The past few weeks have been very chaotic, and the garden has been sadly neglected. Such things happen but tomorrow will be a long hard day bringing the garden back to a semblence of sanity. There have been losses; squash and cukes are long gone, victims of exanding schedules and unexpected calamities (and squash bugs, mildew and cucumber beetles). The tomatoes got so heavy they pulled down the stakes and sprawled everywhere...
And yet the tomato crop is unrivaled this year. They simply keep coming, wave after wave, and sweet as candy, juicy and ripe. Wife found a tomato horn worm, "What are the white things growing out of it's back?". Those are wasp eggs, layed by the mother wasp, waiting to hatch. We return it to the garden; it can hardly move, let alone eat. The beans are rampant; still flowering in scarlet profusion. We will be harvesting for months. The asparagus flowered amongst the lambsquarters, the peppers are ripening among the flowers on the old lettuce we let bolt. Those will be back next year now...
This experiment was not entirely of my choosing but as F-san says, natural farming is not do-nothing farming. A more steady hand and regular hours would go a long way towards keeping those cukes and squash alive; perhaps next year I try Sensei's branches to let them climb around on. His tomato advice is spot on, I can tell you for sure, as is his beans recommendations. I may have tried this a bit more than I meant to, but with better management it seems likely we could increase food production drastically, doubling pounds per acre and length of harvest.
HG