The gardening season is winding down. This is usually the point where it falls apart for me, due to August being hot as camel balls here in Kentucky. but instead we had a bunch of other problems.
My tomatoes fell off their stakes in early July. I pretty much though that was it, but no, even though they are growing laying down at this point I still have this:
Yeah, nice, and this is my fourth harvest like this in the last three weeks. There’s at least one more out there still green. So there are two lessons here. One: Cages not stakes. Two: Tomatoes are pretty easy to grow and fairly hardy too.
My cucumbers fell to the floods at the beginning of August, which I’m disappointed about. And for over a week my broccoli had a horrible aphid infestation that made me throw out what I’d harvested. But just as quickly as they appeared they vanished. I’ve let my broccoli go to bloom now. Picture below, so you can see, once the buds start to swell and separate the stems get woody and the flavor changes. There’s only a few days until the buds open. I’ll take a picture then too, because it is pretty.
My corn is done, the beans got grown over by morning glories (which are pretty, but hard as hell to get rid of) and the squash, and the squash:
Has powdery mildew. Not surprising since they are susceptible and it’s been a rather wet year here. (And to think I was worried about my summer water bill this spring.)
This plot looks like absolute crap right now because the corn is dry and brown, already done for the year, the morning glories grew over it like, well weeds, and when I tried to clear them out I realized they are mixed up with the squash and at this point it’s almost impossible to pull the morning glories without damaging the squash vines. In fact along my back fence they have grown together, through and up the fence, so there are Turk’s Turbans growing above my head along the fence.
The flooding and extra rainfall otherwise killed off about half my plants, and in the bare spots weeds have grown up. Jason and I were so frustrated with it that we just mowed the border of the plot, taking out a bunch of dying vines and a few healthy ones. I thought the plot was just done for, and it would be best to let the last few Turk’s Turbans mature then just take out the whole thing.
But then when I was clipping some mulberry treelings growing on the fence I noticed this:
Three of the surviving plants have strong new growth, including baby squashes (there are three alone in this picture). So now I’m planning to treat the mildew to the best of my ability in the hopes of getting a few more fruits out of them.
As for the upside down planters, well I still have mixed feelings about them. I planted bell peppers in them this year and I got lots of fruit, but they were small. None of them were bigger than my fist, or even as big as my fist. I’ve decided I’m going to try them again next year, only with plants that grow small fruits. I plan to plant one with cherry tomatoes and the other with banana peppers. We’ll see if this changes anything, but at this point I suspect the restricted root space restricted growth and the size of the fruits.
So here’s a few more photos to round out this garden report. I hope yours is doing well.
