Harvests and a Garden Enemy

The Sungold tomatoes have arrived!  They and lemon cucumbers are what summer is all about!  If I grow nothing else (and I didn't grow much else this year) I grow those two. 

 

Boo, his ball, and the lemon cucumber "patch."  The small tomato to the right is the blue chocolate cherry, which is flowering.

pineapple tomatillos - as yet untasted

Siletz tomato

The garden enemy is a very pretty cucumber beetle.  I've had the striped kind before, but not the spotted.  This one is on a vervain anise hyssop leaf, which you can has been nibbled.  I hate that I had to squash it like the bug it is. 

If anyone is wondering about bush beans, pumpkins, Brandywine, or potatoes...  Well, I pulled the beans, Brandywine, and pumpkins out, they were performing miserably.  The entire bed seems to have insufficient nutrients.  The tomatillos are there, but for all I know they should be a lot bigger!  I've never grown them before.  I do know the sunflowers there are stunted.  The bed had the same amendments (steer manure, chicken manure, mushroom compost) as the other 4 x 8 bed, so it's not that.

Potatoes?  They grew-grew-grew up and up, but so far no flowers.  I dug around a bit into the straw mulch and found potato stems, long skinny stems, but didn't find a single spud.  I'll wait until the leaves on top either flower or die and dump the entire thing over.  I had high hopes for my first potatoes.