Updo :: Troll Doll Hair-bun

The other day I was working in the garden and it was HOT so I put my hair up in a bun with two pencils, one of which has an old Troll Doll Pencil Topper I found at Goodwill. 

He's so cute!  Now, that's a high-fashion updo ~

My Veggie Garden :: Attempt Two

Photo: Raised Bed Veggie Garden © Biologie.

My raised bed vegetable garden is now a total of 36 square feet. That's still small but at least I have a little more room to work with than I did last Fall. I planted my new Spring vegetable garden on Monday and tied a soaker hose along the top of the beds. After I had it all hooked up I realized it would have made more sense to line the soaker hose along the inside of the beds so I might re-do all that before the plants really start taking off.

Last fall I planted a pesticide-free vegetable garden of mostly squash. My beautiful and healthy squash plants were devastated by squash vine borers. I even took a picture of one of the adult moths (pictured left) sitting on my squash leaf and wondered what kind of bug it was but I forgot to identify it, to my later chagrin.

The vines went from thriving and blooming big gorgeous flowers to withered and dying, practically overnight. The squash plants had been attacked from within by the larvae of the squash vine bugs and I couldn't see the damage until it was too late! The adult female lays her eggs at the base of the plant and when the larvae hatch they burrow inside the stem and begin eating the plant alive from the inside! After they are finished with the buffet, they exit the stems and work their way into the ground to pupate and emerge the next spring to start the cycle all over again.

To manage the menace of squash vine borers, the first step is to know what the adults look like and keep an eye out for them. Organic controls are outlined at the National Sustainable Agricultural Information Service: Squash Bug and Squash Vine Borer.

I'm spraying the new transplants with a home-made organic pepper spray recipe my dad uses on his garden. I'm not sure if it will keep the borers at bay but it does help keep off the bugs that like to chomp the leaves.

Organic Pepper and Garlic Spray

Ingredients:

• dishsoap
• several cloves of garlic
• 6-10 hot peppers (hotter the better!)
• 1 gallon water

Directions:

Place garlic, peppers and a small amount of your water in a blender/food processor and puree. NOTE: Avert your face when you take the lid off because the fumes are very strong. Strain the mixture and add the liquid to your gallon of water.

When you are ready to use the solution on your garden, fill up a spray bottle, add 2 tsp dish soap, shake and spray every few days on the tops and undersides of plants and leaves until the pests are under control.

Shake well before each use.

Here's my newly planted Spring 2010 Veggie Garden!

Wish me luck and Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Veggie Garden

In August I planted a vegetable garden. It was my first attempt at something like this and I've been meaning to blog about how things are going!

My husband built me a raised bed which I sectioned off like a square foot garden. I planted seeds of bunching onions, long thin cayenne peppers, bok choy, golden hubbard squash, bush beans, spaghetti squash, zucchini, and yellow squash. I used organic soil mixed with organic compost. The only things I transplanted were the pepper plants which I grew by seed indoors some months beforehand.

The bok choy were the first to show their cute faces to the world! They are very slow growers so I didn't expect to see them sprout first. The seed packet was a good one, practically every seed I sewed sprouted. A few days later the squash started sprouting as well as the bush beans (but I never did see a single bunching onion, the seed packet was old).

It didn't take long before the white-flies found my little garden plot. Here is an excerpt from my garden journal:

August 27, 2009
Whiteflies EVERYWHERE! It's awful. I spent pretty much an entire afternoon researching ways to kill them. I sprayed them with my soap solution recipe (it's for aphids but I read it will kill the whiteflies too). They are all over the leaves of my squashes and bush beans, plus the larvae on the underside. I hate them! I just read that the solution might be harmful to my squash plants so I may have killed them along with the flies. :(

I researched a few organic garden pest recipes. My dad used a pepper spray to protect his Tabasco and habenero peppers from being eaten alive by garden chompers. This is the recipe he used as he remembers it:

Ingredients:

• dishsoap
• several cloves of garlic
• 6-10 hot peppers (hotter the better!)
• 1 gallon water

Directions:
Place garlic, peppers and a small amount of your water in a blender/food processor and puree. NOTE: Avert your face when you take the lid off because the fumes are very strong. Strain the mixture and add the liquid to your gallon of water.

When you are ready to use the solution on your garden, fill up a spray bottle, add 2 tsp dishsoap, shake and spray every few days until the pests are under control.

Shake well before each use.

We had to leave for a few days in September. I left a soaker-hose attached to a timer so the seedlings would stay moist while we were gone. When we came home the garden was not only growing and alive, it was wild and the squash plants were huge! They pretty much took over the garden.

Next season I'm going to make a new bed where I can plant just squash separate from everything else! The bush beans and the peppers were still getting enough sun so I just let everything grow so I can see how things turn out. This is definitely an experiment in progress and I will have more pictures and info as the garden saga continues.

Additional photos of my Veggie Garden are found on my Flickr page.

If you are interested in building a square foot garden box like mine, check out Emily's instructions for making the garden box on her My Square Foot Garden blog: Build It!