Some photos

It has been a crazy summer all around. Not just the weather, but that as well. Eggplants did fantastic - did I mention that before? I think I may have reported on that now several times. We are still harvesting them. I count about 25 eggplants all together, both Oriental and Dusky varieties. Apparently they love water, and that is what they had. They would have gotten bigger but it's been chilly.

The peppers are turning red on their vines.

Green peppers are very small but tasty,and we are harvesting many of them.

BEANS! I do not have a photo, but the six or so bean plants out back went NUTS in the sunny, cloudy, rainy months we've had. I know you are supposed to harvest beans as they develop so that the plant will produce more, but I don't like them enough to do that. I gather that we've harvested all together one of those big painter's buckets worth of beans. Dora likes to eat them raw.

PUMPKINS are also nuts. The ones, like this one below, ballooned up early and I'm afraid will rot before pumpkin carving time. And they are apparently no good for pies. I have to investigate to see if we can eat them. But smaller ones are coming as well! Perhaps ten pumpkins altogether. I have a very late winter squash growing, which will probably fail to ripen. There are also a myriad of zucchini and other squash plants that are doing well but it will get too cold for them very very soon. I was so concerned about the pumpkins that I forgot to get our other squash out in a timely manner this year.

We have more beets, kale, mizuna, and lettuce growing. And spinach.

Larvae Galore

I wish I had a picture for this, because it's very very disturbing. I've noticed a great quantity of black fly larvae in our compost tumbler. We got this new tumbler as a gift and it's EASY but I'm not used to the amount of insects it attracts. I suppose because they are truly contained in the bin, they are just easier to see.

Anyway, lately I have been going out to dump food scraps and in the handle depressions, there is maybe an inch of water. In this inch of water, there are about 30 inch long black larvae, all squirming around. I am not sure how they appear so quickly in the depressions after a day of rainfall, but they do! It looks like something from a sci-fi movie, all those larvae squirming about in the clear water.

Yuck! But it's all part of nature.