Edible Yards

This week in our garden …

…  they’re heeeerre! I found a few leaf-footed bug nymphs on our tomatoes. Sometimes these are called stink bugs, but they are slightly different though they do the same damage. You can actually see the proboscis on the nymph in the top picture. They use their proboscis to pierce our ripe fruits and suck out the juices. The best organic control for these is hand-picking, but they’re fast little buggers! I squished these guys after I took their picture.

This week in our garden…

… we have edible flowers! Well, we’ve let our last artichoke go to flower (you actually eat the artichoke bud before it flowers) so that we can enjoy its gorgeous purple bloom. The yellow squash blossoms make a fabulous soup. And the red turk’s cap flowers are a colorful and tasty addition to any salad!

This week in our backyard garden…

…we’re harvesting sungold cherry tomatoes and enjoying big, beautiful sunflowers! Actually, we’ve left the sunflowers in our garden to act as a “trap” crop for stink bugs. Stink bugs like to suck the juicy sweetness out of tomatoes, peppers and other fruits. Watch out for them in your garden since they’ll sneak up on you this time of year! Notice the netting around the tomatoes? That’s used to keep birds and squirrels from nabbing our sweet little sungolds.

This week in our backyard teaching garden…

…we harvested potatoes! The Red Lasotas and White Kinnebecs did fabuous this year, thanks to some very loose, double-dug soil. Here in Central Texas, Potatoes are usually planted around Valentine’s Day and harvested in May and June.