A plan and a thank you!

I really can't thank you all enough for giving me so many tips on what to do to kickstart my garden for the Spring planting season. I read through all the comments (and the emails I received) and have come up with a plan.

THE PLAN
I'm going to remove the dirt from box 1 and shovel it into box 2. Anything that doesn't fit will go into our wheelbarrow. Then I'm going to use the Devil's Urine itself (Roundup) to spray a kill-zone under the area where the box sits. I'm going to put down a new piece of useless landscaping cloth (because I still have some and feel better using it up) and then I'm going to put down some large sheets of cardboard (that Farmer B was nice enough to drag home last night). Then I'm going to put the soil back in, top it up with compost and wash, rinse, repeat on the other box.

The final step to my plan is to buy some stepping stones from Home Depot and place them around the garden as tightly as possible. I realize this is futile because they won't fit perfectly and grass will grow up between them, but the fact that we have thick weeds and grass butting right up against the raised beds can't be good. I figure if the stepping stones at least reduces this by 50% it's a step in the right direction.

I don't know if this is the best plan, but I do know it's at least a plan that's heading me in the right direction. I hope to get it done today and tomorrow, but I'm allowing myself the entire week to pull this off.

Thanks again for all your wonderful tips and advice!!!


Here's a photo of Saffie that I took this morning out at the garden. She's ready for me to be back out there too!

I'm back, I'm dirty and I need help...

I realize I've been gone for a really long time and the list of excuses is long and irrelevant. However, the main reason for my absence is a gardening dilemma that I don't know how to fix. The good news is I've decided to return to the soil and find a way to make it work - even if it's far from perfect.

Here's my grubby garden-loved hand yesterday!


If you've been a long-time reader, you might recall how I let the garden go last summer because it just got too hot and rainy to go out there and weed everyday. One day away from the garden led to a week that led to the entire summer and next thing I knew I couldn't even see my once gorgeous raised beds.


When we finally cleared it out, I discovered - to my horror - that the weeds had gone to seed and my wonderful "Mel's Mix" soil was full of weed seeds. About two weeks after that long weekend back in September of clearing out the weeds I noticed the beds were green again - filled with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny evil weeds.

So I gave up and let the garden go again. You need to know I'm not proud to admit this, but it's what happened and it's time I came clean. It was easy to give up in the late fall. I'd already missed the Fall planting season, we were busy with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas and then we had a small stretch of cold weather that wasn't good for planting anyway.

Then January rolled around and ever since I started this blog I've always been AWOL in January. It's a month full of birthday parties for our family and it's easy to forget the garden.

But then February rolled around and I looked over at my once-loved garden and thought it's about damn time I roll up my sleeves and figure this monster out. If not, I'm one of those annoying people that "dabbled in gardening" as a hobby and let it go, like quitting scrapbooking or knitting or something. That was never my intention. This garden wasn't meant to be a fad. It was meant to feed my family.


So I went out there and cleared the garden - again. Luckily it wasn't quite so bad this time around. The problem is that I have evil thick Florida grass growing straight through the landscaping cloth at the bottom of the beds. Let this be a lesson to new Florida gardeners - no matter what people tell you and no matter what it says in Mel's SFG book, one sheet of landscaping cloth WILL NOT protect your garden from thick Florida grass and weeds growing straight up through the bottom of your garden.

Farmer B was frustrated that we have bare patches in the yard where grass will not grow, but underneath our gardening beds - underneath landscaping cloth - removed from the sun and air, we have thick grass growing like gangbusters.


I know this photo isn't a good one, but it's the bottom of the garden and you can see some of the thick grass roots growing straight up through the cloth. The grass roots pierced the landscaping cloth like ice picks. It's really quite remarkable. This has happened all throughout the beds. You have to imagine that on the ends of each of these little shoots were 3-5 feet of long thick grass snaking throughout the garden.

