The gourd is trapped.

I'm not sure what to do about this gourd. Somehow it had a massive growth spurt in between the times we checked on it, and it is now lodged in the trellis. The boys would like to cut the trellis and save the gourd because ( and I quote) "It looks like a butt!!!!" And what is cooler to a 9 and 5 year old than a butt shaped gourd?

Butt I don't think I have anything that will cut through the trellis - it's pretty thick metal. Although the gourd seems stronger - it's already bowing out the metal on one side.

E doesn't seem to care - she's too busy deciding which piece of okra to eat first - tough decisions!

Grubby grubs

I have decided to grow garlic this year. In preparation, I put horse manure in one of the raised beds back in June. I let it sit there until I was ready to plant the garlic (planting dates are usually in Oct. here in Texas). As I was digging in the horse manure (which composted beautifully - the dirt looked good enough to eat!) we found several beetle grubs. We normally find a few small ones in our other beds - they come from june beetles (but we usually call them June bugs).


These were bigger than we had seen before. Maybe better dirt (or manure) equals bigger grubs? Or maybe a larger beetle found our manure pile tasty.

Well, our chickens LOVE grubs. Love, love, love. They actually fight each other other these things. So, we spent a while grub hunting for the chickens.


Look how happy the grub hunter is as he holds his catch.


As we continued our dig, we apparently uncovered a couple busy making baby grubs:

Yep. Two little june bugs getting busy in my garlic bed. Isn't nature exciting?

This blog may be dying, but my garden is not!

And I have the pictures to prove it:


Red zebra tomatoes

Broccoli (with bonus volunteer basil plants!)

Chinese noodle green beans

Birdhouse gourds

And okra is still producing pretty well:

The recent rains have brought new life to the garden - it was amazing how quickly everything sprang to life. Our peppers are still producing, and I was able to get some strawberry plants for our first ever strawberry bed.