This is what my garden looks like at the end of November.

Yes, the tomatoes are still alive, as are the peppers in the Topsey Turveys, and as you can see the broccoli is loving the cold weather. Left alone they are in full bloom and still producing more bunches of blossoms. My petunias are still alive, though looking a bit scraggly as well and my daughter’s geranium that she rescued from the Walmart garden center. (It was a horribly pitiful thing when she picked it. Jason was sure it was going to die.)

This is pretty much par for the course in our yard, which explains why we might be mowing our lawn in December.

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.

Things are reaching the point where they usually fall apart for me (because of the normal August heat wave), but everything is looking very good so far.

I’ve certainly learned some lessons from the Three sisters planting. The corn has been a little lack luster and I suspect that it’s because the squash covered the corn and prevented pollination. This is also the fourth year I’ve grown corn in this plot, so it might just be time to do something else.

I’ve learned some lessons too for next year, because I have really enjoyed growing squash. Next year I plan to plant corn first in solid rows a foot apart and four deep across the plot. Then I will plant beans in bottomless yogurt cups across the back fence because a big problem has been the rampant growth of morning glories, which when young look a lot like bean sprouts. If I know the bean sprouts are in the circle of the cups I know everything outside of that needs to be weeded. (And the cups can be removed when the beans are big and strong enough.) Then at least 2 weeks after everything else I’ll plant maybe three squash plants.

I used web research to plan this year’s three sister planting and the squash, while fun, is just too much. I need less of it.

Pictures:

It is awfully pretty when you look out and see this mound of large yellow flowers, though.

Also a note, I used NO pesticide this year because I don’t want to kill off bees and ladybugs and lacewings and other beneficial insects, and I have not lost a single fruit to insects, even if some of the leaves have showed damage.

I have healthy insect activity, including lots of bees. And while my son is moderately allergic there have been no cases of any of us being stung. (Jeez, I’m asking for trouble by saying that aren’t I?) The bees in the yard are way too busy to bug us people.

On the other side of the yard the broccoli is almost done. Out of six plants I’ve gotten a half gallon bag of broccoli (after cooking and freezing). There is still more, especially with side shoots (see below) still turning up.

A second wave has been started and since it’s a cold tolerant plant I expect to get another wave of broccoli in late September/October.

The cucumbers, of course, love the heat.

The tomatoes are finally ripening. No clue why I haven’t been getting any ripe ones until August, considering the past two year it’s been early July when I started pulling them off the vine.

The morning glories might be a headache, but they are lovely too.

It’s been a relatively cool week or so and I should have been working in the garden, but time has been getting away from me a lot lately. There never seems to be enough of it, and at the end of the night I find my day has been filled with a massive amount of small tasks and my day has bled away. But the last two or three days I have managed to keep an eye on the garden, because a day can make a real difference to squash and cucumbers, and my broccoli is ripening. The latter you have to harvest before the flowers bloom or it is inedible.

So here’s a few shots.

As you can see the broccoli florets start small and get larger. Then the green buds start to spread and turn yellow and open. These are actually the flowers. You have to get them before they start to open because after the taste is woody. This is actually the plant I though I’d lost because it was knocked over in a storm. How awesome is that?

My tomatoes are huge, and everywhere and still green. They fell over the other day, due to sheer weight. I used bamboo stakes this year because my cages were pretty much trashed. The leaf curling you see is from the damage (where the water can’t get to the leaves because of the stem damage or shifting), but if you see it in your plants when there’s been no change it’s a sign that they need more frequent watering or have some kind of disease.

My cucumbers are doing just fantastic. Cucumbers are a sub tropical plant, so they love heat as long as you keep them well watered (because the fruit is mostly water). The fruit you see in this picture will actually be the four I’ll collect from this plant. Cucumbers picked fresh have spikes that need to be removed (just with a good rub) but you might want to use gloves to harvest them.

Here’s the three sisters planting. Look at all that squash! It’s monstrous. Seriously it’s trailed a good five feet out into the yard. Today I re-directed it though there is no keeping it in the garden. It’s actually climbing the fence, and the corn in the back.

By the way, cucumbers are a semi-tropical squash so these squash all have thick hair-like spikes on the fruits, the stems and the leaves as well. The corn leaves are sort of serrated as well, so when working this garden I wear long sleeves and long pants, preferable jeans down bottom. I hope to make Jason take a picture of me with the squash so you ca get a bit of perspective. They’re simply gigantic.

This is one of the ornamental varieties I planted. This is a Turk’s Turban. I think I pulled this one too soon, but it’s bigger than I let any of the other squash get and I thought at first that it was rotted on the bottom. (It’s not.)