So now I have to decide what to do. As far as I can tell I have three options:

1) Spray the garden with Roundup Weed and Grass killer. This will hopefully remove the grass and weeds and give me a fresh start. The problem with that is I know too much about the evils of Monsanto and don't want my family to eat vegetables that have been grown in soil doused in those chemicals. But I know if I don't find a way to get rid of the grass and weeds I won't be able to grow vegetables in it anyway.

2) Remove all the soil from the beds, lay down something a lot hardier than landscaping cloth - some sort of Kevlar bullet-proof vest material - and then put the soil back in. I mentioned this to Farmer B who gave me the "you're on your own with this crazy scheme" speech. I'll be honest, it does seem like an insane amount of work, but maybe it is the way to go. I'm not sure what I should put down under the beds if I do this. Although it won't help me with the problem of all the weed seeds that are obviously in the soil.

3) Just add some compost to the garden, try to stay on top of the weeds and wing it. This seems like the most likely option, but I'm afraid that the thick grass coming through EVERYWHERE and all the weed seeds will make it too hard for me to stay on top of things and I'll be right back where I was last September.

Anyone else got an option for me? I really want to plant again...I'm in. I'm committed, but I don't know the "cure" for what ails my garden.

Spontaneous Combustion

Here we are in the thick of July, and in my garden July means death. Now I realize that the calendar says June, but it must be July because it's hotter than hot, so clearly there has been some sort of atmospheric time and space mix-up. It can't only be June and be this hot. Because if it's June and it's this hot, what on earth will July and August be like?

Here's our thermometer at about 6:30 yesterday evening in the shade on our patio.


I'm afraid that this month's Garden Blogger's Death Day will be chock full of burned and badly scorched corpses. Because, honestly, it's too hot for me to even go outside and take care of the garden. It's so hot that we have heat warnings, which we never get here in Florida, because Floridians can handle the heat. But apparently even we can't handle this.

Take June 14th. Here was the temperature. Focus on the heat index - that's what it feels like outside once they factor in the humidity.


Then June 15th just before dinnertime. Again - the heat index. It's our version of wind chill.


We went out that night around 7:30 pm and came in before 8 pm because we were all so hot we were seeing stars and feeling sick. The heat index hadn't dropped below 100 degrees yet. The air is thick, soupy and stagnant from morning until night. There is no relief when the sun goes down.

The dogs don't want to go outside.

The boys really don't want to go outside, which is making for long summer days off school.

The chickens are panting non-stop. And I'm a little worried about them, but I'm sure if I keep their water topped up and bring them one cold treat a day, they'll get through this.

But their panting is quite pathetic to watch. Did you know they pant like dogs when they get hot?


You can hear their breathing, hot and heavy and loud.


You can see their little chicken tongues beating up and down.


It's really just too much for them. When they sit on their nest in their cozy little nest box, it's like an Native American sweat box and suddenly less appealing to them. Clementine is clearly not impressed.


Yes, that is Clementine laying an egg! She's back in the game!
So the last thing I'm able to do in this heat is keep up with the garden. I'm honestly afraid to have any metal garden tools that close to the tinder. One spark with a wreckless swipe of a hoe and it'd be curtains for the raised beds. And let's not forget we're under water restrictions, so we're really not *supposed* to water anything more than twice a week. I need to find something that can grow in hotter than hot, dry, baking sun, crispy soil, weather. And don't say okra - I tried it. It worked, but I don't like it. And don't say jalapenos, because I don't do spicey. Right now I'm leaning toward starting a cactus garden until Fall when I can try growing green things again.

Cabbage Expiration Haiku

One of my new-found gardening problems is having no clue when certain not-so-obvious vegetables are ready to harvest. I have potatoes growing right now that might have been ready two weeks ago and then again, might not be ready for another month. Who knows?

I have an eggplant growing that looks ready to harvest. It's much smaller than a typical grocery-store eggplant, but it's about the size of the eggplants I got in the veggie co-op a few weeks ago. Maybe it's ready to harvest? Maybe it's past ready? Again, clueless.

