Hello Readers! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Summer is busier than the school year sometimes. This most recent week, I was visiting my grandma in Indiana. She has a small, maybe 10×10 row garden in front of her house. That means the seeds are planted in rows, with small spaces for walking in between. Her main crops are lettuce, tomatoes and onions- at least that’s what I ate while I was there. She probably gets more from her 10×10 plot than we do from our swimming-pool-sized garden. That just goes to show: It’s not really about the size. It’s more about how good you are at gardening. And my family and I are not very good! We have been getting lots of good crops from our garden:  zucchini, kale, lettuce, Swiss chard, and even some tomatoes! We have about five kinds ranging from cherry to HUGE and orange! We have also gotten a lot of cucumbers.

My little brother Abe with a cucumber!

However, they have been so bitter that we have to peel them to eat them. Apparently this can happen when  a cucumber plant is overwatered or underwatered. And once it produces a bitter cucumber, all the rest will be bitter. Oh well! We can try again next year.     We also planted broccoli, but it is not doing well. From this picture, can you guess why? :) If you guessed “because of the beetles”, you’re probably right! I looked them up and saw that they were cabbage beetles. The like to eat broccoli, cabbage, and similar plants. An article about them: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/bugsquad/index.cfm?tagname=broccoli They are pesky and have probably killed our broccoli. Somewhere else (I wasn’t able to find the site again), I read that to get rid of them, you sprinkle the plants with self-rising flour in the morning. So far, we have been to lazy to do that, but you can try! Next week, I’ll probably go over the entire garden to show you what’s been going on!