Mid-August in the Jarrell Garden

Hola! Happy Monday y'all :)

I missed updating the garden at the beginning of the month, but better late than never right? I just finished reading one of the blogs I follow and she was mentioning she's coming up on the last of her tomatoes. What??? Mine haven't even started yet. Everything in my garden is just starting to produce. 

-Hold the press. Just Googled this. It's apparently common for new gardeners to get nervous by the amount of green tomatoes hanging out on the vine this time of year. They will ripen. Eventually. I think I just have different varieties of tomatoes. 

Why won't my tomatoes ripen?

Our garden path is finished! I just love it! It's so nice to be able to head out to the garden first thing in the morning and not have to worry about getting my shoes getting wet. Awesome sauce!

The raised bed tomatoes. Just for comparison, here's a picture of when we first planted those:

Yeah, I'd say those tomatoes have taken off! Plus, they have HUGE tomatoes on the vine-

Come on, ripen! :)

All the container tomatoes are doing pretty good. Even the Charlie Brown Christmas tree! I went psycho on it and hacked it up. Hacked it up good. I cut practically everything off of it, and now, it's coming back quite nicely. Plus, everything that has come back is green!

Romas on the vine...

Funny story. My pepper plants? Both have turned out to be jalapeño. I now have 3 jalapeño plants, and no other pepper plants. I'm puzzled as to what happened. I obviously mixed up some seed packets. Better labeling next year! In the meantime, anyone need any jalapeños???

I'm actually scared by the number of jalapeños on this plant :)

The cabbage appears to be making a head, so we'll see what we end up with at the end of the summer. 

Lettuce and Chard. This box is crazy. I've harvested the chard quite a few times and it just keeps growing back stronger than before. I'll definitely be growing chard again next year.

Cukes. I'm pretty sure I've been battling the cucumber beetle all season. Next year's goal will be to eradicate these damaging little bugs. I've been spraying the plant down with garlic and cayenne oil, which seems to be helping some. But not 100%. While the cucumbers might not look as pretty as I want, they still taste amaze-balls. 

Let's talk organic gardening, shall we? I saw this extremely strange site in my tomato plants. Upon first glance, I assumed it was a mass of insect eggs on a leaf. NO! This is a parasitized tomato hornworm. A braconid wasp laid it's eggs all over this hornworm. When the eggs hatch, they eat the hornworm and the hornworm dies. These hornworms are extremely detrimental to your tomato plants, so these wasps are a gardener's best friend! If you see this in your garden, leave it alone! These wasps also prey on aphids, beetles, and other bugs that destroy your plants. My favorite part about these crazy wasps? They don't have stingers! My new best friends :)

Organic Gardening and Tomato Hornworms

The herb garden. My 2 cents?

1. Why haven't I moved that mint? Insanity :)

2. Wow, that basil needs to be harvested.

I'll wrap this post with a picture of my favorite gardening partner :)

Have a great week friends!