Garden update

So much has changed with our little backyard garden since my last update about it on March 15th. The picture above was taken two week ago on April 12th. You can see the romaine lettuce and kale was already ready for picking...

..but I wanted to let it grow longer to see how much bigger it would get. I finally harvested all the romaine today. I also cut a ton of cilantro. It grows so fast!

This is the broccoli and brussle sprouts. We have already eaten some broccoli, the brussles are just now starting to form little bitty sprouts.

 

I need to take a more recent picture but here is the cucumber. This is over a week old, the plants are already in full bloom with baby cucumbers growing. There are so many flowers it is getting hard remembering which ones I already pollenated. 

 We have already picked about a pound of strawberries from our little patch. I get about 4-6 ripe ones a day. I was also going to post pictures of the raised beds with the corn, peppers and tomatoes but the pictures are way too out dated already. In two weeks the corn grew over a foot! I'll take more pictures tomorrow.

So far everything growing outside is doing well however we have had major problems with the plants in the greenhouse getting infested with green aphids, mealeybugs and those little black gnats. We have tried a few organic insect sprays (neem oil kind) but none of them have worked well enough to make a dent. So far fly paper and good old fashioned soapy water works best. I had to rip out the arugula today because it was so covered. The romaine I was able to salvage since it is a bigger leaf and I was able to simply wash all the bugs off. I just hope I can keep them off the brussle sprouts and broccoli. Luckily they don't seem interested in the eggplant and cucumber. I just wonder what I need to do to the soil in there after we harvest everything since it is all in container beds? Anyone here with a veggie garden have any advice on how to control aphids?