I visited my garden Saturday afternoon to see how the veggies and herbs were doing.  No my garden isn’t in some communal location or far from my house… it’s in my back yard… my medium-sized (for a city) back yard and is maybe 30 ft. from my sliding door LOL.  But rather than just quickly watering it or peeking at it from inside, I actually got on my knees and looked at my plants, checked for bugs and measured growth – I “visited” it. 🙂

So the positive first – my carrots (actually only 1 made it through the transplant, but it sounds so sad to say my carrot) is doing really well and is surviving the 100º+ AZ summer.  I peeked through the dirt and there is a little baby carrot growing down there!!  

 Also, the kale, swiss chard and cauliflower are looking good, except there aren’t any buds or flowers on the cauliflower, so I’m not sure how it does the whole making a cauliflower part, I only have leaves right now.  (“Making a cauliflower”??? I have no idea where that super intelligent gardening statement came from…LOL).

So while doing my happy dance about my carrot and kale success, I wiggled over to check out the Pak Choy.  <SIGH> The bugs had gotten to it and were having a huge Pak Choy eating contest. There were holes and nibbles in a bunch of the leaves.  So, I ran inside and shouted to Mr. E “something is eating the Pak Choy!”  Without turning from his Fantasy League on the computer he grunted a “hunh, sorry babe…”  I realized he wasn’t going to take this serious until I showed him proof of the catastrophic-ness of the situation!  So I grabbed my gloves and started looking through the leaves knowing I would find at least 1 nasty, mushy, FAT caterpillar.  (I don’t like touching anything yucky, gross or bug-y, I typically leave these things for Mr. E.)  Sure enough I found one right away, I cut the leaf and very carefully and quickly took it inside to Mr. E and showed him the seriousness of the situation. You might be able to imagine his reaction to me walking up to him (or “sneaking up behind him” as he accused me of later) and showing him (“shoving it in front of his face”) and saying (“shrieking”) “Look at how big this one is!”  Needless to say, he was immediately as agitated as I was, unfortunately it was directed more at me then the caterpillar. Ha ha 🙂  

However, being the Hero that he is, he came out and helped me find and pluck 12, yes 12 caterpillars from the Pak Choy.  We’ll have to check again in a few days, because we may have missed some, but at least we stopped the eating contest.  I think the Pak Choy is getting close to being ready, so I’ll have to start thinking of some recipes for it!  Hmmmm…what to make…