The camera's been emptied

I finally did it. After being home since July 26th from Kitty Hawk I have finally downloaded the vacation pictures. Thus, I could take a recent picture of the garden. I was a bad mommy and let the lettuce go to seed so I yanked all of it out this morning. Much more clean! The pole beans are doing better now that they are sprayed with Neem. The Mexican bean beetle (I'm pretty sure) had it's way with the poor things. I hadn't put any pesticides on the plants at all and was skittish about using anything. The beans screamed for help so I was moved to action. After some research I placed my hope in an organic solution called Neem. It worked! No more beetles.......little bastards.

Here's one of the bean leaves. Poor thing. Those beetles sure are destructive. I'm hoping that I still will be able to coax at least SOME beans out of the ones planted.

It's been a small yield for this garden. Sorta hit or miss with some things. The tomatoes have done alright. The peppers have survived. And that's about it. I let the lettuce go to shit so that's my fault there. I did have a pretty decent lettuce crop when I first planted earlier in the Spring. It's the successive crops afterwords that I sorta screwed up. I'm convinced it's the soil. Actually I'm POSITIVE it's the soil. I didn't do anything to prepare it and now I'm suffering the consequences with my plant yields. In years before I've had my husband get manure and till it into the ground. What a nice garden that year! After that, I just got lazy and didn't even have a garden. I started again last year with high optimism. I started THIS year unprepared. Lesson learned.

With the high costs of vegetables, well, the high cost of everything, I really missed out on an opportunity to have a real cost buster with the back yard garden. I get to be a stay at home wife so I've disappointed myself with that one. Don't tell the hubby!