Sunday, June 7, 2009

Springing to Life

The peas continue to climb up their towers, though the ones in back are about 2/3rds of the way up and are climbing both up the tower and away from it in a chain of pea vines that reminds me of a barrel of monkeys. The are all in bloom now, and I can't wait for the first sugar pods of the year. The shelling peas have already set, but after trying one I think I'll wait for the shelling part. I'm begining to lose hope that the sweat potato slips we ordered are going to arrive. Next year I'll try to make my own, and perhaps sometime this week I'll plunk some of the remaining tomatoes into the spot the sweet potatoes were going to go.

The tomato plants are doing well overall. I wouldn't say any better than that as they are under an assault of aphids, tortoise beetles, and flea beetles. I succumbed to temptation for a quick fix and sprayed insecticidal soap on them two nights ago after doing a test on one of the plants the night before that. All of the plants are doing better aphid wise as of today, but three of them developed severe burns from the spray. I wouldn't call that a fair trade and I think I'll stick to manual removal. I may end up having to pull the affected plants, but I'm going to give them a couple weeks to recover first. The carrots have sprouted between the tomatoes and the beans up the middle have also germinated. Unfortunately so have about a thousand grass seeds. I need to do a major weeding and quick. The trouble is it will have to be delicate as the grass and carrots are intermixed.

The potato bed is taking shape and all of the potatoes have pushed through to the surface. The beans up the middle are suffering from the same burns as the tomato plants from the soap spray. They had it much worse and in a way I'm happy because if they didn't have the same burns I'd be freaking out about an exotic tomato disease that I couldn't identify. I don't think the beans will make it anyway as I thought that the potatoes would grow much slower than they have. I'll be needing to mound them in the not to distant future and the beans will be in the way.

This is another one of my interplanting experiments. I need to thin out the turnips, and I'm pretty sure the melon vines will stomp all over everything. My hope is that the other plants will be established enough to hold their own for long enough to produce. I look forward to seeing how this bed develops.

1 comment:

Frank said...

Curious to see how well these do, they're so close!