Now, the bad news.  I'm having a lot more trouble this year with bugs and disease than I expected, based on my experience with a community garden plot last year.  Some of the problems I've diagnosed already, others I'm stumped.  Any help would be appreciated!

First, the tomatoes:

I'm having trouble with two viral infections right now.  Curly Top and Fusarium Wilt.  They're mostly affecting the non-resistant varieties, but even some hybrids are suffering. 

This plant has Tomato Hornback caterpillar damage and Curly Top:

Here's a close up of Curly Top damage.  The plants are stunted and not flowering. 

The only solution for these infections is removal of the plant.  Ugh.  It's almost half of my 20 plants!  Some of the heirlooms are also showing signs of Fusarium Wilt, which, according to my references, may require soil solarization to prevent this from happening next year too.  It will be a much smaller tomato yield than I hoped for this year, although I suppose with my late start and early growth issues, can't be a total surprise.

My trellised cantaloupes having symptoms of powdery mildew.  I treated that this morning with a mixture of baking soda and dish soap dissolved in water.  My references say that it's a good organic fungicide and fungal preventative.  Hopefully it works!  Those cantaloupes are looking wonderful.  

Some of my peppers are having something like blossom-end rot on them, although my references describe it as "water soaked, sunken areas."  Although the fruit tips are brown, shrunken, and, and sunken, they don't seem "water-soaked."  Does this look like typical blossom end rot?  It's spread across multiple varieties, all over the garden. 

My green bell pepper has an odd spot on it.  It's dry and paper thin where you see the white in this picture.  Any ideas?

And last major issue:  What the heck are these bugs?  They're exclusively on my eggplants.  They look way too big to be aphids, and they seem to have two forms, the green stem huggers, and then these black and green shell-like leaf-dwellers.  They like to congregate in the crevices between blossoms and the blossom clusters wilt and fall off. 

I'm going to divide up my posts today by successes and problems.

 

The good news:  I have some tomatoes, peppers, and melons thriving.

Thai pepper plant busting out with thai peppers.  I also have a thriving thai basil bush, so I'd better start looking up some curry recipes!

Sugar Baby Watermelon growing happily.  We have several melons on each plant.

Early Girl Tomatoes and their partly-successful bird deterrent.  The birds are thirsty because of the drought, and our tomatoes are both a meal and a drink. 

We appear to have overcome most of our late season start issues, and it really looks like a garden now.  The most successful tomatoes appear to be the Early Girls and the Juliets.  We might be getting some Black Cherries any day now, and maybe some BHN 444s.  Production is a lot lower than I expected, but with our early season woes, I suppose I'll take what I can get.  Next summer will be much better!

I've included some other happy plant pictures in the gallery with this journal.

So far, the big jolt of nitrogen I gave the soil has made a huge difference.  I've got multiple peppers on multiple plants, 4 varieties of eggplants fruiting, and the tomatoes are getting heavy on the vine. I do need to figure out a bird deterrent though, I lost 3 almost-ripe romas today!

I have two baby cantaloupes hanging out on the trellises, and some tiny watermelons starting up.  We picked our first cucumber (Poona Kheera) and ate it right there.  Quite tasty. 

The sweet potatoes are cascading over the front terrace, just like I hoped they would, and really soften up the stonework. 

The failures include the New Zealand Spinach and the Blue Lake beans.  They just never really got off the ground.  My renegade pumpkins have all but succumbed to the squash vine borers, as have all of my zucchinis.  It was really disappointing to watch my glorious pumpkins wither away like that.  They were so big and cheerful next to my entryway. 

My fruit trees are not growing much.  I wouldn't be surprised if it's another nitrogen issues, so I doused them in fish emulsion as well.  My pear has a few leaves with black tips that I need to figure out before it gets worse.

I took a bunch of new pictures, but it'll be a couple days before I get them up.

We picked beets this morning.  I attached some images to the gallery. (The reason G looks like he just rolled out of bed is because he did!)   They aren't as big as the ones you see in the store, but it's just too hot now.  The greens would wilt every afternoon and perk up again in the evening. Plus, I need the room for my spreading watermelon.   I always forget how ridiculously big those get!

G and I have a couple hours to kill in the morning before school now that he gets up with the sun.  (Damn you, early sun!)  Garden work has turned out to be a perfect activity.  It's not too hot yet, he likes to go around and name all the plants, and then he tells me "They're growing!"

For record-keeping purposes, my most successful variety was the Baby Ball Beets.  The Detroit Red turned out okay, and the Golden Beets were a complete fail.  Germination was nonexistent.

