Monday, August 4, 2014

Late July - Good News : Bad News

Good news and bad news. The good first........

The peas are starting to come on. This is our first picking of sweet snow peas. 

Each week we're now picking cucumbers and a few zucchini. The cuke variety is called Sumter and grows well for us. So far not too much damage from the pickleworm. The zucchinis are not faring quite so well. I'm surprised that we're getting any at all, but several have worms in them. Luckily you can cut out the damaged area and eat the rest. The other summer squashes are dying from some sort of diseases. The yellow crookneck and the white patty pans. Everyone tells us that they can't grow them, so I guess we are not going to have any luck either. But we will have to experiment and see if we can come up with a solution. 
The potatoes are doing super. Above, Sue B is washing our harvest from today. 
 This is our first digging. Four different varieties. And there are plenty more to harvest still. 

Now for the bad news......real bad news. The resident goat broke into the garden. Mr Bucky is now nicknamed Mr Destructo. 
He went through and stuffed himself. He ate all the cabbages, broccoli, kale, Chinese kale, spinach, and basil down to the ground. Not a leaf or stalk survived.
He nibbled the tips of several tomato plants. Luckily they will recover. He didn't eat any of the potato plants but any potato tuber near the surface was eaten. 
The bok choy was attacked but only the greener leaves were consumed. Perhaps Mr Bucjy was getting a bit full? He also sampled the beet and chard leaves, ripping most of them out of the ground. The turnip greens were all eaten and all the turnips ripped up. He took one bite out of eat turnip, discarding the rest. But that ruined all the turnips. 
I was surprised to see that the goat chewed the pineapple leaves. They are sharp, tough, and very fibrous. But in spite of that, he ate the ends off almost every leaf. 
The poor beans are a total loss. Every leaf was eaten. We now have a bed full of green twigs. 
The radishes and carrots are partially destroyed. Some sections were entirely consumed. Others were partially spared. Plenty were simply ripped up and discarded. 

Very little was passed over. He did not touch the mints, eggplants, peppers, or peas. Nor the squashes, cucumbers, rosemary, onions, or chives. 

Letting a goat near a garden is disaster!! But we'll replant. Gee, we're getting a lot of experience in replanting! 
Since we're replanting, we decided to move some of the trellises. One person on each leg and the trellis is easy to pick up and walk to its new location. We plan to plant pole beans on this one. 
Lunch time! As you can see we've upgraded out "employee lounge". The big tables are in use. Shade tents protect up from the rain. The tree gives us plenty of shade. In the far background you can see the two trellises that we moved. 
An extra tent protects some of our work area, mainly the potting table. No, the tent isn't broken. We just have one leg shortened so that the rain runs off the canopy better. 




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