Massive Suburban Harvest!

I'm home in PA for this 4th of July weekend. This is summer at it's best. The cheer of sharing a massive garden harvest with family and close neighbors really makes a man feel at peace with the world. As such, an enormous garden harvest is indeed at hand. Most of my crops are bursting at the seams with produce. The squashes, peas, and onions have been yielding prodigious amounts of food. The corn and beans are coming up nicely. Though of course the Japanese beetles are in season again, they have been effectively contained by the design of the garden. Learning from last year's hard experience, I have selected 3 varieties of Eurasian peas, followed by later maturing Eurasian pole beans. Eurasian legumes(peas especially) seems to have an inhibitory effect on these pests. As such there are far fewer of these beetles than last year. The few who are invading this garden have switched to attacking my apple trees though.

The bio-intensive tomato bed seems to have gone crazy with growth. There are green tomatoes everywhere. I estimate that there are over 400 tomatoes growing in the 16 square feet bed. The bio-intensive approach is clearly working very well. Though nothing comes for free, the incredible yield is earned through higher inputs of human labour and water.



The plant polycutures in my garden has attracted a huge variety of insects and birds and reptiles. The incredible diversity of life stood in stark contrast with the monoculture of the lawn grass. I saw lady bugs, spiders, tiger beetle, dragon flies, glow worms, mayflies, gnats, fireflies, soldier beetles, japanese beetles, leafhoppers, preying mantis, ants, aphids, snails, cicadas, rollie pollies, worms, stinkbugs, centipedes. While working in the garden, I saw 2 different kinds of toads chilling in the shade. Blue jays, robins, sparrows, and finches flew around the garden, picking up insects for lunch.


But onto the harvest. Over the last 3 days, huge quantity of food was harvested:

52 lbs of potatoes
13 lbs of peas
4 lbs of onions/garlic
46 lbs of summer squash
3 lbs of Lettuce


















































On top of all that, we caught another 5 lbs of fish!