It’s Friday, and that means pictures! Which reminds me…you all should go out and take a couple great tomato pictures to enter in our Tomato Day Photo Contest! Categories are Mr. Tomato Head, The Artistic Tomato, and Unique Tomato Growing Methods. (Maybe we need a category for critters that eat tomatoes?!?)

Speaking of critters eating plants, we have some quite content Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars on our fennel.

Then there’s this ugly guy on the long beans. I’m definitely not thrilled to have him around. It looks like either a corn earworm/tomato fruitworm (very lost, granted), or some sort of cutworm. Either way, he was smushed into the ground after I snapped a good picture!

Our ‘Mars’ seedless grape is starting to ripen. It is always the first of the three grapevines, and usually the most affected by black rot. You can see a shriveled grape that probably had black rot. There were whole clusters that were affected this year. This vine also has more leaf cover, which probably caused the disease to be worse than on the other two vines.

The ‘Orange Blossom’ looks like it will be the first non-cherry or non-early tomato to ripen. I have a picture of this same cluster from Tuesday and they are all green. This morning there are two beginning to turn orange. This isn’t the fully ripe color, but it will be exciting to see what they’re like!

Our Suhyo Cross Cucumbers are starting to take over their territory too. The plants went from being fairly small to covering the whole section of the garden in just a couple weeks! The cucumbers aren’t quite ready to pick yet, but they should be by sometime next week.

Have a great weekend!