Veggie Disappointments

No more winter vegetables!  I went out of town for a few days and all my broccoli was flowering when I returned.  The lettuce has begun to seed.  And what about those beautiful Brussels sprouts?  After patiently growing Brussels sprouts in my garden, I was so looking forward to preparing and eating them.  But, instead, I was shocked and horrified by what I saw:

Mealy cabbage aphids!

Yucky, yucky cabbage aphids on my Brussels sprouts!

"Dirt" on the leaves is the first sign

These yucky aphids love plants in the cabbage family, and boy, did they ever love my Brussels sprouts!

These are not regular run-of-the-mill aphids.  These aphids look larger to me (may be my imagination), and they have a waxy coating that makes they look a bit gray.  They can also transmit viruses to other plants.

How to get rid of these aphids?  The best form of aphid control is ladybugs.  I had a bumper crop of ladybugs in my garden earlier in the year, so I was surprised to see these little buggers on my sweet Brussels sprouts.  However, the temperatures had plummeted below freezing a couple of nights before I found the cabbage aphids, so perhaps the temperatures affected the ladybugs.

Mealy cabbage aphids!

I have read that you can spray these with water from a high pressure hose to wash them off, but I couldn't get the vision of flying aphids out of my head.  Plus, they weren't just on the leaves - they were on the sprouts, too, perhaps even burrowing in the folds of the sprouts (at least, that's what I was imagining), and I didn't want to eat any of them!  Yuck!  I would rather do without Brussels sprouts than eat one of these ugly buglies!  So, that's what I did.  Without.  I disposed of all of my Brussels sprouts plants.

:(

So, desperate to have some sort of harvest, I began to look at the asparagus.  Ah, sweet asparagus!

Purple asparagus

Alas, that was not to be, either.

When can you harvest asparagus?  According to my planting directions, no harvest the first year.  Harvest of three or four stalks the second year, and then regular harvesting the third year.  This is my second year, so I could harvest a few stalks from each crown (I have three planted).  Growing asparagus has been easy, so far, and I was looking forward to bragging about roasting them.  My favorite recipe to cook asparagus is just to broil them for a few minutes with a little olive oil, salt and pepper.  Yum.

But, remember the freezing nights I wrote about?  Well, the tops of the asparagus were killed in the freeze.  Bummer.  I decided the best thing to do is to wait for more asparagus to emerge and then harvest the few stalks I am allowed this year.

So, no harvest this month!  Very disappointing.  No harvest from my broccoli.  No harvest from my lettuce.  No harvest from my Brussels sprouts.  And no harvest from my asparagus.

Zero.

Nada.

Nothing.

Zip.

What a blow to my ego!  ;)

Even though I had no harvest this month, I joining The Gardening Blog for Garden Bloggers Harvest Day.  I hope you had a better harvest for March!