Garden Update

Our garden, as of Monday.  Please excuse the chaos that is the outside of our house.  It's being worked on.

 Our tomato plants are huge.  They quickly outgrew the cages around them, and a couple are taller than I am.  In fact, the vines droop over the top and almost back down to the ground on at least one of the plants.  It's ridiculous.  They're so tall and heavy that we walked out one morning and several of the cages had been pulled out of the ground from the weight of the plants and had toppled over.  Nathan had to stake them really well to stand them back up.

However, there are some problems with my tomatoes, mostly having to do with pests.  For one thing, the stink bugs are attracted to one of the plants and are sucking some of the tomatoes dry.  But the bigger problem are some caterpillars that I have yet to correctly identify--they are on every single plant, and they are decimating portions of my tomatoes.  See all the holes in the leaves?  Caterpillars! AAAARGH!

 In my zeal to get rid of them, I doused my plants in soapy water, hoping that would do it (it didn't), and I made too strong of a concentration, which made a lot of leaves turn brown.  On the upside, now I know what "disease" discolored some of my tomato leaves last year, an issue that drove me up the wall because no one had an answer for me.  But on the downside, I killed several leaves on my plants this year.  Oh well.  It's not like the plants are stunted or anything!

Closest in this picture are the tomatoes I started from seed, which are smaller than the others.

The squash and watermelon plants are out of control.  Seriously, last year's squash never got this big, and it's only May.  It's spilling onto the driveway.  So far, I've harvested one nicely sized yellow squash and one big zucchini.  The watermelon vines (closest to you in the pic) are sprawling onto the grass.  It doesn't look that attractive, but I will probably let it happen for this summer and plan a neater looking garden next year.