The Garden

I should be enjoying a bountiful harvest, planting out fall crops, loving the fruits of the labor in spring.

My harvest is decent, but not great. I’m skipping fall crops, minus the beans that I planted a month ago. And I feel like this garden has just been a battle against pests.

It hasn’t been used or maintained in years, and surrounded by feral waste places, my garden is a breeding ground for pests. This is the list so far:

Slugs
Grasshoppers
Aphids
Spider mites
Blossom end rot
Tomato cracking
Cats scratching up melons
Stink bugs on tomatoes
Cucumber beetles
Wilting of squash (I lost five plants)
And lots of weeds

Many of these pests focus on preventive control. Part of my problem is the furrow irrigation that I do not control. The garden gets pretty flooded at times. I’ve sprayed my plants off occasionlly with water, but otherwise, I haven’t done anything for my list of pests. And I’m not planning to. The cost of any control far exceeds the value of the produce.