I woke up at 6 a.m. on a recent morning ready to conquer. Equipped with garden gloves, a spray bottle of organic Bt, a fly swatter, and a vengeful heart, I was determined not to lose my grapevine this year. Just yesterday I had identified the dark blue moths dancing amid my garden to be Grape Leaf Skeletonizers and had formulated my plan of attack.


I started my mission with the fly swatter. With a Clint Eastwood stance (and squint) and an old Western whistle escaping my serious demeanor, the showdown began. Any smarmy little bugger I saw battin' around out there faced a certain doom. Grape leaf skeletonizers are fairly slow creatures and swatting them right out of the air become my new favorite game. I also noticed many of the moths seemed to be dying; laying on the leaves and barely flinching when I came near. Perhaps they die immediately after laying eggs? If so, it serves them right.

Then came grapevine care. Thankfully my vine is still young and therefore easily managed. I overturned the leaves one at a time. Yes, every one of them. One thing I noticed is that the newest growth never had any eggs. But dozens upon dozens of the mature leaves were covered in clusters of eggs. This is where the gloves come in - I methodically smushed every cluster I found. Grape leaf skeletonizer larvae can irritate the skin but their eggs generally do not. I wore the gloves to pick off any caterpillars I might have found but it came in handy with the smushing too.


Then every single leaf got a thorough coating of Bt. I diluted approximately one teaspoon of Bt concentrate into a 32 oz spray bottle and went to town on the front and back of each any every leaf. Bt, short for Bacillus thuringiensis, is a naturally occuring soil bacteria that attacks the stomachs of those leaf-eating menaces. Within a day or so of ingestion, caterpillars stop eating and die. Aah, sweet justice. The awesome thing about this product is that Bt doesn't affect other insects or beneficials. I like to think of it as a natural predator of caterpillars. The downside of Bt is that it only works on larvae, not the grown moths or their eggs. And I've never had it work once the larvae (caterpillars) were bigger than a grain of rice.

Reapplication of Bt should be done every 14 days or after it rains. My only concern is whether our high summer temps will inhibit effectiveness of the bacteria. I also have no idea if these moths attack other plants, although I've seen them on nearly every plant I have. I believe the moths feed on nectar rather than leaves, so perhaps my entire yard doesn't need a thorough coating of Bt, although the idea is rather tempting. I did spray my tomato plants to help in our efforts against the tomato hornworm. That, coupled with our friendly parasitic wasps, should do the trick nicely, although I'll keep an eye out (and a fly swatter ready) for any signs I can help.

Tara lives and learns with her family in Las Vegas, NV. You can read more of her at TheOrganicSister.

Back in the days before we had a kid and a bunch of blogs and had time on our hands, we spent a couple of years with a home garden big enough to sell produce at our local farmer's market. We specialized in hot peppers - habaneros, jalapenos, hot banana, cayenne, chiltepin, the list goes on - and cherry tomatoes, specifically Sweet 100s, which are like the candy of home fruit and vegetable gardening, and Yellow Peard, which have a lot of sweetness but also a delicious citrus edge. We also sold okra, but there wasn't much of a market for naturally-grown okra at that time.

At full tilt we were showing up with 30-40 pounds of cherry tomatoes in a 10-gallon storage container and selling them by the pint for $3 a pop. The farmer's market was struggling and we never sold more than 20 pounds or so, but between that and the other produce we would sometimes walk away with $100 or $150 for four hours of our time that were very rewarding. When you factor in all of the gardening time and expenses, of course, it never made financial sense.

Then came a child, and the immediate reduction and slow ramping back up of our gardening ambitions. At four, Z is actually a big help and a lot of fun to have in the garden, and takes pleasure in every part of gardening, except weeding (did you know some goatweed has thorns?). A few weeks ago, we visited the farmer's market to buy vegetables after a bit of an absence, and were surprised to see how much it had grown. The market was thriving, with twenty or thirty sellers and everything from fruit and vegetables to locally-roasted coffee, soaps, and handicrafts. The parking lot the market is held in was crowded with shoppers, too. As we recalled the pleasure we got from selling at the market during its slower days, and the fact that we had suddenly moved back into having more cherry tomatoes than we could eat or even had time to process and save, we realized that coming back to the farmer's market once or twice would be a lot of fun to do with Z.