And let's sidestep to talk about my dream the other night. I watched a YouTube video on how to harvest a cabbage because I had a feeling that my lone cabbage plant was ready to be harvested. It had some holes in the outer leaves, but the center head looked great. It had to be time. All of my spring cabbage plants went kaput in the heat, but I had one pretty cabbage plant from last Fall that looked about ready to go. I watched the video and decided that my cabbage was about ready come out of the garden. I went to bed that night and had a weird dream about pulling the cabbage up and it made this horrible ripping sound and I pulled and pulled and ended up ripping up half of the Northern Hemisphere up with it. It was very disturbing.


Fast-forward to yesterday morning. After having that dream I decided that it was finally THE day to harvest that cabbage. I figured I'd let the chickens out and then come back inside, get a knife and head on out to the garden. On the way back inside I swung by the garden to discover, much to my horror, that some evil creature of the night clearly had the exact same dream and eaten the cabbage before I got there.


WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME?

I'm always a day late and a dollar short in the garden.

To mark my cabbage's demise, I've written a short haiku.


(*note: I spelled basterds with an e, much like Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds". No one knows why he did it, but apparently it's less offensive to spell it wrong. And on a gardening blog, I aim to unoffend, even in the face of cabbage murder).

Invasion 2010

Well it's about time my garden was invaded by unnamed and unknown beasties hell-bent on crushing my gardening bravado yet again. It started with a teeny-tiny tomato hornworm a few weeks ago, but I knew that meant it was time to whip out my BT and put the beat-down on them. It was my own fault for feeling so confident in my killing abilities.

Because not soon after I noticed that my will-never-be-edible-since-they-bolted-instantly-due-to-heat cauliflower and broccoli plants were holey as could be. I searched the plants and under a few of the leaves I found tiny green wormy bugs. Shudder. I hate that I have a bit of a bug phobia, but worms are the worst thanks to too many TLC specials about humans as parasitic hosts (Farmer B won't let me watch those shows anymore, which is irrelevant since I scream when I even see the previews). I decided to spray the BT again since these appeared caterpillar-like and BT is the caterpillar kill-all in my books.


Again, feeling like a cocky killing machine.

Then dammit if I didn't go out there and notice my Swiss Chard had turned to Swiss Cheese AGAIN! This happened before in the garden and last time the culprit was armyworms (or so my gardening blogger friends told me). This time I didn't see any worms, but I suppose they could have been hiding. I am not sure how to go about killing them, so each day I have more holes and less chard.


And let's not forget the red ants that killed my green peas, but that's in the past.

Then a couple of days ago I'm out in the garden with that older boy of mine and we're harvesting some green beans for dinner when he starts eyeing up my potato plants and asking me when we can eat the potatoes. I told him I think the leaves start to yellow or something when the potatoes are ready. He said "Well I hope we get to eat them before all these bugs do"


WHAT? And there on the leaves of my potato plants were all of these orange leggy insects just making themselves at home. I did what I always do when I encounter a new bug - get a big case of the willies, then run inside and open up my Organic Pest Control book and try to identify the bug. The best part about that experience is that the gross-out factor of turning page after page of wriggly vile bugs is off the charts and I have yet to identify one bug from the book. This is confounded by the fact that bugs mutate constantly - you have to look at the egg, larvae, juvenile and adult photos for each and every writhing multi-legged creature. And this time was no different - nothing in there looked like these bugs.

So I was left wondering - should I kill them? Are they good bugs? Are they evil bugs? How do I kill them? So I found a bottle of Garden Safe Fruit and Vegetable insect killer spray that I've had for a couple of years and never used and went running out to the garden with it. It says "kills instantly" on the label, so I figured I'd use it and hope these weren't good bugs. I sprayed every last one of them and nothing happened. They even looked angrier and stronger an hour or so later. So if they were good bugs, I did them no harm. If they were bad bugs, I'm screwed.

Apparently I am not prepared for the invasion. I'm taking a big, fat mental note of this.

My potatoes are growing tomatoes!

Granted I still have a lot to learn about gardening, but what I saw the other day confused me and made me doubt what knowledge I have picked up along the way. I was watering the garden and admiring the gigantic bushy potato plants that have overtaken the scenery in one of my raised beds when a little something caught my eye. I leaned in and saw a little green tomato that had fallen off one of my tomato plants and landed on my potato plant.


