This week with the help of our fantastic Pomona College intern Megan, we built and installed the remaining trellises for the tiered bed. The tomatoes and cucumbers are getting pretty tall and we needed to get a support structure built for them.

While our demonstration garden has an irrigation system, it doesn't have a timer, meaning that I have to manually turn the water on and off. Last month, I got distracted while running the system and waited too long to turn it off.  As a result, the demonstration garden was a bit overwatered, and I've spent the last couple of weeks waiting for the soil to dry out.

As you can see, things are recovering nicely after almost 3 weeks without watering. If you needed convincing that automatic timers are an essential garden tool, you should look no further than Farmscape's front yard.

The squash have really started to take off, almost doubling in size and you can see that our first 8-ball has started to form. 

We also experienced our first real pest problem. Megan spotted some leaves on one of the chard plants that had started to curl back, as well as ants moving to and from the plant. As you can see when we looked under the leaves we found a small aphid infestation.

I cut off the two leaves that were the worst and hit the remaining aphids with insecticidal soap. We were lucky to catch the infestation early as there are 4 or 5 other chard plants that were aphid free just a couple of feet away.

This week with the help of our fantastic Pomona College intern Megan, we built and installed the remaining trellises for the tiered bed. The tomatoes and cucumbers are getting pretty tall and we needed to get a support structure built for them.

While our demonstration garden has an irrigation system, it doesn't have a timer, meaning that I have to manually turn the water on and off. Last month, I got distracted while running the system and waited too long to turn it off.  As a result, the demonstration garden was a bit overwatered, and I've spent the last couple of weeks waiting for the soil to dry out.

As you can see, things are recovering nicely after almost 3 weeks without watering. If you needed convincing that automatic timers are an essential garden tool, you should look no further than Farmscape's front yard.

The squash have really started to take off, almost doubling in size and you can see that our first 8-ball has started to form. 

We also experienced our first real pest problem. Megan spotted some leaves on one of the chard plants that had started to curl back, as well as ants moving to and from the plant. As you can see when we looked under the leaves we found a small aphid infestation.

I cut off the two leaves that were the worst and hit the remaining aphids with insecticidal soap. We were lucky to catch the infestation early as there are 4 or 5 other chard plants that were aphid free just a couple of feet away.