So last weekend we got up early, made some green smoothies for breakfast, and packed ten pints of cherry tomatoes and four or five pints of green beans, grabbing her play table and chair on the way out the door. And for a $10 day selling fee, we helped Z set up shop.




She had a lot of fun and did a great job. It took almost two hours to sell all the stuff but between the conversation, the people-watching and the occasional forays to explore the rest of the market, she declined all offers to leave early, even as the sun broke out over the edge of the building we were next to and things started getting hot. We helped her count money and she made change. She drew pictures with markers to give each paying customer. She forced samples on people who had stopped idly to chat, and once they tasted, they bought. When you're selling garden-fresh cherry tomatoes, sampling is key, because they are 100x better than store-bought!

Z was determined to stay until we sold everything, which we almost did, except for a pint of green beans and half a pint of cherry toms left over from sampling, for a profit of $35 less our $10 fee.

As we were getting ready to leave Z discovered that the woman a couple stalls down from us was selling handmade dolls. They were very nice, but I initially rejected Z's pleas to let her spend her portion of our earnings on the doll. It was filled with organic millet, really nicely made, and priced at $10. My thought was that this would work against our goal of teaching her the value of the money she had earned. Plus, I am a cheapskate.

In the end, though, I realized that what she had really learned that day was the value of her work - that she could exchange her labor and something she had produced for something that was valuable to her. That concept in itself is a big deal for a kid to realize. She gets the concept of money, but allowing her to spend her portion of the money (we agreed to split it with her 50/50 - and we got a good bargain, as she was the key to all our sales) was far more instructive in cementing in her mind just what she had accomplished.

Plus, the woman refused to take the stated $10 price of the doll, and gave her $4.25 back (all the change she had). In turn we gave her the leftover half pint of cherry tomatoes and a pint of green beans. My spendthrift heart soared.


And Z was proud to have worked to earn the money for a new, beloved baby.


By the way, that guy at the table next to Z's in the top picture? A honey man. And we're getting bees!

We've been getting a lot of tomatoes in the last couple of weeks, but the real explosion has been in the cherry varieties - a couple dozen plants have offered up maybe 30-40 pounds of tomatoes so far.


It takes several pints of cherry tomatoes to make a quart of dried ones, but they taste delicious.


We use a Nesco Gardenmaster food dehydrator, currently on sale for almost 30% off (about $100 instead of $150) on Amazon. We've used it on and off for years and haven't had any trouble with it. The dehydrator features rigid tray sections topped with flexible polypropylene discs (mesh or solid, depending on what you're drying) that are easy to wash and BPA-free.


The drying process took around 24 hours at 135 degrees, but that was only background noise and occasional tasty checks of the tomatoes' progress. The real time-consuming tasks were washing and splitting the tomatoes and flipping them all on their trays halfway through; despite several clever ideas, there proved to be no quicker way to do this than to gently pick them up one by one and flip them over.

The dried tomatoes are not perfectly "preserved" in that they keep best and longest in the freezer, not on the pantry shelf. You can also preserve these dried tomatoes in olive oil, although it's recommended that you eat any stored that way within a few weeks, sort of a tomato equivalent to refrigerator pickles. I plan to do this with a small subset of these dried cherry tomatoes because I'm sure they will be delicious tossed in a pasta salad or topping a garden salad with spinach and goat cheese.

Last night we processed about 10 pounds of gorgeous whole, "full-sized" tomatoes - deep yellow ones (I'm blanking on the variety name) and lots and lots of Romas. Getting the skins off was easier than I anticipated; a pot of boiling water, a couple-minute dunk, and then dropping them in an ice-water bath to cool, and my four-year-old daughter Z and I peeled the skins off easily. I chopped off the stem end and in some cases pulled out a tougher central pillar while we both peeled them; then all it took for the sauce was simmering and seasoning. It wasn't enough to can, and we're a little wary of our skills at canning low-acid foods anyway. And of course there's the whole BPA thing. We'll freeze the gallon or so of tomato sauce to save it until winter.

Are you harvesting a bumper crop of anything, or planning on one? If so, what are you doing with it? We'll share a few other ways we're making use of our tomatoes in upcoming posts!