Summer Wind-Down Continues

It's been over a week since I posted about the big rain -- the start of The Wet Season! Since then, we've had a mix of vaguely-warm, cool, damp, and humid weather. It's turning out to be The Year of the Mushroom.

This is only one example of the (at least) five different kinds of mushrooms that have been popping up around my yard. Mind you, I've seen many of these mushrooms before, just not all at the same time, or even in the same year! I continue to hold to my philosophical approach that they are merely doing the job in the garden of breaking down complex (plant) materials, making them more readily available for the living, growing plants to consume.

Mushrooms are, of course, fungi. So is the powdery mildew that is consuming the scalloped and zucchini squash plants.

The zucchini plants continue to try real hard, but they are definitely falling behind. The scalloped squash, on the other hand, are just plain losing the battle.

And, if you'll notice on the lawn below...

these little baby squash have committed suicide.

So, I bit the bullet last night and started taking out the plants that needed to be taken out. I started with the poor scalloped squash plants above, then turned my attention to the zucchinis. I started by looking them over to see if there were any new squashes coming on and there were, so I went for a more conservative approach. I started pruning out the leaves that were most heavily infested with powdery mildew and continued till I had mostly healthy leaves, some lightly-infested leaves, some stalks, and very-dang-few zucchini. *sigh* At that point it was easy to see that the two plants that were trying to produce (light-green) zucchini could stay a while longer, but the other two plants were just done-for.

But, in an attempt to try to make life a little less miserable for the remaining zucchini, I decided to whack back  some of the non-producing arms of the non-producing beefsteak tomato. (I discussed the fact that excessively rich soil probably doomed me to lots of green vegetation and very few -- if any -- tomatoes in an earlier post.) Well, I was whacking and hacking and hewing and creating quite the pile of green vegetation when I noticed this:

Holy crap! And there was SO much vegetation that I couldn't even find where it had actually done any damage. Tomato hornworms start out small (small fraction of an inch) and go through several "instars" (shed their skin and pop out bigger and bigger and bigger...). This is about as big as they get. At this size they can actually eat full-sized tomatoes!  Gah!

But, I have a friend in my garden who likes these bad boys... *without* butter and garlic!

If you look closely, you'll see the green stem that the hornworm was attached to in the previous photo. I had pitched it in front of Shelley's new hide-y-hole last night so she could discover it for breakfast (or a midnight snack). An hour later it was in exactly the same position. This morning there is of sign of the bugger and the tomato stem is actually closer to Shelley's hideout than it was last night.

Yay, Shelley!  (I also tossed out some baby squashes that didn't make it in case she wanted a side dish.)  About an hour after I took this photo, Shelley had burrowed back into the depths of her cave, presumably to digest. She's usually out on patrol for tasty tidbits or water at that hour.

Oh, yeah. Here's Shelley's other idea of "hiding."

In the meanwhile, the California Native Grape is finally deciding that it's time to ripen its berries.

By this time last year, this plant had put on large numbers of massive, tight bunches of grapes, had ripened them, had dropped them, and had started turning its leaves to bright Fall colors.  Definitely a "different" year than last year.