Mysterious Grubs

I promise, this is the last post here today. We had mysterious grubs grow (and die) in our compost tea. Thought I’d share them here…  Any clue what they might be?  I think they’re the creatures from Star Trek II:  the Wrath of Khan.

Book Review: The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control

I recently purchased The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control by Barbara Ellis (editor) and Fern Marshall Bradley (editor).  So far, I have to say that this book is handier than I expected.  It is well laid out, covering issues and problems by plant type and offering practical advice.  While the advice is often to destroy the plant, I suspect that it may have helped me last year when many of my tomato plants withered and died.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of using chemicals in my garden. I worry about harming our son, our dog, and most of all ingesting something. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even like to use products like Miracle Gro, instead prefering to use compost, compost tea, and bagged manure. 

What I’ve liked about this book so far is that it offers common sense and simple solutions.  It’s definitely worth checking out for quick reference.

Latest Garden Update

So this past weekend we planted more.  We now have three full garden boxes mostly full with vegetables, herbs, and a few flowers.  The goal now is to let things grow and then determine where there is additional space/need for plants.

While the vegetables are largely tomato and pepper plants, we’ve also planted some dill, melon, squash, and arugula.  So far we’ve had warm days and a healthy amount of rain which has lead to healthy plants.  We only lost one plant from the Seed Savers order so I’m quite happy.  We’ll see how those plants produce.

We also planted a number of flowers in pots over the weekend to round out the beds and garden areas.  I think we’ll continue to add and fill pots as the spring progresses.

Also, Shannon wrote a nice gardening post on her cooking blog.  As always, you can check out more pictures from the garden in my Flickr gardening set.