Adventures in Gardening 2013 part 2 - Insects read blogger!

The day after I posted about how I was getting a great bean crop, with no fertilizers and no pesticides, I went out to inspect my beans and found oodles of grasshoppers, and a couple grundles of little stubby yellow and orange caterpillar-like bugs (don't suppose anybody recognizes them and could tell me what they are?) all over the beans. Apparently bugs follow blogger.

I decided to hold off on spraying though, and the bugs seem to have mostly gone away, ant the beans are still fine. Maybe the spiders, bats and birds are blog readers too. We do have a garden snake, which appears to have made a home under our driveway, so maybe he/she gets the credit. I've done my best to leave the snake alone, hoping I can keep it around. We'll see...

Either no farmers read my blog, or those that do were too nice to make fun of me for bragging about my four pound harvest. Thus far I have done three more harvests, and have put away about 20 pounds of beans.

The mysterious sunflower bloomed. It is a big one! We might be able to harvest seeds from it. Still no idea where it came from.

This is the first year I have planted the tomatoes in regular garden space. In the past I have always had a separate garden for them, usually a big truck tire or the like, to help keep the soil warmer, since tomatoes like it hot. As a result, the tomatoes are getting more water than I usually give them. As a result, my tomato plants look like a jungle...

They seem to be doing okay for tomato production in spite of this. I have to say, I have never really loved the tomatoes I grow though. Not for just straight eating. They are fine in sauces, but for some reason the tomatoes I grow always seem to have a very tough skin, with a sort of unpleasant taste. I don't know if it is the breed I am growing or what. Perhaps I will have to do a a little research on that. Not a high priority though, since I am the only person in the house who will eat tomatoes.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I decided to try propagating our Ardennes hibiscus this year...

Pretty thing isn't it? I saw a couple you-tube videos on propagating from cuttings, and thought I'd give it a try.

Okay, I will confess, I didn't follow the instructions entirely. I selected 10 new branches that I was going to have to prune, and cut the tips off. I put those in a window box filled with leftover paving sand. I didn't use any rooting compound. I haven't spent a dime on this little experiment. It is looking like three of them might actually make it.

Oh (again), I also decided to try growing an avocado tree from a seed I kept. Well, two actually. I had tried one before, and got nuttin'. I set up two more a few months back - Suspended the seed in a glass of water using toothpicks. It took about 2 months before anything happened, but one of them has sprouted. I transplanted it to a pot about a month ago...

Not sure how the petunia marker wound up in there. apparently it is too much work for me to fish it out. Hopefully it doesn't give the avocado an identity crisis...