I remember having a fleeting thought about how strange it was that a little green tomato had fallen upward about 12 inches from where it was growing - and over one full garden bed to land on my potato plant. I thought it was bizarre so I reached out to grab it and chuck it on the ground. When I grabbed a hold of it, the thing was stuck and not laying loosely on a leaf like I expected. Obviously some sort of vine had wrapped around it so I looked at the stem of the little tomato to see why it wasn't moving. Turns out it was stuck because the TOMATO WAS GROWING OUT OF MY POTATO PLANT.

And when I looked deeper, there were little tomatoes growing all over on my potato plant. You can't imagine the thoughts that ran through my mind. What had I done? Had I inadvertently created a new species of plant by violating some plant law and planting potatoes and tomatoes too closely? Why wasn't this in the gardening book? Were there tomato seeds in my compost that had morphed with my seed potatoes? Had my lack of gardening skills led me to single-handedly mess with Mother Nature, possibly causing some horrible potmato hybrid to take over the world?


So I came inside and called Farmer B and my mom right away. They both had the same startled reaction and doubted my sanity and my discovery. So I did a quick internet search to see if anyone else had created such an abomination or if there was some sort of number I should call to turn myself in to the proper agricultural authorities. I was relieved and surprised that a lot of people have found tomatoes growing from their potatoes and were equally surprised by them.

Turns out this is normal. The round green cherry-tomato-looking fruit actually are the fruit of the potato plant and not real tomatoes. We eat the tuber, but the fruit is what the plant produces, complete with seed in there for growing future plants (although I read that these plants can be iffy, so best to start with seed potatoes and not actual seeds). The potato and the tomato are both in the nightshade family, which explains why the fruits look similar. However, they're poisonous, so you don't want to chop one up and put it in your salad and you might want to tell your kids to leave them alone.

Phew. I could walk free another day.

A prematurely flowering broccoli and a Garden Bloggers Death Day Announcement!

I've been a bit busy lately and the blog has taken a nice comfy seat on the backburner. I've finally found a spare couple of minutes tonight and thought I'd share my latest gardening dilemma with you. I have a prematurely flowering broccoli. What gives?


It's a new plant and with the first little heads of broccoli came yellow flowers. It never grew a nice large head of broccoli - I got funky small little broccoli buds and yellow flowers. I can't eat yellow flowers with my dinner! What happened to my broccoli? Do I need to get rid of the plant now?


Any ideas? I've never had this happen before and I'm perlexed - as usual.

*****
And my BIG ANNOUNCEMENT is that I'm holding the first Garden Blogger's Death Day of 2010 on April 30th for the Spring 2010 planting season!!



Garden Blogger's Death Day is the day for gardeners who overwater, underwater, maim, prune or otherwise neglect their plants to a state of dismal droopage or untimely death. This is the day for gardeners like me with black thumbs who kill more than they cultivate, for cadmium-green-thumbed gardeners who have a lapse in judgment and commit accidental planticide, and for any poor soul whose plants fall victim to that fickle mother who controls us all - Mother Nature.

So join me on April 30th for GBDD! Post on your blog what fell victim to your gardening wrath this month. Feel free to leave a comment explaining what you killed or maimed this month. If you have a blog leave a link to it so we can visit and check out post mortem photos too.

Remember, we're here for you. Let's not judge, but support each other like a good pair of pantyhose or a well-staked garden trellis.

Help! I've got ants in my plants!

In the back row of one of my raised beds I have evil, red intruders. An enormous nest of fire ants has moved in and has overrun at least half of the bed.


I noticed the soil around the pea seedlings was much higher than it should be so I grabbed a handful of soil and it was alive with ants. After doing a girly squeal, hand fling and dance I realized I have a red ant problem and I don't know how to fix it. I also have an empty square that's begging for something to be planted in it too, but when I dug into it red ants streamed up my Garfield trowel.


