My corn is already silking out, which is nice. It's an old flint corn.
Lately things are in a quiet mood. I've gotten some zucchinis which is great, and had a massive number of male blossoms on all my cucurbits.
It would seem we've seen the last of the groundhogs, knock on wood.
I'm sloooooowly working through my tomatoes and pruning them heavily. A big oversight on my part this year was not pinching my suckers in a reasonable time frame. Now there are suckers as big as the main plants growing and even fruiting on many of the tomatoes and we're starting to see some blight creep in due to all the crowding. It's a shame, but I'm chopping off a lot of tomato plant trying to get them under control. I wish I had just pinched my suckers more judiciously - all that growth could have cone into the main stem instead! I'm also tying them off to the posts better. Seems like just yesterday I was tying them off because they were too bushy the LAST time.
Otherwise things are quiet on the garden front. Everything's just quietly growing. I pull some weeds and sometimes pinch flowers as I go through every couple days. If it's been dry for a while, I water.
Ultimately, I ended up loosing almost all my sweet peppers to the groundhog attacks but the hot ones have recovered and are growing fast.
The beans are struggling. The bugs are coming out in full force and the bean plants aren't big enough.
But excitingly I found a preying mantis chilling in the tall grass outside my garden last week! It was most likely a nativized Chinese mantis. It was a young one, no wings, about 2" long. I snapped a bunch of photos but haven't uploaded them yet.
Beneficial insects can be really rare around here. there's a lot of pesticide use both in the suburbs and countryside and there's a significant lack of native plant life appropriate for them to live in. So it was extremely exciting for me to see this mantis. I found what I thought might be a mantis eggsac last fall on one of my native frost asters, and it would seem that at least one hatchling stuck around. I even got to sit and watch it try to hunt a lightning bug! (It didn't manage to catch it though.)
We've also been getting a lot of house finches around lately. Last fall I saw some goldfinches. They live in this area but they're not common to see in the suburbs. Almost everything here is sparrows, jays, cardinals and robins.
Very exciting for me. We get all kinds of wildife here because we don't have a perfectly flat grass lawn.
