A Good Garden

This years garden is a good garden. Plenty of yellow squash so far. Even the unintended cucumber is putting out. The tomatoes are bountiful. The eggplant is delicious! The poor little pepper that once this year looked as if it were on the brink of death with only 3 yellow leaves has now produced 6 banana peppers. The poblano pepper is finally producing peppers. A little about the eggplant. I have two kinds. One is a Japanese eggplant, which is right now, as I write...producing a beautiful eggplant. There have been some very small black bugs on it and I believe they are eating tiny holes in the leaves, but they do not seem to be killing the plants. I will try Safer on them also.



The Japanese eggplant has a longer, thinner fruit. The one commonly seen in the grocery store is a different variety and I believe that it is called "Black Beauty". It gets wider and fatter. I have two of those who, during the flood looked pretty peaked and I thought they would surely die. Now they are healthy and about to produce. These plants have been easy to care for and have required nothing more than watering and some compost piled around the bottom. They have flourished. They grow new leaves daily and produce beautiful purple flowers. So my rating for eggplant is EASY. Try some! (We are in zone 7).



This is the black beauty. I noticed that its stem was not purple like the other. Interesting. It has done surprisingly well considering I put it out as a seedling that looked thin and frail, almost as thin as an alfalfa sprout. Look how gorgeous!



I got a Japanese eggplant off the plant the other day and made an eggplant casserole.
It was a small one...and I ate the whole thing. It has butter, breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese mixed thoroughly with the eggplant after it has been boiled until soft and then mashed. Other ways to cook it are frying it, and of course the much loved eggplant parmesan.

UPDATE: On the squash bug. I was looking through the leaves of the cucumber today and saw the squash bug I sprayed with Safer lying dead on top of the leaf. So YES! Safer does indeed kill squash bugs.