Tuesday, October 9, 2007

It finally feels like fall!

Fall is here! Today's the first day it has finally felt like fall. The humidity has dropped some and it's in the mid-80s today and breezy. Here's some garden updates from around our house this week.

RAIN!! - It finally rained this last week. We got 4.3 inches over 5 days. In comparison, we probably got 8 inches all summer! So, even though we're thankful for all the rain. It's also a lot of rain at once. I was really worried about my vegetable garden. My seedlings were close to being flooded. But, they survived and it's all good now.

Worms are eating my veggie plant! I planted my pumpkin seedlings Sunday a week ago. By Thursday, they'd been eaten to the ground. We finally discovered the culprit - little green worms. I was really upset when I discovered they were also eating my squash seedlings that were just popping out of the ground. We've dusted with Sevin dust a couple times (it keeps raining and washing it off). That should help keep the pest problem down a little. John also has put a little fertilizer out and some pelleted dolomitic lime. Our soil pH is really low and the veggie plants don't really like this. (I'll have more on this in another posting later this week.)

4-H and Vermiculture - My 4-H group is meeting tonight. We're starting a vermiculture project. I'm really excited about this project. Tonight we're building the earthworm box and next week we'll put earthworms in. Billy Crow, one of our 4-H dads and a UF nematologist, is helping us out with this project. I think he's more excited than the kids are about it.

Butterfly Festival - The Florida Museum of Natural History has a Butterfly Festival this weekend. I'm going to take my kids. It looks like it has a lot of fun activities and a lot of teaching opportunities about pollinators and butterfly gardening. We should able to come up with some 4-H projects about it also.

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