I wouldn't say I'm going 100% organic with the vegetable garden, but we are doing our best not to use any unnatural chemicals or pesticides. So dumping a bucket of ant-killing insecticide into my vegetables doesn't appeal to me, but I've lived in Florida long enough to know that fire ants don't move easily. It takes a lot to tick them off. I've never met an organic product that does anything other than amuse the ants or beef them up like they're on steroids. My dad once told me that he treated a fire ant nest with a natural pesticide and the ants threw it back at him in disgust.


Anyone got any suggestions for me? As it stands I'm afraid to go near the garden at this point because it's like a mine field. I've got a sneaking suspicion that there's a sleeper cell of fire ants in my other raised bed too, so my problem is definitely spreading.

Help!

Kamikaze iguanas and credit cards on ice

I'm t-t-t-too c-c-c-cold to t-t-t-type. This Arctic Blast was fun for a moment and now it's stopped being fun and is just downright horrible. We're not equipped for such low temperatures here in Florida, especially not in Central and Southern Florida. We're thin-skinned sun lovers and we know it. We've had low temperatures in the 20s and 30s for days and days and days… and I am ready to move away from the frigid confines of Florida at this point.

We don't have the clothes for it and we sure don't have the patience for it. No one owns a real jacket around here and I don't even have any fleece-lined Croc's. I have two pairs of jeans and three long-sleeved shirts. It's all a bit too much. I'm calling it quits on this weather. Hmph.

Farmer B is running in his first ever marathon this weekend and temps and windchills are expected to be in the 20s. That means he'll be running in weather that's 70 degrees colder than what he's been training in!!!! He's very stressed to say the least.

Yeah, we're a mad, mad mess.

Just how cold is it?

It's so cold that iguanas are falling out of trees in South Florida because the cold puts them into a state similar to hibernation. They're calling them kamikaze iguanas because they're just dive-bombing to the ground.

It's so cold that my boys were almost late to school today because our car was frozen. We don't own ice scrapers here in Central Florida so when the car is frozen we stare dumbly and numbly at it for awhile before scraping off the ice with our credit cards. That takes a long time, by the way. I saw an ice scraper once and asked my mom why someone had a kitty litter scoop in their glove box. Also, recess is cancelled in school because it's too cold for the kids to play outside since many don't own jackets.




It's so cold that the chickens get warm cooked oatmeal for breakfast instead of just the as-is oats scattered around their run. Yes, I'm aware that I cook my chickens oatmeal when it's cold. Please just gloss over that.


It's so cold that I think the garden is history. I threw a tablecloth over my best-producing tomato plant just in case, but I'm afraid to look under it. I fear it'll be like lifting a sheet in a morgue - just too gruesome to take right now. Everything else outside is a funky shade of grey, including my oh-so-cute flowers by the front door.


It's so cold that our local weather guy is predicting a *chance* of snow/sleet/wintery mix this Friday night into Saturday morning. SERIOUSLY? And we're about to set a record for the most days with temperatures under 60 degrees. Oh and airplanes are stuck at our airport because they have ice on them and of course, we have no deicing equipment. I should call them and let them know about the credit card technique.


Well I'm going to go and curl up with a cup of tea, a warm puppy and a blanket and try and thaw out before I have to trek outside into the bitter Florida weather again.

Sigh.

The Swiss Chard tasted GREAT!

This week has been one of those busy weeks that involved moms brag about. Turns out I had an event at my son's school every single day this week. From volunteering at the book fair to going into the classroom and making sugar-cone cornucopias with the kindergarteners, it's just been a crazy-busy week. Because I had such a busy week I didn't get a chance to go out to the garden all week, but the weather has been mild and it appeared green and lush from a distance so I knew all was well.

I went to the grocery store and bought some Swiss cheese, mushrooms and some ready-made crust to make my Swiss Chard and mushroom quiche. I've got a ton of eggs in the fridge and I thought it would be a wonderful brunch this weekend. I went out into the garden today to harvest the final ingredient and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the Swiss Chard.

Total and complete carnage.


