Garden update and Avalon pale ale..

Seems like forever since I've posted here.. but.. only 5-6 days, I guess. In any case, brewed a 12+ gallon batch of Avalon Pale Ale the other day.. this is the beer that goes with me to Avalon, NJ each year to quench the thirsts of the beachgoers on our big family vacation. Last year, one keg wasn't enough, so I made another one.. granted, one is a mini-keg, but still, there's two of 'em. Right now, that beer looks like this:

Nice decoration, isn't it? Fermentation is over, but it still touched ~80 at it's peak.. swamp cooler keg-in-bucket setup or not. We'll see soon enough what sorts of green apple flavors lurk here.

In other news, a pictorial of the garden.. and coffee tree, too. Behold:

Since I moved the coffee tree outside on the deck when it will be fine till the fall, it's suddenly sprouted some major buds from which beans may result. Dig that.

Cucumber on the vine.. this one got picked the day after I took this pic, which was two days ago.. and Cessy ate it right up. I took a bite as well, and it wasn't vomit inducing, even though I hate cucumbers.

Here's a pic (from today) of the very first colored tomatos. They're small, but they'll be ripe in a just a bit, I guess.. and I swear, I will eat at least one of them. That will be a first..

Also new to the family, a teeny tiny little carrot leaf has popped up here:

I know that one is a mite small, but it's got a lot of friends joining it. I planted this one in the less desirable of the two beds for carrot production, but my options were limited. I had some room from some vacated.. err.. spinach, was it? Something. Anyway, I put 'em in there about a week ago and lo and behold, they're actually coming up. I mulched 'em with the straw you see in this picture, and when I saw the leafs emerge today, I pulled the mulch back to give them some light. There's actually quite a few of them in the row, and I hope to see some growth that's easier to take pics of in the near future.

In other bad news, when I went to pull the red lettuce out, with each pull of the evicted stalk came these guys:

Bane of my existence, we are troubled mightily with grubs. Just that one lettuce pull produced the three grubs you see here in this picture, and a couple more were unearthed without too much trouble as well. I found the cure for these is a product (bacteria, actually) called Milky Spore, which the grubs eat, and eventually causes their death. It's actually a pretty neat thing, because it's all natural and completely harmless to *everything* else except grubs. I'll be picking this stuff up in a couple days and applying it then. This is the time, thankfully, to apply the stuff too.. when the grubs are coming to the surface to soon become Japanese Beatles.

Also in that same lettuce pull I found a fat earthworm and a friend of his as well, so I guess we'l have some good with out bad. The worms I can handle.. and the Spore won't harm them when I throw that stuff down.

That's all for now.. tune in next time, true believers. Carry on..