It’s a great day when you find your first tomatoes of the seasons on the vine.  Green of course but it’s a start.  The tomato plants are all around knee high and starting to climb the wire fences.  The first raspberry is already eaten.  Even the Peppers are showing up.

We found cucumber beetles on several of our squash and cucumber plants a few days ago.  A quick trip to the Grange Co Op and an organic solution was purchased.  The next morning the bugs were back resulting in another spray.  Then another bottle and the notice that the limit is 6 applications per year.  After four, there just wasn’t any stopping the bugs.

Enter Sevin. One treatment and no more problems.  I’m all for organics but there’s a limit on how much I’ll go out of my way for something that had no effect.

Each year the garden gets upgraded somehow.  The first year was a simple “deer fence” with posts tied to the existing fence T posts.  The deer fence worked well until the deer decided they wanted in.  Watering was with an oscillating sprinkler that we moved around.

Year two we built a true 9 foot fence to start.  Midway through the year I picked up a bunch of 3/4 inch pipe and a few sprinklers to mount on the fence.  The system was fed by a hose and controlled via two quarter turn valves.  Great progress but required manual control.

I picked up the upgrade for the garden this year, an automatic sprinkler controller. In addition to installing the controller, I moved the hose connection to the front of the garden to allow for a shorter hose.  Watering every morning to kick the year off and will add a second cycle when needed.  So much easier!

With the tomatoes and eggplants out of the greenhouse and in the ground it’s time to clear the last bit of room in the garden that the greenhouse has been filling for the last three months.  The greenhouse is a pretty simple setup with metal 1 inch poles and a cover that goes over the whole thing.  It came down easily but created a challenge of how to clean and store the cover for the summer.

For now the poles are in an extra trash can tied together with the small parts in the bottom of the can.  The cover should be rolled up soon and joining it for summer storage.

It’s really bad when a sales man tells you you’ve got a problem.  We lost one tomato plant in the last week.  A Carbon (black) tomato plant.  It was something that my wife had picked up at the spring growers event in May.   She found the card and knew where it was from but hadn’t had luck with initial contacts.

We were in Jackson ville this morning at the weekend market and a vendor had some tomato starts.  When she mentioned the carbon, the grower hadn’t heard of it.  It came up that losing one of 42 wasn’t that bad at which point the grower replied back “You’ve got a problem”