Rotten radishes

Another vegetable that's not doing so well--- first the beans, then the squash, and now the radishes. The tops have been yellowing, so I pulled a few up to see how they were doing. I think they've been in the soil so long they started to rot.

Why'd they fail? I think our soil compacted too much, and it's been way too hot here. We'll pull these ones up and plant a new batch elsewhere.

Collards

With so many of our vegetables failing, it's so nice to see our collards doing well.

Collards are one of my favorite foods. Nothing beats a huge pot of collards cooked with bacon.

Chicken feeder

Up until last week, we were wasting quite a bit of chicken feed. We'd put it in a pile in the run, but when it rained, most of the food went to waste. Our local feed store wanted close to 50 dollars for a one-gallon poultry feeder, which wasn't about to happen. We tried an automatic pet-feeder, but the dish was so wide that they'd just jump in and scratch it all out. Then Mr. Dennis had a great idea.

We went to Publix and asked the bakery department for a left-over icing bucket. After drilling some holes and attaching it to a shallow plastic dish (like the kind that goes underneath terracotta pots), we had our nearly-free chicken feeder.

Powdery Mildew

So our squash have been looking sickly for a while, and we've finally narrowed it down to Powdery Mildew. It's a nasty little fungus that grows on the surface of rough leaves as a result of humid conditions and poor air circulation. We looked up some remedies, and decided to try a mixture of baking soda and water (one tablespoon per liter)*.

We sprayed all of the infected leaves and then let them dry in the sun. It seemed to kill the mildew on contact. If this fails us, we've also read about a milk solution that can be applied to the leaves.

*We later learned that this mixture was too strong and burned some of our leaves.

Beans

After our beans died as a result of our soapy aphid treatment, we quickly went and picked all of the ripe pods. We only wound up with a small handful of beans in the end, but had the plants not died, we could still have harvested more over time.

When we pulled up the bean plants, we did see plenty of little nodules on the roots, which means that the nitrogen-fixing bacteria were in fact doing their job. Some improved soil and a handful of beans is better than nothing.

Attracting pollinators

We've been noticing a lack of insect life around our garden. To remedy this, Taylor and I have been working on adding some more flowers which will hopefully attract more bees, and other buzzing creatures.

We're also trying to make sure we add some useful flowers as well. So far we've started some echinacea and lavender seedlings, and will hopefully add more later on.

Priming the chicken coop

While Taylor and I were out one evening, Mr. Dennis surprised us by painting the chicken coop with primer. Hopefully we'll paint it pretty soon, and have a barn-red chicken coop with a white picket fence. I just love this coop's charm.