My son's preschool is having a gardening themed week next week.  I gave his teacher a bunch of 4" transplant pots I had saved, and now I've gone through my seed box to find suitable seeds for toddlers to plant.  I'm thinking they have to be pretty big, for little hands to handle, and germinate fairly quickly.  Is there anything besides beans that might work?  Cilantro maybe? 

Any other gardening activities that might work for 18mo-3y/o? 

In other news, according to the guys at whatsthatbug.com, I've got assassin bugs.  This a great thing!  Now if only they could reach inside pumpkin stems and get SVB...

This is my first year to have my very own garden, the previous season I had a community garden plot.  It's been a learning experience to say the least.  First with the low nitrogen soil, now with all the various pests and critters.

My learning experience lately is squash borer surgery.  The bT treatments leave too much to doubt.  Did I get enough in?  Is the bug dead?  How long will it last?  Surgery is very definite:  slit the stem, dig around with toothpick, squish any found worms. 

It's exhausting though!  I have provided squash borer heaven with my renegade pumpkins and my happy zucchinis.  I dug out 5 borers today, in various stages of development.  The one I got out of my zucchini was probably 1-2days from killing the plant.  I don't know how I missed it for so long!  The stem at the base was holding on by maybe 1/8th of it's original girth.  I mounded up a bunch of soil around it and gave it a big dose of seaweed emulsion.  Hopefully it will keep thriving.

Everyday I go out there, lay in the dirt, looking under the plants and scraping off eggs.  Every day I miss some, and every few days I have to get out there with an exacto knife and a toothpick.  And every day I see that damn beetle flying around, laying even more eggs! 

This is much more frustrating than the no-growth phenomenon because I knew that had to have a solution!  This is just a never-ending battle against a very determined bug.

Bedtime took forever tonight, so it was well after dark before I made it outside to water.  I went ahead and fertilized as well, mixing up 15 gallons of John's Recipe, and giving everything a good dousing.  I tried to give extra TLC to the pumpkins since I stabbed them with a medicine dropper this afternoon, injecting bT into most of them.  (Found quite a few squash borer holes once I knew what I was looking for.  At least I found them before real damage was done!)

This weekend is crazy busy, so I don't think I'll manage to get much done in the garden.  I've got a triathlon Sunday, and while I'll be home by noon, I'm not going to want to play in the garden after.   Saturday is pretty much booked too. 

I need to design a butterfly garden for my son's school (It's called Mariposa.)

I need to give the plants a more thorough drink. 

I need to weed in the back yard along the retaining wall. 

We need to figure out a bird&critter net for David's corn.

I need to dig out the last of the bleeding heart in my herb garden and try to win that war. 

I need to stake my fruit trees!

 

 There is a bumblebee-sized, black and red, fuzzy legged bug that is desperate to lay eggs on my renegade pumpkins.  Whatever eggs I don't find and scrape off turn into fuzzy black and red caterpillars with a voracious appetite for pumpkins leaves.

Gah!  I finally found it on google.  It's an effin' squash borer.  Field trip to the nursery for bT tonight methinks.

Apparently those fuzzy black & red caterpillars have nothing to do with the puzzle.  They're some other pesky problem.

 

ETA: Does anyone know how to inject bT into squash vines?  What kind of syringe do I need?  Do I need to use a needle or just the syringe?  Should I do it above or below the squash borer hole?  Should I inject all the plants even though only one has a hole?

The caterpillar identification book at the nursery has informed me that the red & black fuzzy things are actually Giant Leopard Moths.  I've never seen them around, but obviously, I'm just not paying enough attention.

 

 

 A HUGE storm system moved through Central Texas last night.  80 mph wind gusts, 2-4" (yes, that's inches) hail, amazing lightning.  The worst of it went 10 miies north of us, and we got maybe 1/8" of rain out of it. I'm very grateful we were spared the brunt of it.  Lots of my friends lost trees, will have to replace their roof, or make major claims on their cars.

Here are some impressive pictures from our newspaper.

http://tinyurl.com/6az7dz

 

 

Today I went out to inspect the peppers again.  I've been fretting over them for so long, it was a huge relief to see this: 

Those are green leaves!  Growing!  Truly, those are the first new leaves I've seen on these peppers since I put them in the ground 6 weeks ago.  All hail the fish emulsion!  This stuff is liquid gold, I tell you.

 

Then there's this cute little Ancho:

The ancho never struggled as much as the bells, so while it's not a big bush yet, it's sturdy enough to fruit.  

 

This Lemon Cucumber had yellowed badly the first 2 weeks it was in, but this last week, it's grown at least 3 inches!  I'm still pulling the flowers off though.