Ugly Tomatoes: Blossom End Rot

Have you had any tomatoes this season that have been looking like this?

Wrangling Cucumbers

As noted previously, our cucumber plants had a difficult start to the 2012 growing season. The rabbits in the area were quite impatient, and decided to lop all of the plants off before they even got started producing the goods. We quickly acted, and ended up planting beans where our original cucumbers had been. We felt that we needed to grow some cucumbers at some point, and decided to fill the space where our potatoes once were with a few cucumber plants. We sowed the 'cuke' seeds approximately 3 and a half weeks ago, and are testing out how much heat they can handle. So far so good, but...

Plans For Your Veggies

Over at Rebuilding Together Central Ohio we are always trying to come up with new and exciting ways to eat the different vegetables that we have been growing at our Demo Garden. Unless you find a way to stagger your crops, there are periods where you might be having very successful yields with only one or two types of vegetable at a time. So far at RTCO we have had a TON of yellow squash, zucchini, and black plum tomatoes and we are actively searching for recipes to use up the 'fruits' of our labor.

Check out some recipes that we have discovered below!

Cucumber Beetle is Certainly No Lady(bug)

Have any of your plants been looking like this yet this summer?:

Potato Harvest!

The results of our straw tower potato garden are in: Success! (sort of)

We had originally thought that the potatoes from our bed of straw would grow within the straw section of the garden, while the roots dig deeper and deeper into the soil. This is not exactly how our potatoes turned out. However, the good news is that we were able to harvest a significant amount of potatoes. Alec and Kerri had to dig through a little bit of dirt to stir them up, but ultimately our harvest of potatoes amounted to roughly 52 good-sized potatoes. More after the jump:

Squash For Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

With the early harvests of the season comes the challenge of discovering what to do with so much of certain types of fruit and vegetables. Our team at RTCO has picked a whole bunch of varieties of squash and zucchini, including these lovely eight-ball and one-ball squash in the picture up above. We did a thorough search on what sort of dishes can easily be prepared with minimal amounts of ingredients or additives, and found one that sounded fantastic. The link is provided below

Pest Control: Aphids

Have you ever been checking on your tomato plants, looked at the underside of any of the leaves and seen these nasty little buggers?

Sadly this image is from the Demonstration Garden here at RTCO. These bugs are called aphids, and they are located on a few of our tomato plants. Aphids have sharp little mouths that gnaw on plants and can do damage to leaves and stems. Some varieties of aphids are capable of injecting toxins into plants that can harm the growth of tomatoes and other vegetables. Since that is the case we took to doing some research on ways to get rid of our not-so-welcome guests