We're still wishing for rain, real rain. So far, just brief sprinkles. The ground is drying out, there is hope for a hurricane later this week, but we won't hold our breathe.
The grass is invading the garden bigtime! The volunteers are battling bravely, but the grass is winning.they have dug, wacked, yanked, and cut grass every week, but it is invading further and further. A real big problem. We plan to try using agricultural vinegar and see it that helps. Buying the stuff is super expensive, because if the shipping costs. But we discovered we can make our own by semi-freezing regular vinegar and pouring off the liquid. The liquid becomes a high percentage vinegar. So we'll give it a try. Now we just need a few days of strong sun.
We've been harvesting lots of beets and beans. We can really grow them good. Plus lots of kale. Our kale plants are turning into little trees! But the kale still tastes great.
The Swiss chard plants are getting very old looking. We cut them back to see what would happen. All the stems resprouted along the stems with lots and lots of little leaves. We don't think it's worth trying to salvage the plants, so we plan to pull them out and start new plants. We are learning which plants can be revitalized and which are not worth the effort. But we have discovered that chard never bolts to seed here in Hawaii. So this is one veggy that we have to purchase seed for,
August 12th
The hurricane was a disappointment. Not one drop of rain!
We managed to get two good sprayings of vinegar. The tiny baby weeds have already wilted, but not much has happened to the grass yet. Perhaps it's a bit yellow. Today we really savagely attacked the grass, ripping and gouging. A goodly section of garden got cleared out. The grass is really frustrating.
Doug harvested a big bunch of bananas, enough for everyone to take some home. Plus there are several infant clumps up in the trees. So etching to look forward to.
The cherry tomatoes are starting to produce well again. We were surprised to see a yellow one. There must have been an errant seed in the pack. How fun!
The spaghetti squash is getting little squashes all over it. We are hoping that fruit flies don't like this variety. We've not been seeing pickleworm damage for the past two weeks, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for the squashes.
August 26th
We're still getting no recordable rain, just evening sprinkles. It is causing lots of leaf disease in the garden. Some sort of rot is attacking the gourds. Some tomatoes are rotting. The Portuguese cabbage and kale are getting mildew.
Vog! Last Wednesday we had a bad bout of vog come through. It burned a lot of leaves. The taro was the worst hit.
The sugar is growing crazy. Guess that's because it's a grass. When the stalks mature out a bit more, we are going to propagate this variety. It produces lots of sweet juice. It's a good one!
We dug up the experimental sweet potato bed. The experiment was a flop. We had been told that I stead of re-rooting new cuttings, we should just allow the end to restart itself. So we tried it, yes the plants regrew just fine. They came up from bits of tubers that were missed in the harvest. They grew lushly. But when it came time for harvest, there was very little there. Most tubers were small and not many. Only a couple of big ones. So we discovered that this is certainly NOT the way to grow sweet potatoes. So we dug the entire bed, properly this time. We will go back to our tried and true method of raising sweets.
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