Last harvest, for real

I dropped by my garden one last time to pick some last little treasures:

Morning glory seeds	Dried valerian root
Rainbow chard	Random tomatoes

Bye-bye, urban organic garden! You will be missed.

No shortage of tomatoes

My squash are all suffering from this mildewy thing. It's a little disappointing, but there doesn't look to be anything I can do about it. The cucumbers are still growing, albeit very slowly. I'm hoping to have my first lemon cucumber in maybe a week or so.

Both my pumpkins have been successfully destroyed by the squirrels. Whatever. :P

Tomatoes are doing fine, beans are basically done, peppers seem all right, basil looks good, flowering lettuce are going to seed, flax and barley are getting good and dry, parsley is a little paltry, eggplants are slowly maturing, chard is insane and I'm tired of harvesting it, potatoes are looking really healthy (I just wish I had more tires to stack them higher), valerian is slowly gaining size, and I'm sure I have quite a few other veggies that I've now completely forgotten about.

Preserving

I just packed 3 lb. of rainbow chard into yoghurt containers for freezing. It took most of the morning, but it's pretty easy to do:

1. Wash the leaves and stems.
2. Chop them into reasonable sized pieces.
3. Blanch them by submerging them, batch by batch, into a pot of boiling water for about 2 minutes.
4. Take it out, drain it, and pack it into a container or airtight bag.
5. Label and date each container and put it in the freezer.

Looks like I've harvested the equivalent of $82 worth of food so far (see the chart on the right), and my tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, etc. still aren't even ready.

Point-form updates

• I harvested my first zucchini a couple days ago – fresh as a summer's rain.
• My pole beans turned out in fact to be bush beans. I harvest beans from them every couple days, but they're not producing much, and some of the leaves are yellowing. I don't think they're getting as much sun as they need.
• My friend Jen visited a few days ago and she helped me transplant quite a few lettuce and spinach seedlings, and more are on the way. I keep harvesting lettuce, so there's always more room to plant.
• I keep having to tighten the trellises for my tomatoes; the fabric they're made of is gradually getting stretched. They're pretty effective, though. No longer are the neighbouring onions gasping for sunlight.
• Every day I gently steer a few pumpkin or melon vines to follow the trellises or directions I want. I'm trying to aim them north, out to the back lane where there's space, but they're naturally inclined to grow the other direction, towards the sun.
• I'm still picking off the leaf miner-attacked fragments of my chard leaves on a regular basis.
  
• I mounded up my potatoes a while ago. I couldn't find another tire for one of the stacks, so I made do with bits of brick I've collected from the yard over the summer, which I laid around the edges of the topmost tire. Soon I'm going to have to come up with another solution, though.
  

Leaf miners

Upon closer inspection today, it looks like little white caterpillars are consuming the leaves of my chard and spinach. It still looks like a disease because you never see the worms until they're so big and the leaf is so disintegrated that they're visible through the remnant membrane, so that's why I thought it was mildew before.

I spent about half an hour picking off all my attacked spinach and chard leaves. I probably should have done that when I first noticed the condition. Hopefully it will make a positive difference.

Update: Jon informs me that these are, in fact, leaf miner larvae. I'm investigating it.

Update #2: Okay, these are definitely leaf miners, because this page describes my dilemma very accurately. They suggest picking off the infected leaves as the first method of control (just as I have been doing). Beyond that, there's not much you can do, unless you want to take the pesticide route. I can see how farmers would be tempted by that option if they have a large crop at risk. The sad thing is, by applying pesticides you damage soil life, which is crucial for healthy soil. And as Jon and I have learned, healthy soil = healthy plants.

Don't deplete my goosefeet

Something is causing the leaves of my spinach and chard plants to deteriorate (both are members of the goosefoot family, which also includes beets, amaranth, quinoa, lamb's quarters, and purslane, if you're interested). It starts with a beige-yellow streak in the leaf, and then grows until, in some cases, the whole leaf is hanging limply and sometimes puffy. Here are some pictures:

I looked it up, and the best guess I could come up with is downy mildew. Perhaps due to the unusually hot, humid weather we've been having. Anyone care to make a better guess?

It's rather disappointing, but I'm not going to be too bothered by it. If all my spinach and chard die off, then all the more room for tomatoes, squash, and oats!

Chard chomper & second bed

I noticed today that my Swiss chard seedlings were actually starting to get cut off at the base, just above the root. At first I thought it might be another case of damping off, but upon examining the soil close to the stem I caught a little larva-like critter red-handed. I did away with it appropriately (flicked it with my finger to nowhereland). A cursory Google search suggested it might be a darkling or rove beetle – assuming I lived in Arizona.

Whatever pest it may be, I figured the best way to handle it was to transplant the seedlings, seeing as their first true leaves (the leaves that grow after the seed leaves, or cotyledons) have finally appeared. But that meant digging a new bed, because I refuse to plant chard next to carrots and radishes if they're not going to benefit one another in some way (they aren't companion plants). So I double-dug a new raised bed in the backyard. It took a few hours, as I had to remove the plastic lining that lay beneath the gravel and penetrate the seriously compacted soil that it covered. Here is the result:

Into this bed I transplanted spinach and rainbow chard seedlings. To remove the seedlings from the flats, I used a short kitchen knife to help loosen the soil beneath them. Following the guidelines in HtGMV, I spaced the spinach 6 inches apart and the chard 8 inches apart in a hexagonal pattern (separately, don't worry). I realize now that I probably should have spaced them twice as close together and harvested the thinnings as soon as their leaves touched. I'll do that tomorrow. Immediately after transplanting, I watered the bed and sprinkled cayenne powder around them. By the way, I noticed that the radish leaves out front that had undergone extended contact with cayenne powder have started to curl. I'm trying to avoid sprinkling the powder directly on the plants now, which is much easier to achieve with 6-8 inch spacing.

Speaking of radishes, I thought I'd post a picture of how they're coming along. Note that the pattern would probably be flawless were it not for the rodents.