The Last Day of May

If all goes well this time tomorrow I'll be killing off aphids using the tomato leaf tea I'm brewing in the milk jug below.


Tomatoes are part of the Nightshade family of plants, and their leaves contain toxic alkaloids that are harmful to soft-shelled buggers like aphids and humans alike. You really don't want to eat tomato leaves! Luckily its much worse for the aphids than it is for us and it is 'organic'. Made from the very leaves I pruned off the tomato plants this afternoon. With the weather warming nicely the tomatoes have started to put on some real growth so I felt it was safe to trim off the branches/leaves that had suffered from some of the nasty cold weather.


In the space between the rows of young mustard seedlings a group of tomatoes has sprung up. It pains me to think of these as weeds, so they weren't culled along with the other weeds during my weeding this afternoon. I'll probably have to bite the bullet soon and rip them out. They're most likely growing from the fallen hybrid tomatoes from last year, and I don't have high hopes for how they'd end up tasting.


Michelle's daises are looking beautiful up in the front bed, and I had to take some time out to admire them as I went about my gardening duties.


The garden as a whole has finally started to really take shape. I planted five additional tomato plants in the middle of the last bed this afternoon. They're in the center and will have summer squash growing at their feet. I also cultivated the spinach bed as what was left was 95% weeds with a few sickly spinach plants. I didn't get time to replant it before the thunderstorms started rolling in, so hopefully I'll be able to do so tomorrow.

The rabbits have done a ton of damage, but the garden is holding on. It has been amazing to watch some of the plants I thought were goners recover, and hopefully we'll see them flourish in the weeks to come. All they have to do is survive masses of aphids, any further rabbit incursions, and acts of mother nature.