The past two weeks have actually been pretty hard on the garden.  Twice we’ve had strong windstorms coupled with a drop in temperature.  The wind really did a number on the plants in the aquaponic bed–I’m not sure why, but it might have to do with it being elevated to waist height.  The morning following the storm, I went out to check on everything and found the tomato plants were really bruised and battered, the peppers had withered and the squash leaves were torn and bruised.  I pruned most of the damaged vines and leaves but it was sad because they were really growing and flowering well and some vines that were full of flowers had to be removed.  This week, there was another windstorm but not nearly as damaging as the prior one.  It was a little bit of a setback, but the plants are beginning to bounce back.  

The tomatoes in the traditional soil bed are doing really well.  All of the plants except one variety, the “Early Girl” are in bloom and have set fruit.  The “Early Girl” tomato in the aquaponic garden hasn’t bloomed either, so I’m not going to worry about them yet.  

This past week, I noticed that the beautiful petunias were getting ravaged by caterpillars.  I started pulling them off by hand, but quickly realized that this was a losing, uphill battle and instead bought some organic pest control for the ornamental flowers.  Since it seems that the dinner bell has rung for the pests, I decided to pretty up the vegetable garden with some marigolds.  I have always heard that marigolds repel certain insects that prey on vegetables and keeping last year’s pest problem in mind, I decided to plant the marigolds in the empty spaces in the cinderblocks as a kind of force field.  I’ll let you know if it’s successful, but in the meantime, it is really pretty!  I think I’ll pick up a bunch more this weekend to fill the rest of the holes.

I’m really excited about the little cucumber plants.  I have totally outed myself as a City Mouse.  Every day, I’ve been looking at the cucumbers, wondering if they will ever fruit.  I kept seeing flowers, but no cucumbers, or so I thought.  Then one day this week, I was looking really closely and finally saw them and squealed “pickles!!”  Apparently, I’ve never seen cucumbers growing on the vine before and didn’t know what I was looking at and yes, I do know it’s not called a pickle plant!  

The zucchini and yellow crookneck squash has been blooming as well, and like the cucumbers, I just noticed the baby squash growing behind the blossom!  Very exciting!