Today in My Garden

I was anxious to get out and check the garden today after a day and half of rain. The garden weathered the rainy weather well with only a couple of the Sweet Millions tomatoes splitting. Given the amount of rain that fell I was quite surprised. There were a few tomatoes, peppers and peas ready for picking as well.

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about the decreased levels of bees, an important pollinator. I am pleased to report that both honey and bumble bees are visiting my vegetable beds. I would love to see a few parasitic wasps that would help control the tomato hornworms. While we have a generous population of yellow jackets and hornets I haven't spotted any parasitic wasps yet but when I do they will be quite welcomed in my garden.

Little Marvel Peas

My Little Marvel peas are now growing nicely and producing well unlike the Lincoln (Homesteader) peas. Although I like both varieties of peas, I tend to favour the Little Marvel as they have been consistently good performers for me. Little Marvel peas have 7 to 8 very sweet, tender peas per pod that are ideal for freezing. Unfortunately I have seldom grown enough of them to put up but we enjoy them fresh during the growing season. They are lovely tossed into salads raw.

I added a second planting of both varieties of peas for another week along with snowpeas and Laxton's Progress. I may or may not get anything off the second plantings depending on how the fall weather is.

More Hornworms

I didn't check the garden yesterday due to the steady rain so imagine my horror when I checked it this morning to find more tomato hornworms pictured here (more here)! I could not believe my eyes as one after another were spotted. I removed seven in total. The largest one was a good 4-inches long! Once you spot hornworms as mentioned in my previous post the only thing you can do is damage control. The first round of damage control comes from the manual removal of all tomato hornworms. The second round of damage control is using some form of tilling a couple of times in the fall to destroy the pupae to prevent re-infestation in the spring.

Today I checked tomato vines several times. Aside of the initial removal of the 7 hornworms I did not spot any more. Now from experience I know that certain critters are more active at certain times of the day. Every hornworm I spotted was on the upper most stems of the tomato vines and it was late morning. So I'm now checking hourly for tomorrow, several times on Saturday then at least 4 times on Sunday to establish a pattern of when the hornworms are most active for easy removal.

Today's Bounty

Today's bounty included 8 Heinz 1439 tomatoes (more here), about a half pint of Sweet Millions tomatoes, a handful of Little Marvel peas and both sweet banana and Hungarian wax peppers. Not shown is the lettuce and herbs picked for fresh use for dinner. I really like to pick both lettuce and herbs within minutes of using. At the moment it is not a huge daily harvest but it is still a harvest so I'm quite pleased.

The Habanero peppers are doing great with lots of still green peppers. The low tomato producers so far this year look to be the Lemon Boy and Sweet 100's even though the vine growth looks wonderful. All of the herbs are exceeding expectation with the exception of dill which really only produced a few heads that quickly went to seed but at least I got the dill seed from them. Other than that the garden appears to be on course for this time of year.

Happy Gardening!

Garden Gnome
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