Gardening & Google Voice

Well, my garden is doing… OK now, I guess. At least half of my peppers have died – all the bells, 10/12 jalapenos, 8/12 hungarian hot, all the rio grand hot, and a rather random selection of others. But, those that have survived are looking pretty good. So, hopefully we get some peppers, though I’m definetly going to have to buy jalapenos to pickle like I did last year.

Unfortunately though, my cucumbers & zucchini appear to be doing the same thing as my peppers. They all looked absolutely awful on Monday when we got back from Findlay. Right before we left I sprayed them pretty good with peroxide & spread my remaining cornmeal around on them, and I think it *might* have helped as some of them are looking like the might survive. Though they still look pretty awful. But we’ve gotten a handful of zucchini (like.. 5 or 6 now), and I think we *might* get some more. And I got one nice lil cucumbuer the other day too, and theres a few more that look like they *might* keep growing and get slightly bigger than 3 or 4″.

And then today I went ahead and pulled out all of my peas, broccoli & onions. The peas were definetly dead, and I’ve just been highly disgusted with how they’ve done – I swear I got more broccoli from 6 plants last year than I did all 40 odd plants this year!! But, I did get quite a few nice onions from between my broccoli plants… Now I’m just trying to decide what I want to re-plant in those beds. I’m thinking I’m going to try and plant broccoli from seeds where my peas were and put peas & beans where the broccoli were. Who knows if I’ll actually get any peas/beans/broccoli, but its at least worth a try!!

On a totally, completely, utterly unrelated note, I got an invite (and then registerd) for Google Voice – which seems pretty darn cool. I can send text messages from my computer now (which is super cool since I normally can’t since I don’t have cell phone reception at home), and the fact that I can call anyone from home for free is also super cool. So yeah, go request an invite and try it out. It seems quite cool!!

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Powdery Mildew

So, as of Friday, I was convinced that I was losing ALL of my squash – my cucumbers had already all but died, and my zucchini were on there way out with all my winter squash (acorn, butternut, pumpkin, spaghetti), not far behind them. Then I googled around and figured out it must be powdery mildew. Sounds right – my cucumbers fruited, then got it. The same pattern was developing with my zucchini, and winter squashes. So googled some more for treatments. Lots of stuff about pesticides, fungicides, herbacides, etc… But I just really don’t want to use that stuff. I love that my whole garden is 100% organic, and I would really, really like to keep it that way. But I want to eat some of the stuff in it! You know?

And then, I found a post about using a milk & water solution (1:9 ration of milk:water, minimum). And it just sounded too good. I had to try it. So I did…. and I swear to you, 2 days later, my plants are looking WAY better! Almost all the mildewy stuff on the tops of there leaves is gone, and they just look more “perky” for lack of a better word. I’m SO excited! Even the last 2 or 3 cucumbers which were on there death beds are looking better. Which is absolutely incredible. I just might get some more zucchini and squashes afterall! Hurray!!