Humble Garden

This is one fast growing crop that I didn’t intend to grow. I think I “bought” this problem of powdery mildew when I did a foliar spray with some fish emulsion that was then followed by multiple damp dark gloomy depressing sunless days.

Within a week, it has really done a number on my vine crops.

It doesn’t really upset me because this represents a teachable moment. My family will not starve due to a reduced number of spaghetti squash and mini-pumpkins and I will, hopefully, learn something about how to cope with powdery mildew.

In one of my many-a-day strolls through the garden, I was looking at one of the tomato patches, lamenting the loss of most of the leaves on my calabash tomato to some sort of wilt (I hesitate to says its one thing, I am guessing various things are going on here) and I found, hanging from a tomato branch, this caterpillar beset by eggs and what looked like flying ants.

My first reaction was revulsion (OK, that remains my reaction) but I left it there because:

This flash slideshow shows you some of the ways I have used our beet¹s lately.We have eaten about half of our first batch of red beets (some of the other beets we have planted include: Shiraz Tall Top Beet, Chioggia Beet, Lutz Salad Leaf Beet, Yellow Mangel Beet). Their greens are starting to look mighty ragged so we will be accelerating our beet-feasts to catch them before they simply go bad in the ground.Various recipes have been or will be blogged at my food blog Nika’s Culinaria.The one dish that has the yellow disk like item (its polenta) was blogged at this post “The unbearable intensity of homegrown food” and it is called “Homegrown organic beets and greens served over beet juice infused polenta², dribbled with a beet, garlic, apricot gastrique“.I think I like the following detail photo especially because it shows the dark voluptuous nature of the beet along with some of it’s delicate inner leaves. These leaves are revealed sometimes when you pull away the much larger ones.

If you have been reading here a bit, you will remember that we are in the process of building a new chicken house. I have not mentioned this in a while because construction on the house has been delayed. Why? We live not too far from Old Lyme, Connecticut and live in the Lyme Disease Hot Zone and as a result, like everyone else around here, we are awash in deer ticks and the constant lingering menace of Lyme Disease.