Blueberries, tomatoes, six confirmed kills of vine borers

I'll start out with 2 nice pictures, and then if you don't want to look at the vine borers, you don't have to scroll down.
The weather has been favorable for the blueberries--generally speaking, but of course I will proceed to the nuance of the specifics in a moment.
Here are some premium sized blueberries that I picked last night.

 

I had already made one batch of muffins from the berries I picked Monday or Tuesday. 

I have noticed that the birds are eating a lot of the blueberries.  There is no wild cherry crop this year, and when there are no wild cherries, which the birds love, there is more bird pressure on the blueberry crop.  Perhaps the cold snap back in the spring, which only did a little damage to the blueberries directly, hurt the wild cherry crop; indirectly that is affecting the blueberry crop.  Interesting connections, I say.

Birds in the berries, stink bugs on the tomatoes...  We ate our first tomato last night.  It had sustained some stink bug damage, and I had brought it indoors to finish ripening.  I picked a few more tomatoes last night to let them ripen indoors as well. 

 

We've been eating squash practically every night, but I don't know how long that will last with the pressure from the vine borers.  I killed 3 more borers this morning.  That makes 6 confirmed kills.  At first, when I would see a little of the "sawdust" oozing from the vine, I tried to stick my tiny knife in and hopefully kill the borer without opening the vine up, but I never knew if I was hitting the borer or not that way.  This morning, I did get enough of one part of a borer out to know I had killed it, plus I got 2 additional borers out entirely.  One was quite small, the other was large.



 

 

I'm still picking off some Japanese beetles and tossing them over to my neighbor's chickens, but there haven't been so many lately.  My neighbor put up a trap, he said, so that undoubtedly is helping.

In other news, we've gotten 2 3/4" of rain within the last week.  The rain that waters the vegetables also waters weeds (including those that we call our lawn).  Things are starting to look, to use the word Mama would use, rank.

That's the update on the garden "plot."