Garden Update

Raised beds after a few weeks, trellises attached.

 Here are the raised beds after a few weeks. Since I'm playing catch up on the blog and posting old pictures, the dates get a little fuzzy.  My impressions were that the cucumbers were growing amazingly while the watermelons looked so weak and spindly.  The cukes are on the trellis to the left and the watermelons are on the right. I remember thinking something might be wrong with the bed to the right since it clearly looks so stunted. Same wood, same soil, same water.  We'll have to wait and see.

This was my first run in with leaf miners. What the ......  A what?  Never heard of it. Lots of internet searching later revealed that the light swirling pattern on the cucumber leaves was leaf miner damage.  And guess what, there is little you can really do for it. The bugger is between the layers of the leaves so topical treatments have little affect. Clever little bugger. If it wasn't my garden, I might even be impressed with Mother Nature on this one.  The  hippies at Urban Sunshine (organic growing store) said just to cut off the affected leaves and maybe put a blue sticky trap up to catch the moth that is laying the actual miner. I caught a significant amount of love bugs (not so impressed  with that one Mother Nature) but the leaf mining never ceased.

Tomatoes, marigolds, banana peppers and watermelons.