Behind The Scenes.

I know not everybody who reads this blog is a full time church goer, but for those of you who are you will relate to my past week, as I had one of THOSE church weeks. The one where all your responsibilities converge at the same time.

To start, my wife and kids are headed to Nicaragua this summer on a mission trip and one of the ways they raised money for the trip was working on a very large church yard sale. One that takes up a whole gym and lasts for 3 days. A lot goes into one of these kind of yard sales, you must set a hundred or so tables out, fill them up with millions of pounds of stuff (organized of course), put sticker prices on all the stuff and then sell the stuff. The good news is they raised over $6,000........the bad news is it has to be split 25 ways. lol. On top of that I wear a few hats at my church like Christian Ed Director, Sunday School teacher, Tenor in the choir, Advisory board member and finally Mission board member. Throw in Plumbing Contractor, Dad, Husband, and my wife and I getting sucked into watching the past 5 LOST seasons to catch up with our friends who watch & talk about it regularly, and it's been an exhausting week. Barely enough time for the garden......but I'm back!

I'd like to thank Margaret at http://life-at-thistlegarden.blogspot.com/ for waking me up to the easy solution to my squash problem. She told me to just take the male squash stamen and rub it on the female flower (or is flour Margaret?). I know it sounds dirty, but as you can see below in just one weeks time I've got some squash! I feel like a dummy!

Above: Magda squash.

Above left: Sweet Lightning, Above right: Spaghetti squash.

Above: Crooked Neck.

Above: The Squash Patch.

In the middle of my busy week I had a disaster in the garden as well........20 pepper plants chopped down like the Amazon Rain Forest by some Cutworms. It's totally my fault. I stubbornly didn't listen to the advise I got to collar the stems of the plants. I guess I though I was Super Conservative Gardener and cutworms wouldn't dare continue to mess with me. I had read somewhere where an old farmer would put nails next to his plants and the cutworms wouldn't hurt the plants because the nails would bother them. Well......take a look:



The above pick shows where there used to be about 15 plants, the rest in the pic are now gone as well. I've got a bunch more under the lights getting ready to come out to the garden. Next time......I've got some Dixie cups going around them. (And yes, that is an eggplant that I mistakenly planted with the peppers)

And of course no blog would be complete without an update on my favorites........the Tomatoes.




I'm excited about the tomatoes.....they look strong! The cutworms did get about 5 tomato plants, but I had some ready to take their place. (btw- you can click on any picture and it will bring you to my Flickr page where you can enlarge the pic if you want. Just don't go browsing around my Flickr invading my privacy......lol, just kidding)


Well that's quick update, I'll see if I can do my next post without letting a whole week go by!