Garden Journal - Week 4 - First Squash and Attack of the Caterpillars

Here is the update for this week. It has been amazing to watch how much the plants have grown in the last 2 weeks. Today, I actually picked our first squash and cooked it up and ate it. It was DELICIOUS!! They grew from 12" to 22"!! (They're HUGE!)There are several others that should be ready to be picked tomorrow or the next day. I guess my squash were properly pollinated :) I did find 2 of the squash plants with aphids all over them. I sprayed them with soap water and they seem to be doing a little better. I think I need to spray again though because I sprayed the same day the rain started.

On another note, we have been attacked by caterpillars. A couple weeks ago, I noticed about 3-4 small ones on our green bean plant. No biggie, we had the kids pick them off and we were good to go. I haven't really seen anymore since then.

Well, I don't know if the 5 days of straight rain brought them or what... but we picked off 30-40 of those little buggers today off the tomato plants. These were almost solely on the 4 big plants on the end. The smaller ones only had 1 plant with 2 on it. Why did they move 2 beds down?. We followed the advice I have read on several gardening sites and crushed up those caterpillars (sorry Jackie) and put the remains around the plant to deter others from coming. I don't know if this will really work, but we are going to get some organic Bt also to make sure they don't come back.
The tomatoes have grown from:
17" to 23"
20" to 25"
36 to 49"
24" to 33"

As far as the green peppers go, we are now down to only 1 plant out of the 9! I'm not sure why they did so poorly, but they sure did struggle. The one remaining still looks fine, but I'm not holding my breath. The one left grew from 12" to 25".The Green Beans still look pretty good, but I still don't see any beginning of beans. The maturity is 48 days, so I guess I have a couple more weeks before I really see anything significant.
They grew from 11" to 12"
The cantaloupe look great! They have lots of vines going all over the place! The cantaloupe and squash were the 2 plants that didn't seem to mind all this rain at all! In fact, they thrived off of it. I am starting to see small flowers and I am hoping that I will be able to distinguish the male from the female blooms soon.

They grew from 7" to 9" tall, but have spread to almost fill the entire bed and parts of the plant are hanging over. I think we are going to have a lot of cantaloupe.

To follow the whole gardening adventure, click here.