Round 1 Eliminations were held last night, first to leave are the cucumbers covered with bugs!
They are horribly covered in squash bugs of all life stages...
This is the first bit of space created for the fall garden... what you can't see is the hundreds of squash bugs running for the hills!
I splurged and paid $8.99 for a large bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap to make my own insecticidal soap. I had been balking at the price but you only need 2 tbsp to make a quart! The level in the bottle has barely moved after making 2 quarts! Plus this stuff can be used for all sorts of things around the home.
And it WORKS!
Stopped the squash bug in his tracks! Why did I wait soooo long to do this?
Unexpected Bonuses:
1. The peppermint smell will act as a bit of a deterrent if used in the early stages of the garden before they have established their stronghold (too late for me)!
B. If you are bored, the label on the soap bottle makes for fun reading!
Excuse the obscene abbreviation, but WTF? These are my yard-long beans! Luckily I only found one like this.
Check out the critter party aftermath on the J. Gyllenhaal!
I admit defeat at this point.
Here is today's harvest. Romas are rolling in now, but were crawling with squash bug nymphs and have BER. I've been sowing beans all through the heat of summer and basically been wasting my seeds until now. They are finally starting to come in again. Yellow Wax are looking to be winners again and new for me is Contender green bush bean which has just started to trickle in but are nice looking. I gave the Dragon's Tongue another go but sadly this variety will not be reappearing in my garden. I was hoping for a different outcome in the summer vs. spring, but they look even worse. They are colored beautifully when about an inch long, but lose their luster within a day and leaving them longer doesn't help. Not suited as well for my area I guess, although I will say the ones harvested in May were better, but not as good as the other varieties.
A few good things...
love, love, love yard-long beans! I love walking through them growing on the arch in the garden, love the blooms, love the way they taste, love the way they look in my wok, the love is rivaling my Subaru Love, and that's a good thing...
Then came school shopping for the kids...
don't take a sip of that coffee because you will probably snort it out...
HA!
While wandering around T.J. Maxx I put these on and my kids were horrified!
Finnegan: "mommy, take them off before you fall down!"
Lochlann: "you don't look like you would be a very good mom in those"...
Note in the above photo how there is about 2 inches between the top of the shoe and my knee, these would be good for gals who are like 6'2 !
OK, I don't want to offend any of you who "this is your thang"- but I will go ahead anyways - I'm a Birkenstock/Teva/Flippy-Floppy Gal, and these are utterly ridiculous! So hey, if you are in the "middle-age tween crowd" (heard that term today!) puh-leeze don't wear these, you look unstable, both mentally and physically LOL!
... but I'm thinking they might be good squash bug squishing shoes! Maybe hang them like a windchime to serve as a warning to insect evildoers?
Wait til my kids are about 14, they probably won't go anywhere with me!
Thunderstorms all day for next 2-3 days, so I think the garden will be done for by this weekend and it will be time for Round 2 Eliminations... I'm thinking it will definitely involve tomatoes.
Now, looking at the calendar, I realize that he will be home a total of only about 6-8 weeks this summer/fall, mostly in 2 week spurts before he leaves for the real deployment in November. So now that I am faced with enough produce for a family of 50 (no kidding!), I am once again cursing myself for falling for the "denial stage" yet again. My husband had to work on our fence/gates all weekend just to finish them before he left, so the kids didn't get any "dad time" before he left. I even let a bad one slip, it went something like "if you want a home to come back to, you will finish these - TONIGHT"! Yeah, ooops... This is something he is quite used to in the weeks/months leading up to deployment, and then again at his return, and you would think that after all these years & deployments we would be able to deal with this better, but nope! In my defense, at the time I made my comment, he had just finished setting my potato cages on fire so I was a little tweaked already! (Yeah, he did it by accident, more on that fiasco in my next garden update!) Since he left on Tuesday, I have sunk to bad mommy levels not seen around here in awhile...the past 3 days dinner consisted of McDonald's, Pizza Rolls, and tonight - frozen pizza! I had every intention of cooking dinner this evening, but just finished mowing the lawn in heat & humidity and after cleaning up dog puke, Legos, and wet swimsuits from the floor, I am done! I even yelled at one of my kids today before he could get anything out past "Mommy....." Ugh!