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| Awww....so cute. Baby green beans. |
The green beans are growing rapidly now and making lots of flowers where we will soon have lots of green beans. This is always a happy time, since green beans are one of our favorite veggies. I love seeing the tiny beans forming-- they look so cute. Is it possible for vegetables to be cute? Well, I think so.
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| Spotted Cucumber Beetle, kind of pretty, but super-destructive. |
Every year, along with the green beans come the Spotted Cucumber Beetles. I'm not sure why they didn't call them Spotted Green Bean Beetles. They eat many plants, but green beans sure seem to be their favorite. We have tons of these pests, and they arrived the very first time we planted a garden here, as if they had been waiting patiently for decades for someone to grow green beans. The best organic method I've found to get rid of them is the old pick-and-squish. I do this at least once a day for about a month, and it seems to sufficiently reduce their population to where the green beans can still make a decent crop. It is a lot of work, but I've become quite efficient at it. One of the benefits of having only one acre of farm is that manual techniques like this are possible.