I checked the plants the other day when I saw holes in them and didn't see any bugs on them. I looked under the leaves and on the stalk and figured it was some random caterpillar who had gone on his way. Apparently I need to bring my reading glasses out to the garden.


Today I didn't need my glasses, obviously.

I have never seen so many creepy-crawly beasties on one square foot of greenery in my entire life. After my initial shock and disgust and a not-so-pleasant temper tantrum as visions of my Swiss chard and mushroom quiche faded quickly, I grabbed a bucket and started ripping off leaves that were heavy with these nasty-looking caterpillar things and stuffing them in the bucket.

When I was done, I didn't have any plants left. Nothing was worth saving because the leaves had more holes than green and more bug poop than I cared to wash off. I assume I need to pull these plants and discard them. Luckily I have a couple of Swiss chard plants in the other box that seem to be bug-free…so far. I think I'll spray them with BT tomorrow just to be on the safe side.


I figured the way to make me feel better about this was to dump the buggy chard in the chicken run and let them slaughter the little buggers and eat the holey leaves. My youngest son and I dumped two bucketfuls of Swiss chard and caterpillars into the run and the chickens went to town. Poor Clementine missed out on the feast because she was busy laying an egg. Maggie and Sookie don't believe in waiting and politeness and left her with nothing by the time she waddled out.


Later on in the afternoon I found three of the bugs on my radish greens so I pulled the remaining radishes, that were overdue anyway, and gave the radish greens to Clementine who was finished with her egg and indignantly waiting for her buggy treat.

I looked up the bugs in my organic gardening book and they might be Fall armyworms. Shudder. I'm not down with bugs and any kind of worm gives me the creeps. Wouldn't you know they show up and eat my chard the ONE week I left the garden alone?

So apparently my Swiss Chard tasted great…or so the chickens and caterpillars lead me to believe.

And you said I couldn't kill a SFG. I'm proving you all wrong.

I'll admit to being uncharacteristically optimistic about the plants in our two SFG raised beds. I think we did pretty good at approximating Mel's Mix and the weather hasn't been extreme so I thought we might just get a nice Late Fall-Early Winter crop from this planting. But, as is always the case with anything we plant, it isn't going as planned. I'd appreciate it if you'd all act shocked and surprised please.

First we'll talk about the Kentucky Wonder Beans. Farmer B built an awesome trellis for these little buggers (more on that later) and they sprouted wonderfully, but they're fizzling out fast. I noticed that the edges of the leaves were turning white last week. Now this week the plants are curling up and dying.



I am seriously the Gardening Grim Reaper. Anything I touch expires rapidly. Farmer B said I should wear gloves so my death-touch doesn't affect any more plants. It's very depressing. Here is a photo of me pointing at my dying plants.


I figured that maybe the Kentucky Wonder beans just weren't meant to be, but then I noticed that the yellow bush beans in the other box are starting to do the same thing! What gives???


On a bright note the broccoli and the black-eyed peas seem to not be suffering under the wrath of my black thumb.


But oddly enough one of my bell peppers has completely died - it didn't survive the transplant torture I put it through. One of the other bell peppers always seems to have red ants on it when I look at it, although I can see none in the rest of the garden. And the center leaves are all dark and curly and stunted-looking. The other bell pepper seems to be without issue - so far.


I have two squares of Bok Choy and they just aren't as healthy as I hoped they would be. A couple look like they might just live if I don't make eye contact with them, but most look like the one you see in the photo below - sort of a bedraggled limp mess.


So I'm not sure what to do with everything. The SFG book says I shouldn't need to fertilize, but maybe that's what everything needs. I wonder if I should be watering more, but I assumed 2-3 times a week with a watering can was enough (especially since it's rained a couple of times). We did have some hot weather when the garden was first planted with heat indices around 100 degrees for almost two weeks, but then we got a super-cold front with lows in the chilly 50s for a few days. Was it the temperature variation?

Or is it just the sickle I seem to carry with me when I visit the garden?

Discouraged I am.

Surprised I am not.

