kindergardens - week 12

Ladies and gentlemen, it has come to this.

I couldn't take it any longer.  I had to pull out my beloved acorn squash vine this week, and that was the last straw.  Those cucumber beetles are dead meat.  I hope.

I also found squash bugs while I was out spraying, as well as some foreboding egg clusters, so they all got doused.  I don't know how organic gardeners do it.  I tried planting late, I tried hand-picking the critters, I tried various concoctions of foul-smelling ingredients.  What's a girl to do?  I'm trying to justify my actions by telling myself that at least I know what I'm spraying on my food and when (and this particular product is not supposed to be absorbed by the plant, so theoretically it will all wash off before we eat it).  And I didn't spray the whole garden - just the cucurbits.  Which still took the whole bottle.  Yikes.  We have a lot of cucurbits.

Moving on...

We were a little late with our last KinderGARDEN post, so if you missed it last week yesterday, you can check it out here.

This week, we've really started to harvest yummy goodness from our garden.  We've been feasting on grape tomatoes and peas, picking the occasional pepper,

and last night we picked the first of the beans on Kiddo's teepee!

(And, coincidentally, found a huge Carolina locust/grasshopper in the teepee.  And he has friends.  Is there no end to the bugs??).

When the heat and the bugs aren't chasing us indoors, Kiddo has been busy in the garden.  He's been checking the progress of his morning glory house,

hiding in his flower maze,

smelling the flowers,

checking to see if he still fits in his teepee,

navigating his zinnia path (just starting to bloom!),

and anxiously waiting for the yellow tomatoes to ripen ("they're my favorite, Mommy.  They're REALLY good!").

He has a while to wait yet.

He also spent an evening transplanting flowers (with feline "supervision") in his flower bed.

Kiddo's helper, Sam, comes to visit whenever he spots us in the garden.

One happy side effect of our groundhog fence is that it has worked on the cats, too.  No more litter box "gifts" in our garden!  And there was much rejoicing in the land.

Finally, we've started an experiment - we were going to grow a yam for the "Y" in our alphabet garden, but then I read that they are incredibly difficult to grow and are basically a tropical plant.  I had already bought a yam at the grocery store, so I went ahead and stuck it in a shallow bowl of water on our kitchen counter.  It sprouted and grew and grew...and grew!

So we stuck it in the ground and waited to see what would happen.  And now, 10 days later, it looks like this!

I don't know if we'll get any yams out of it, but we're having fun watching it grow!


Linking up to week 12 of KinderGARDENs over at The Inadvertent Farmer.