Saturday's Harvest

We went out to the garden Saturday to trellis the volunteer tomatoes that we'd transplanted and neglected, and we came across this!

It's either a tomato horn worm or a tobacco horn worm, which will decimate tomatoes in no time flat, but the cool part is what's on it... parasitic wasp coccoons! I know it's a bit gross, but knowing that we have beneficial insects in our garden is definitely heartening. I also saw a huge praying mantis with a great big bee in his clutches! I love bees because they're pollinators so I was a little disappointed to see that the mantis had caught one, but our garden has been teeming with both bees and praying mantises, which is wonderful.

Here's the harvest we brought in, once we'd tamed the tomato jungle.

I've never grown corn before so I'm not sure what we did wrong, but as you can see the kernels didn't develop quite as they should. There were black beetles with yellow markings on the corn and the tassles had all dried up, so we picked it, but it wasn't quite the success I'd hoped for. Each plant was about eight feet tall, though!

The surprise for this year is banana peppers. I bought four plants on a whim because we had some empty squares, and I pulled over a dozen of them off the plants over the weekend!

Tuesday I'll be learning to can, so I'm taking my banana peppers, along with a box of tomatoes, both traditional and heirloom yellows and whites, onions, and peppers, so I can make some spaghetti sauce. How weird am I, all excited about learning to can vegetables?

Fall Planting

I need to get some fresh pictures, but I want to post without waiting for that :) Being a procrastinator doesn't make one good at maintaining a blog!

Our garden did really well this year. We planted some of the tomatoes that volunteered in our garden and they're just starting to produce, as the summer tomatoes are fading and dying off. Today I planted two kinds of peas that I got in a seed exchange, Blue-Podded Peas and Golden Sweet Peas, and this afternoon I'll plant some Sugar Ann Peas. I have Mammoth Melting Sugar Snow Pea seeds, but I'm not sure I'll plant them because the place I've planted previously needs a raised bed put in. They need a big trellis, so I may wait until spring in the hopes of having the bed in by then.

I was really surprised when I planted peas for the greens last year and they produced peas, even though it was supposedly too warm for them to do so. The aphids tormented them, of course, but I still got some peas. My husband loves them so I hope to get a good crop this fall.