We got off to a rough start, but I think this little garden of mine- er- Jinx's is coming along nicely.

Finally.

I have some cherry tomatoes on the plant and some normal tomatoes and the broccoli exploded in size even just between yesterday and today! (Imagine! All the garden wanted was some SUN! Hear that, Nature? SUN! That thunderstorm you're currently pelting us with is not appreciated. But I'll get to that later in this post.) I had to try and encourage my cucumber plants to grow in the OTHER direction than they were going (rude little buggers) and one of my broccoli plants fell over and might have broken overnight (I think Sophie jumped on it. She tends to jump from the deck to the garden if it's raining because she loathes wet grass). So I broke out the twine this afternoon and made some small modifications to the plants. Hopefully this will work.

If you look closely on that top photo of broccoli, you'll notice there's a little yellow BUG on it. GAH! I was most distressed as I was looking through my photos (I thought I'd play with my fancy camera and try and get some decent shots of the garden. I'm still completely useless at using it though. Ugh.) So I fretted much of the night (when I wasn't sleeping) and then I remembered that I had recently read an article on Buzzfeed about products you can make yourself - which I cleverly added to Pinterest (which I rarely, if ever use) and so I checked that out today and found my way to the Sweet Peas and Pumpkins blog and this post on making your own insecticide!

Happily, I had everything I needed in the kitchen to try making this chemical-free (mostly) product. I took out my camera and proceeded to make one hugetastic mess of the kitchen. *cough*

You mix 1 Tablespoon of red pepper flakes, with 1 head of garlic and 1 cup of water in a blender (or food processor like I did) until it gets all pasty - and somehow manages to leak out all over the place as your mushing it and you have a big mess in your kitchen.

Then you strain the base into a bowl or jar or whatever so that you don't have any little leftover bits of garlic and red pepper flakes.

To make the insecticide you use 2 Tablespoons of the mixture, 1/2 teaspoon of liquid dishsoap and 2 cups of water and mix that together in an empty spray bottle.

Then you go outside and spray both the tops and bottoms of the leaves in your garden to protect them from little critters and creatures. You do this when there is NO rain in the forecast because it will wash it all off.

And it was BRIGHT AND SUNNY when I went out there and fought with the spray bottle to spray every broccoli, cucumber and celery leaf. The bottle kept locking up on me and I was getting cranky, but I was happy when it was all done.

Then what happened? I came inside to transfer and edit photos from my camera to the laptop and A FREAKING THUNDERSTORM CAME OUT OF NOWHERE. Now it's pouring and all that work was for nothing.

UGH!

Meanwhile, now that the plants are a little bit bigger, Jinx is rediscovering his interest and excitement over the garden. He's still rather bulldozery when it comes to walking through the broccoli, but with one plant suddenly becoming huge, he's noticing them a little more. He's still a big fan of his coocumbers and tomato plants and he loooooves the parsley.

He's a good little gardener, my Jinx is.