Puppies and Gardens...an Update

How can 2015 already be halfway over?!  This is madness!  With the 4th of July holiday this weekend, I feel like this week has already flown by.  Our weekend was fantastic. Dad came down for a golf weekend extravaganza with Eric.  They'd planned to play a course North of here, but could not get a tee time, so they opted to play a little closer to home...no arguments here because it meant I got to spend more time with them.  But the best part of them golfing the whole time?  A whole lot of free time for this girl right here.  I actually got to sit around the house and do nothing on a weekend and it was glorious! Of course I got to spend some quality time with the most adorable puppy in the universe who got to go home to her forever home with my parents.....Miss Maggie (yes she does have a name now).

It doesn't get much cuter than her.  

It's safe to say my parents are in love with this sweet girl, and I am thrilled for them.  It's been several years since they've had a wagging tail waiting for them when they got home every day. I could wax poetic about this sweet puppy, but I'll spare you (for now).

Ok now I'm done...

In other news our garden is still doing well.  I still can't get over how much everything grew this past month. It's nuts! I have to walk around the outside of the garden and have just a few places where I can walk through to pick things. 

The okra has been producing like crazy! I pickled some (that didn't turn out well-you win some and you lose some I guess), fried some (that was fantastic), and gave some away.  I am currently amassing our next batch and will probably fry it up this weekend.

You can find the recipe here.  It was not hard to do at all....this coming from a frying novice (me).

My tomatoes are just now starting to turn, which is exciting. It won't be long before we're canning salsa and tomato sauce!   We had some early trouble with birds eating the tomatoes as soon they had any bit of red coloring to them.  I did a quick fix with a bird net purchase and we have not had any issues since then.  I bought another one I am going to put over my raspberries this week because the last batch of berries mysteriously disappearred.

We've eaten one watermelon already, and have 3 still growing.  Plus we have 4 cantaloupes that are almost ready, so we should be elbow deep in melons very soon!

The watermelons are the dark balls on the right side of the picture. The cantaloupes are on the left, they were still green and fuzzy at this point so they're hard to see.  The climbing plant in the back is our super duper cucumber producer.  That thing has not slowed down for a month! I am having a pickle making party very very soon because I have not more space to store them in the fridge!

With all of the excitement I am sad to report that our squash and zucchini crop has come to a depressing halt due to a garden pest that I learned about a few days ago from a coworker....squash borers. They're horrible and once you have them you can't do anything about it.  They are wasp-looking bugs that lay eggs near squash.  When the eggs hatch, the larvae bore (hence the name) into the stalks of your squash and eat them from the inside out. It's pretty terrible.  I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the leaves on our plants started to wilt and chalked it up to the intense heat we had, but after examining the stalks it was very obvious that we had borers. The Day 60 picture was taken literally the day before my plants started to seriously wilt. I am letting the current plants ride it out for now. They still have several small squash on them, but they are growing at a snail's pace since they aren't getting the nutrients they need. I am seriously thinking about just digging them up and planting another crop since we have such a long growing season around here. I'll keep you updated.

The yellow on these leaves should have been a dead giveaway, but since I didn't know about them, I was oblivious.  Apparently you can kill the larvae if you catch it early enough which I WILL be looking for next year. P.S. Check out the green onions growing on the far right. These were green onions I bought at the grocery store and when I was done using them (cut them down as far as I could), I stuck the stalks in the dirt and they have grown like crazy!  I wrote a while back about doing this in just water, which works too, but they have flourished in the dirt!

SO there you have it, the past 10 days in a nut shell. Of course there were a few other activities that went on like work, softball, football practice, and puppy walks (finally), but if there's no photo it didn't happen, right? =) Just kidding!