Gardening in the Rain

If I was one of my own children, tonight I would have asked myself, "How in the world did you get so dirty?" Of course I already knew that I was like a kid again playing in the rain. And if you know me, my kind of playing is of the garden variety! Because of our busy schedules (I am doing many of the things I didn't want to do with 4 kids in tow, and have all the back to school meetings and sports) I haven't gotten to the garden since Saturday. Today, I decided it was now or never, because we have sports the next 2 nights and we have had so much rain, there is NO WAY I am going to take Anna to the garden tomorrow. She would be covered with dirt and slipping in the mud......

So tonight, although it was raining, I had a little escape to the garden. It wasn't really raining that hard and there was a lot to be harvested.

The bad news is that I have a weed that is almost up to my chin and many of its friends joining the fun. The good news is that I have too much to harvest to worry about silly things like weeds. I will just have to have Ken mow them all down after the harvest is complete!

Organic gardening at its yuckiest had me jumping up and down on my now dead zucchini plants to kill the thousands of squash bugs that did the zucchini killing! If I leave them alone, the internet says they will somehow last though the winter (maybe just their eggs) and then I will have a worse problem next year! I figured if I used a pesticide they would be dead anyway, but it just isn't like me to smash bugs, but since their name is "squash", I decided it was ok. Plus they are ugly and I hate what they did to my zucchini and yellow squash. I also want to prevent them from getting to the butternut (or coconut if you ask Joel for the name) squash. I planted 3 kinds of tomatoes

1. an 8 pack of "whatever" they sell in an 8 pack
2. 2 cherry tomato plants
3. 2 "early" kind of tomatoes.....

As you can tell from the pictures, I have an endless list of tomato shapes, sizes and colors. It really reminds a gardener of how amazing God's work can be. There is one volunteer bush that must be a mix of several kinds of tomatoes, because as I pick from it, there are tear drop shaped tomatoes, golden cherries and "regular (kinda small, but bigger than a cherry) volunteer" tomatoes. I have other plants offering up golden and regular romas and a few beautiful heirloom types of tomatoes. The added bonus is that the cherries and romas don't seem to get much blight on the fruit. This may be due to the fact that I actually started fighting the blight before the volunteers were fully grown. Here is one of the 5 bags of tomatoes I picked tonight. Keep in mind, it had been 4 days since I had picked any and we have had a nice amount of rain. I take no credit for this wonderful bounty! I am just glad that we survived the blight (for the most part) and have had a fantastic time in the garden (diamond loss and car damage forgiven :)