Squash Blossoms, Sunflowers, and other Seed Progress

Weekly Update May 30, 2010
This Memorial Day weekend marks the 2-year anniversary that we moved into this house. Our garden has come a long way since then. We used to have nothing but weeds and holly bushes in the backyard. Now, instead of the sad looking bushes that were here, we have a few veggie plants downstairs, blueberry bushes, a butterfly bush, and fewer weeds. We have containers on the deck with vegetables. The front yard only had the azalea bushes, but we have since added hydrangeas. Good progress!

This weekend's to-do list:
1) weed
2) pollinate the squash blossoms -- after a week of nothing but female flowers, a male finally appeared and we pollinated all of them
3) check plants for pests

We have three containers where we're growing yellow squash. Our little bumble bee lush has returned this year! Unfortunately there were no male flowers around when he made this appearance.

The jalapenos are growing nicely...

...as are my purple green beans...

...and the Patio Princess cherry tomatoes I started from seed.

The first fruits on the Napa Grape tomatoes (bought as plants). We had these last year too and they did very well. Hoping for the same harvest this year.

Sunflowers

giant sunflowers, growing tall!

The Chianti sunflowers were started from seed at the same time, but the difference in growth rates is very obvious. Not sure why, will need to do a little research online. They're getting just as much sun and water as the others. Hope they grow big and strong!

butterfly bush bloomSo far, so good with respect to aphids or spider mites NOT being on the plants. There were aphids on this butterfly bush earlier this week, but Matt gave it a good hard spray and squished some--no chemicals here as we have a kitty and some fish in a little pond. He saw some predatory mites a couple of days later, which should take care of any remaining aphids, and now the bush is doing better. It's even got some blooms now.

That's it for today. Time to BBQ!