Garden Maintenance

This morning I did some maintenance on the garden.

First, the peas were taking over. I - foolishly - thought they would naturally climb up the stakes I'd put out for them. However, they didn't. I am supposed to train them to do this. So this morning, I did just that. I put some twine around the stages to make a makeshift cage for the peas.

Here is one pea plant overtaking a nearby eggplant. The eggplant is circled. Everything else is the pea.

Here is the eggplant after I caged the pea.

                                        

Here is one pea plant before caging.

And after caging.

I am sure that the eggplants are thankful for my taming the peas.

I wonder how they would have done had I not caged them. I guess they would have just crawled around the ground. However, the leaves would get wet with each watering and would lead to diseased plants eventually.

The next task of the morning was to spray Neem Oil on the corn. The thrips are back (as mentioned previously), they haven't done much damage given that I haven't sprayed in over two weeks.

I then sidedressed everything except the peas with bone meal. This is because everything is starting to bloom and will give them a boost in P. Peas don't need much fertilizer so I left them alone. When I pulled back the mulch to sidedress. I noticed that a few of the alfalfa pellets were still decomposing, so that's good...continuous supply of light nitrogen. I know most of it has already decomposed.

One pea plant had radishes that sprouted. They have gotten fairly large too. This was a companion planting experiment, so we'll see if these peas do better than others.

So here is how everything is doing (shown with 2 liter sprayer):

Eggplant

Corn and Peas

Our first corn forming

Squash

What a beautiful sight (notice the bee):

 One thing I noticed while out doing my maintenance....I have a lot of twin plantings. You know, you put two seeds in the hole, hoping one sprouts and they both do....You don't notice that its two seperate plants when they are seedlings....so now you have two thriving plants.

Here are all my twins (eggplant - notice the aluminum foil around the stem...lost one to a cutworm, so I went back and foiled the rest of them, squash, corn):