Zucchini updated -- first female flower opened!!

So far the best zucchini plant by far is the one in the west bed.  The first female flower opened today!  And there was a male flower in one of the air conditioner plants!  So I pollinated it.  We'll see if it takes!  This one plant hasn't aborted anything yet, looks really good.

The two zucchinis by the air conditioner both have looked wimpy, pale green.... but growing, and don't look sickly necessarily.  They came in handy today for a male flower.

The second best zucchini is one of the ones in the hydro meter bed, but still quite far behind the best plant.

(None of the rondes are flowering yet)

Fridge beets going to seed

The beets from last year that lasted all winter and that I planted back into the garden this spring are going to seed.  The seed heads are there, just not opened/flowered yet.  Cool!

Leaf miners in chard and beets

I'm not too worried about it.  Removed affected leaves or parts of leaves today.

First ever broccoli harvest! (tiny though)

Woo!  The most advanced of the broccoli plant has had a little head forming for a bit.  Today I could see the flowers are on the verge of opening, so I harvested it.  It's small, very easily fits within the palm of my hand.

Turnips not forming bulbs

I pulled 3 or 4, just a whole bunch of leaves.  Too much nitrogen?  Will leave the others for longer.

Black Seeded Susan lettuce bolting; others not bolting yet

Still tastes good though.  Will leave one or two to go to seed.  Apparently lettuce is easy to collect seed from, doesn't cross-pollinate.

3 more leek moth caterpillars in garlic; scapes are coming out (some destroyed)

I found the caterpillars by looking for new damage.

Scapes are coming out.

Some of the scapes I destroyed/removed while removing the caterpillars.  Wonder if they'll produce.  According to this article, they should be fine... https://www.thestar.com/life/2017/07/14/new-research-says-removing-scapes-will-improve-your-garlic-yield.html

Reference: Collecting lettuce seeds

Saw a comment on the Edible Gardens group about saving lettuce seeds.  For some reason it never occurred to me that I could save lettuce seeds.  Lettuce starts bolting, gets bitter, gets pulled and put into the compost bin.  Well, guess what I'm going to do this year...  Cool!

Came across this handy webpage about how to save lettuce seeds.

https://www.urbanfoodgarden.org/main/seed-saving/seed-saving-methods/seed-saving-methods--lettuce.htm

Short zinnia all true to colour so far

So weird... the tall ones' colours were all over the place, whereas so far all of the short ones' colours have been true.  They're not all showing open flowers yet so we'll see if they'll be 100% or not.

Flea beetle update: Steady, not overwhelming. Rehoming daily.

^^^

14 leek moth caterpillars found in garlic!! Must look at the very NEWEST leaves, down close to the center.

What did I say yesterday?  Too funny!  Turns out I wasn't checking close in enough to the main growing stem.  Almost all the garlics had at least one caterpillar, some had more than one.

Removed the parts where they were living in, which in some cases might have been a young scape, not sure, but the leaf was tubular.

Some basils trying to start to go to seed

(So I'm harvesting/pruning them)

Basil/parsley harvest, made pesto -- &, basil leaves curly and weird

Yum.

However, all the basil in the west bed, the newest growth is curly and weird looking.  The ones in the container look fine.

No sign of leek moth on garlic yet

Have been checking.... of course now that I write this post, I'm sure to find some tomorrow!

Central squash and central ground cherries not growing much, not thriving

This happened last year too, with the central patch.

The butternut and cushaw in the central patch haven't done much, kind of yellowy, whereas the butternut and cushaw in the west bed against the house are looking great, green and vibrant.

The ground cherries in the central patch have kind of frozen in time, don't seem to be growing, not full and lush.  The best ground cherry is still the one in the container which looks great, go figure; the other two ground cherries in the west/north bed are decent too.

The tomatoes in the central patch all look good, though one is on the small side and of course the two determinate Scotias are quite small too, but look healthy (though not seeing much new growth on the Scotias).  The tomato in the container also looks very good.

The sunflowers in the central bed all look good, as well as the short, stocky, lush one in the west bed.

I'm not too worried about those wimpy looking central bed plants, since this happened last year and the squash ended up crazy productive, the ground cherry too.  So, fingers crossed they will pull through.

Broccoli appearing!

Ooooh, the biggest broccoli plant has some broccoli appearing!!

Peas look great again, the May 27th issue went away on its own

No idea what that issue was, but all the peas look great again.  I did water them that night, maybe that helped.

Give-aways

Gave away 2 each of cucumber, cushaw, butternut, yellow zucchini, and ronde de nice.

Zinnias (tall) transplanted -- short zinnias not yet because colours not yet revealed

The tall zinnias look great in their new home.  Some in the backyard; most in front of house; some at the two sides of the house.

A few were unopened so will be a surprise what colour they'll be.

Went down to 3 last night!

Hopefully everything was snug in their get-up.