TOMATO WOE - a limerick

TOMATO WOE - a limerick

My first ripe tomato turned red
But it developed a crack on its head
Then a bird ate its skin
Before I could dig in
And now I'm eating some store bought's instead.


Seriously - am I not meant to enjoy a mater from my garden? I haven't had any watering issues (up until this week's torrential downpours) so I don't know how the damn thing cracked. And this morning - THIS morning - was the morning I had put aside to pick the tomato. My first ripe tomato. I had fresh turkey and cheese and a hoagie put aside just for this morning's first tomato. And wouldn’t you know that a bird decided to peck at the damn thing right before I got there. A garden is definitely a lesson in patience...and humility.

Woe is me.

It's splitsville for me and the radishes

The one thing I successfully grew last year was the radish. The big Sparkler White Tip radish to be exact. The one thing that made me think I had enough hidden gardening skills to keep up this pathetic gardening gig was that row of perfect little red round radishes I pulled out of the ground last year. So of course I've been touting myself as the Radish Queen to all my non-gardening friends who don't know that an ape should be able to successfully grow radishes. I even shared my radish and apple salad recipe with them to further prove what a radish connoisseur I am.

This time my radishes have been bombing along at full speed and looking grand. Then the vacation happened upon us. The day we were slated to leave I decided to have a last-minute check around the garden. I was poking around for evil-doing bugs and making sure that the sprinkler was hooked up and pointing the right way and that the timer was set.

I peered down at the radishes and thought "Damn, those look ready - like really, really ready."

I pulled one out. Perfect.

I checked my watch. We had to pack the car and leave… what to do…what to do? If I pull them all out, I can't get them cleaned up and packed up in time to take with us. And even if I did, what would I do with a bag full of radishes on vacation? We certainly weren't planning on buying lots of salad bits to go with radishes. I didn't think they'd do well in the fridge for 10 days so I decided to leave them in the ground, figuring that they'd be okay when we got home.

Oh how wrong I was. How very, very wrong.


I pulled them out of the ground the day we got home. I expected one or two to have cracked from a big gut, but I didn't expect almost all of them to be split. I tossed them into a big bowl of water on the patio with the intention of letting them sit for about 5 minutes and then separating the radishes from the greens and soil for the compost bin.


Fast forward to this morning. I stumbled out on the patio to let the dog out after a very sleepless night thanks to a 3-year-old with an overactive imagination and a series of bad dreams and banchee-like screaming fits. I got to the screen door and instead of the dog bolting past me to get outside, I hear "slup, slup, slup, slup." I turn around to see the dog gulping water out of the container full of radishes. GAH!

I had forgotten about the radishes! And what was that smell? That horrible rotten smell? That would be the bucket o' radishes. Apparently they'd been sucking up water all night, which in some insane chemical reaction causes the leaves to turn to mush, the radishes to go all puffy and squishy and the water to smell worse than a port-a-potty at a high school football game.

Not one little radish was saved. This is why my blog isn't called "Gardening With Skills." I felt like such a dope and have abdicated the Radish Queen throne. I do have some leftover seeds that I'm going to plant later this week with the hopes that I can make it to the position of Radish Duchess before the summer is over.

Gardening S.O.S. - Part 2 - the autopsy

I decided to go out to the garden today and uproot the dead zucchini and watermelon plants to see if anything looked suspicious. Knowing nothing about plants, everything looks suspicious to me, so I'm not sure what I hoped to gain from this. I will take the photos and spend this afternoon with my Organic Gardening Book with the hopes that something will jump out at me.

I thought I'd post the pictures here in case any of you gardening pro's see anything that looks obvious. You can click on any of the photos to see them larger.

I managed to dig up three dead plants - the fourth one was barely visible so there was really nothing to dig up. They all looked exactly the same.



They all had a severely bent and sort of cut/split stem right at the soil level. I'm not sure if this happened before or after they died.




Then they had some very limp gross brown leaves around the bottom with a couple of yellowy-green limp leaves too. I didn't see any evidence of insects on them.



So anyone want to play Dr. G, Plant Examiner with me? Does this look like anything to you?