made bug repelling concoction that includes vinegar as an ingredient, try spraying just a small part of the plant first before you douse your entire garden.  That way, you won't end up with crippled, burnt plants that don't like vinegar...like snap peas, for example.  Don't ask me how I know this).

When Kiddo is interested in gardening, we are finding (blurry) blueberries,

peppers,

and snap peas!

Kiddo is joining Miles and Ella's quest to make sure no pea makes it to the house.

"They taste even better when they come from our own garden instead of the grocery store, Mommy.  Why is that?"

We've also got a baby eggplant,

nasturtium blossoms,

as well as baby grape tomatoes, borage (totally underestimated the size of borage - it's huge!), and - cuteness alert - an itsy bitsy adorable little pea-sized watermelon!

We don't really know when you're supposed to pick kohlrabi - I read somewhere that baseball-size is best, but a friend of mine showed me a picture of her CSA loot and the kohlrabi was huge.  Way bigger than a baseball.  We decided to err on the side of caution and went ahead and picked them small this week.

We haven't eaten any yet, but I am collecting some recipes to try this coming week - we'll let you know what we think!

Kiddo's beans are starting to climb up his teepee, despite our continued battle with cucumber beetles and a few other unidentified bugs.  And the morning glory house - well, the morning glory house is just plain fun.  We measured the vines as they grew until they reached the roof earlier this week.

Hubby's twin brother was in to visit this week, and Kiddo was very excited to give him the grand tour of the garden and to show off his house.

In the past couple of days, the sides of the house have filled up even more, and we found our first real blossom today!

 

Isn't it pretty?  Can't wait to see what the house looks like when the vines really start blooming!

We continue to battle with pests.  We solved (knock on wood) our deer problem with fishing line, but now we have what we think is a groundhog snacking on peas, lettuce, chard, green beans and corn.  Hellooooo, but there's plenty of corn over there, across the street, in that nice big field...

Apparently our corn is tastier, so we hit Home Depot for some chicken wire yesterday, and within a few hours we had a second fence.

We'll be making another trip to Home Depot tomorrow - we went out to check on things after church today and found some of the sunflowers in Kiddo's flower maze pulled right out of the ground.  Hopefully all of this fencing works.  It is getting more and more difficult for us human folk to get into the garden, so we are crossing our fingers that it will prove to be enough of a bother that the critters will take their dining somewhere else.

In addition to groundhogs, we have also added cabbage worms to our list of enemies.  Last month, I was innocently admiring all of the cute little white butterflies flying around our garden.  And then one day, our neighbor mentioned she had seen several cabbage moths in our garden.  Cabbage moths?  I thought, What are those?  Then we got excited when we saw our first cauliflower head start to form and forgot all about cabbage moths.

As we started to check on our cauliflower daily, we started to notice weird green and black stuff collecting on the heads.  This week I showed it to our neighbor.  "It looks like poop!" she said (well, that's not exactly what she said, but my seven-year-old reads my blog).  "Caterpillar poop!" she continued.  Caterpillar poop?!  I took another look at our plants.  And, what do you know, I found poop-producing caterpillars. 

Those cute little white butterflies aren't so cute now that their babies have hatched ALL OVER our cauliflower and broccoli.  So now I'm squishing cucumber beetles, Japanese beetles (they showed up this week, too) AND cabbage worms (FYI, Japanese beetles are really hard to squish...but fun to drown in a bucket of soapy water.  And cabbage worms are really gross to squish.  They almost pop, and their guts squirt out the end.  Kind of like popping a giant green zit.  Totally gross, and totally more than you wanted to know, I'm sure).

So far, they've restricted themselves to making ugly-but-not-too-devastating (yet) holes in the leaves, and we were still able to harvest our first cauliflower head yesterday.  Hooray!

 (notice the cauliflower is being gingerly held to avoid caterpillar poop contact)

We have been enjoying looking at everyone's fun garden plan "sketches," so Kiddo and I decided to sit down and make one for our garden, too.

It's getting holy-moly-what-are-we-thinking a little big.  Particularly when we have to go shopping for fencing.  But we sure are having a lot of fun, despite all the critters and bugs.

This week I'll be handing the camera over to Kiddo as part of our Kindergarden homework assignment.  Can't wait to see what he finds noteworthy!

Linking up to Kindergardens week 8, where you can check out Kim's post and find out what's happening in other kindergardens this week!