Garden report

I am loving my flowers.

With rain almost every day, you can imagine how well things are growing around here. Especially weeds, as you can see in the foreground of the picture below; at least where the straw is, I can keep them to a minimum.

These crazy vines are loaded with butternut squash, and I think I only planted three seeds.

They're loaded with green butternut squashes, some over six inches long; and yet I'm afraid to hope they'll reach maturity because of my eternal feud with squash bugs (or stink bugs, to some of you).

In past years I've tried taking off the leaves with eggs on them and destroying them, and dusting the plants with Sevin; but my fighting was in vain.

This year I have a new weapon that seems to be much more effective than Sevin. I won't brag about it, though, until I'm eating some of my own squash.

It's a baby eggplant!

I'm bringing in several tomatoes each day, and so far they're staying ahead of the blight that often foils my canning plans. The sweet peppers are really setting on now, too; I get a couple of those a day. I think we'll have stuffed peppers for dinner today. Our recent windstorms have blown a couple of the pepper plants down; I hope I remember next year to put some sort of cage around each pepper I set out.

Early in the season I planted a small, ten-cent packet of some sort of heritage bush beans so I'd have some green beans fairly early. Live and learn; next year I'll get Top-Crop bush beans, because the beans I got from these plants were misshapen: fat in the middle and undeveloped on the ends.

My pole beans are doing well, but it takes them longer to start bearing. There are acual beans developing on the vines, though, like the two in my hand; so it won't be long.