Bells of the North Homestead

This weekend I decided to bite the bullet and tear out our lovely, beautiful lone tomatillo plant.  If you remember right I posted earlier that I made the rookie mistake of only planting one tomatillo plant.  You know, the old saying, it takes two to tango? Well that applies here. Tomatillo plants are self infertile which means they need two plants to produce fruit.  Since I only planted one plant the tomatillo was going to do nothing else in my garden but draw bees (good thing), take up room (bad thing) and bring shade to my pepper plants (also bad thing).  So, it's gone.  In it's place I planted some Cumin seeds that I hope will come up soon.  Edward and I love cooking with Cumin so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  This will be a new spice for me to grow. I also have one other spice that I will be trying soon but a blog will be following shortly on that to cover that one. So onto the state of the garden.  First we had a...

This is my second year growing eggplant and oddly enough I did not have issues with flea beetles last year.  I don't know why they suddenly decided that THIS year they will come to my yard to munch on my eggplants and tomatilloes.  One day I walked out and just suddenly noticed all these tiny holes in my leaves of my eggplant.  Upon closer inspection I found the tiny beetles sitting all over the leaves, munching away.  Now I do know after a bit of research that from now on I will probably always have them in this garden, thats even with tilling come Autumn. Unfortunately once the flea beetles figure out you have yummy plants in your garden the adults will hide in your soil during the winter and then emerge once again in the spring to feast on your young seedlings.  Especially if you have mulch or straw on your bed.  There are very limited ways to get rid of these guys unfortunately, especially using organic means.  Flea Beetles Diatomaceous e...

The nice thing about vacations when you have a garden is you get the wonderful treat of seeing how your garden did in your absence.  All in all I'm pretty happy with our progress.  Something ate every single little leaf off our parsley so that bit the dust.  I'm betting it was a neighborhood squirrel.  Our lemon balm obviously didn't like the heat as a good portion of it died but it is still alive so I'm giving it loads of TLC to bring it back.  Almost same story for the Oregano however I think that one was more due to lack of water.  Our hanging plants in the coconut husks fared the worst.  One pot had completely died out.  That I think was due to a fungal disease in the soil of the unknown blue creeping plant. The other was slowly petering out as well so I tossed that one in the trash.  I never EVER put the remains of a plant killed by any sort of disease or fungus in our compost so they literally went in the trash.  Since we'll be...