Gardening you win some you loose some

Pulled the onions this morning. I only put in one bunch this year. When Onions went in in January I was working a ton. I am pleased with how they did given the care they received. I had bought seeds and had plans to grow my own starts for this year. Wellllll that didn't happen due to the number of hours I was working last fall when I would have needed to get moving on starting my seeds.  So I bought one bundle of sets at the store in January and threw them in the ground. I am looking forward to growing my own starts for this next year as the varieties of seeds I have are some we can't get sets for here.

Speaking of working/jobs, we have made some changes. After a year, I am now back on the farm full time. We felt it was a good decision. I am still doing some work at home. I will take care of the online sales stuff "computer part" for the Interior Design Shop I was working at. Its not a full time job. I can do that and take care of all that I need to here at the farm :O).

Keeper says he is so glad I will be home with him all the time again. He missed me. I missed him as well. This fella is my buddy. He is sooooo sweet and loving. He is wonderful with all other animals as well, the perfect furry helper for a farm with other critters. We really hit the jackpot finding him. For those that do not know, we got Keeper from a animal rescue group. They were a all breed rescue for cats and dogs. 

 Tomatillos.. I love the balloon shells that tomatillos grow in! Mine are doing good so far. I have been getting a few yellow leaves on my plants but hoping that is nothing to worry about.

Tomatoes are doing nice. I was getting worried as I was not seeing many tomatoes coming on the plants but then they started loading up...

In the spirit of showing the good and the bad... below is what a few of my plants look like. I gave them a hair cut yesterday as they had a lot of  branches that had turned yellow with some bad spots on them, they looked pretty sad.. 

I took my scissors and a jar of water with a dab of bleach in it.. I dipped my scissors often.

I then cut off any really bad looking branches and took those all out of my garden.  My thinking was if I could get those off... the plant wouldn't be as stressed and the tomatoes could finish growing and ripen. Also maybe slow down any spreading to other plants of that issue. A few I cut a lot off and if I did not have shade covers ready to go on as soon as we need them I would not have cut that much off as here in Texas those tomatoes would scald being that exposed to our sun. I only cut a couple that heavily the rest just a few branches.

This year we are not as hot as we usually are and we are getting more rain than we usually get! 

You can see some still have a few yellow leaves but over all the branch still looked ok so I left those.

Most of my tomatoes aren't doing this and I hope they don't.

Squash plants look really good this year.. however I am having a problem with my squash rotting at the blossom end. I read this is the same issue as Blossom end rot on tomatoes. So I have been giving them calcium water I make boiling eggs. You boil 20 eggs (which I then crush and feed back to the chickens) in a gallon of water and then save the water. Use 2 cups of that water in one gallon of water. I cannot say this has solved the problem entirely but its slowed it down some. I also noticed that with my plants being older now the yellow squash/ zucchini are starting to grow higher up the plants and not so close to the ground. This seems to be helping as well or maybe the calcium water is just now had time to kick in... I am not sure. 

I have been picking my squash really small like 4" so I could get them before they started to rot. Hoping to be able to let them grow to full size. They have tasted good even though small :O)

If anyone has any tips on solving this rotting issue I would love to hear them!

Not sure what happened here. One of my zucchini plants turned yellow nearly the entire plant. So I got my trusty scissors out and gave it a hair cut too! Its coming back some at the base with new nice green leaves. We will see how it goes. I wanted to get all the bad leaves off of it in case it was something that might spread.  I am considering pulling it out. I don't really need the plant. But it was trying so hard putting out those new green leaves. If you look close you can see DE sprinkled around the base of the plant. I cover the why of that further down in this post.

This picture is of the new variety of spaghetti squash I mentioned before  in another post. Its just growing and growing and growing. If all the baby squash make it I will surely be pleased! I have had a few of these rot off too but most seem to be doing ok.

See the trellis below, Those are cucumbers, my best ones. Cucumbers have been a battle this year! I have planted cucumbers 4 times this year! Between weather which got some of them and the rolly polly bugs arghhhhh they kept eating them off to the ground! When you use hay you have 100s, heck thousands of rolly polly bugs. Rolly Polly bugs eat decaying matter, they also love seedlings!  I have never had them as bad as I do this year! They will eat your plants. So I collared  most every plant in my garden with toilet paper rolls or paper towel rolls or small dixie cups. I started using food grade DE(Diatomaceous Earth) 

(NOT the kind with added chemicals don't use that) which helped a lot at the base around the stems. My best bud gave me that tip. She uses hay too and has 1000s of rolly polly bugs of her own to deal with LOL. 

 This little cucumber plant below is very late in the game. Its the 4th planting! So its small. It has a collar still around the base it in hopes of keeping the rolly pollys from chomping it up. Plus DE gets put around the base. 

 This is another trellis, planted 4 times with cucumbers.. This is what I have to show for it.. The rest poof either weather or rolly pollys ate them. Mostly rolly pollys. You win some you loose some. 

So there is my very long LOL post for today.