With the season coming to an end, our organic vegetable garden is looking a little messy.
Take a look at the garden before we roll up our sleeves and do some cleaning up.
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The gardening season is starting to wind down as autumn approaches. Even though most of our tomatoes look browner than green, they are continuing to produce tiny tomatoes.
Take a look at today’s harvest.
Jeanne Nolan visits Chicago Tonight to give an update on the garden. With powdery mildew and some pests taking their toll, she is back with help and advice for our garden and yours.
Tune in tonight to hear her advice.
When the sunflowers in our garden first bloomed they stood tall with their flower heads facing forward. Recently, the flower heads have started to droop, causing some of them to fall off.
What’s causing the sunflowers to droop?
Over the past month, the zucchini plant has deteriorated. Problems began with the onset of powdery mildew, and then a few of the plant’s stems began to wilt.
A few weeks later, most of the stems were wilting, and the once monstrous plant shrank in size. The Organic Gardener Jeanne Nolan and her crew recently inspected the plant.
On a handful of occasions, I’ve spotted birds in the garden. Naturally, I thought they didn’t belong in the garden, so I shooed them away.
But birds in a garden may not always be a bad thing.
Approximately two weeks ago, the zucchini plant began developing powdery mildew, which according to The Organic Gardener crew was normal due to the weather conditions.
Despite the disease, the plant continued to produce sizable zucchini, and it continues to even though the plant itself is looking a little beat up.
The sweet bell peppers in our garden have started changing colors. Less than two weeks ago, the peppers were almost entirely green.
Fast forward to today, some of the peppers are redder than they are green.
The sudden downpour earlier today helped dissipate the day’s humidity and high temperatures.
While too much water isn’t good for our garden, there was a silver lining to be found from today’s thunderstorms.
This year has been a difficult season for many Chicago area tomato plants. While the tomato plants in our garden have fared quite well in comparison to others, they aren’t looking as healthy as they could be.
The plants have experienced disease and more recently the infestation of aphids and white flies. Did the disease lead to the insect infestation, or vice versa?
This morning the garden was filled with splitting tomatoes, and if you’re growing tomatoes at home, you will probably see a few split tomatoes, too.
Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with these tomatoes as long as you harvest them right away.
Harvesting continues in our organic vegetable garden as we pick the first few handfuls of edamame pods.
According to Jeanne Nolan, it’s easy to miss the harvesting window for this crop. Fortunately, a pair of maintenance crew members stopped by recently to share harvesting tips for edamame.
Earlier this gardening season, we thinned the rainbow carrots to make room for them to grow. At the time, the thinnings were too small to be consumed.
Since then the carrots have grown considerably, so it was time to thin again. And this time, the thinnings wouldn’t be tossed away.
We’ve been vigilant about removing cabbage worms, cabbage loopers and Japanese beetles from our garden as well as chasing away the moths that lay the worm and looper eggs.
Now that the Japanese beetles seemed to have disappeared, we’re faced with another insect infestation.
At first glance, it’s difficult to tell whether a flower is male or female, especially if you’re an inexperienced gardener like me.
When a co-worker asked me which zucchini flowers could be consumed or cooked with, I didn’t know what to tell her. Fortunately, I had an expert gardener I could ask.
Midway into August, we’ve harvested many of our crops, but we are waiting for a few more to ripen including the sweet bell pepper plants.
Right now the plants are green and could be harvested, but Jeanne Nolan recommends waiting for them to change color. This could take a month or so, but as long as the vegetables meet certain conditions, Nolan says to leave them on the vine.
