Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (16)

These are the happy ending to my gardening adventures - Tiny Tims, sweet golds, and Juliets. I didn't think the Tiny Tim plant was producing, because its squat determinate plant got buried under the monster indeterminate vines of everything else (especially the sweet golds.) But I poked under there, and it had a bunch of teeny tiny Tims! They are such a weird cherry tomato - they taste just like a big, meaty beefsteak (not sweet at all) but are sooooo small. It's actually been very interesting to taste these cherry varieties next to each other, makes me feel like a tomato connoisseur. The sweet golds are definitely the sweetest this year, the Juliets taste and feel very much like a roma, and the sweet 100s are just your average tomato (this year.) I have three larger tomatoes ripening, can't wait to put them on a sandwich!

This is a before picture of my weed harvest. I don't recommend letting your garden grow to look like this - it takes hours to change it's appearance. And when you put in those hours, the plants you wanted will be stunted, sad, and less than productive :(

As I weeded, I disturbed at least 10 nests of these little red and black beetles. They didn't seem to be hurting anything, but it was creepy to lift a plant out, and see them swarm out of the cracks in the ground.

Here's the "after" picture of the back half of my plot. Dying corn because we didn't water, dead potato plants we should dig up soon, anemic bean plants with overly mature beans that were not picked, and a few cucurbits also suffering from lack of water, with a few flowers, but no fruit.

I don't have any pics of my kinders helping me garden this week, but Bean has been eating peas from the garden (he likes the edible pods more than the peas inside, which actually I do, too.) He also helped me kill some of the slugs that I find feasting on my cabbages every morning - what can I do about slugs? The BTK isn't meant for them, only the looper caterpillars. As the nights get longer and cooler, I feel summer slipping away, and after the weeding fiasco, I've given up on any upkeep, only harvest!

Please check out everyone else's updates at Kim's blog! Hopefully this next week I'll sneak away one morning (when I'm not exhausted by waking up with a newborn) to do her early morning photo assignment :)