The upside down planters (no pictures) are dripping with peppers (the black one still has tiny fruits and the other’s first fruit ripened to red). But even the red plant’s fruits are smaller than the ones you see in the store. At this point I’m not sure if that’s normal or not. Store vegetables aren’t the same as garden veggies, but having never grown peppers before I don’t quite know how different home growns should be. I need to get to a farmer’s market (which by the way, if you are a beginning gardener is a great place to learn more about gardening and what is typical and what is not.)

Here’s what I’ve pulled out of the garden the last three days.

It seems like something always has to suffer. I get back on track submissions-wise and I forget to blog. Oh well. Have some more garden pron.

I love sunflowers because they seem to have so much personality.

Houston we have beans! And based on the number of flowers like this one I’ve found more survived that I thought. The problem is that the young leaves look a lot like morning glories, which are also growing in my yard. But as the leaves mature they get significantly darker, larger, and more elongated and pointy than the morning glory plants. So now I fear I might have killed some off myself believing them to be weeds.  But there are still many left so I have hope of bean soup in the fall.

My broccoli is about to fruit, you can see the head forming.

Even my venus fly trap is flowering (aren’t they neat little plants. And they aren’t exotic! They’re actually native US plants.)

And here’s my latest fruit from the squash bread. It’s been a lot of fun no knowing what kind of squash I’d get. I definitely recommend squash for beginners because they are very easy to grow and grow fast. The only real problem I’ve had is making sure to pick the fruits before they got too big, and making sure they didn’t stay too wet. I’ve only lost one fruit so far to rot (and evidently something nibbled on it, which let moisture get in and rot start.

These came off the vine Sunday:

So I made this:

It was very good. I say was because one of the loafs is already gone.

Also, obligatory kitty love pictures.

It was that kind of a weekend.

Yes, but while making sure the yard was clear for mowing (which meant moving all the squash tendrils back into the garden area and staking up one of the tomato plants that was beginning to creep) I discovered blooms on almost everything. Of course the one thing I was looking for, the bean blooms, aren’t there. I’m still keeping an eye out though.

This is the cucumber. Eventually the fruit develops behind the flower and the bloom drops off.

Here’s the squash blooms, which develop the same way.

And for a bit of perspective about how big there leaves are:

Here’s a shot of that whole plot.

Yes, it is supposed to look overcrowded. The plants are complimentary to each other.

I’ve dubbed this the zombie broccoli, because even though it got knocked over in a storm and all the leaves died off I replanted the stem and it’s come back (see all that nice new healthy growth? That’s what you look for when buying plants from stores, by the way, not the flowers or at the fat, greenhouse grown leaves, but at the new and just starting growth, because that it what will survive transporting and transplants.)

Our neighbor got rid of their hostas (which they had planted in full sun anyway, not their fault, it was that way when they moved in). Hostas are shade tolerant (they can handle up to about 4-5 hours of sun, but thrive in shade too.) and they are really good for those trouble areas, like under trees. This area is shady most of the day, is unevenly covered with evergreen bushes and “landscaped” with rock (I hate landscape rock. You can never get rid of it. Mulch naturally decays, but rock just makes it hard for me to dig. ) I put them here in an effort to fill this area so I can stop weeding it. Despite that black plastic and the rock every year this area gets massively overgrown because in the summer the house sat empty weeds grew on top of it, on top of the weed plastic. The rocks don’t help, they just end up getting flung at me when I’m weed wacking, or spill out into the yard and where they have run ins with the mower.

If these hostas get as strong and thick as the ones I have in the front shade garden then they’ll go a long way to help keep out the weeds.

Speaking of the other hostas, they are flowering.

And so are my stargazer lilies (which are really easy to grow!)

Happy weekend all!

Last update is here, in case you want to compare, because the difference is pretty dramatic.

Especially in garden #1 (squash, corn, beans)

Seriously, these crop plants grow FAST.

The corn. Those seed-looking bits are actually the male pollen. It’s not mature yet, but it’ll be there soon.

The Squash. For perspective these leaves are large than my face. Easily.

The beans are more difficult because they got dwarfed by the squash. If I do this three sisters planting again I will give the beans a week or two to sprout and grow before I plant the squash. I’m just not sure how many bean plants are alive and well, but I planted scarlet runner beans, so when they bloom it will be clear, since they bloom pretty red flowers.

In the second half of this plot, where the corn never surfaces, I ended up planting some decorative gourd seeds, which are also doing well.

In fact between the corn leaves, which are painfully sharp, and the squah leaves, which are huge and also have a potentially painful edge, I can’[t quite weed this plot any more. However, that is the point to the three sisters planting. The corn grown tall, the beans climb the corn and the squash smothers weeds, growing anong the ground. I do think that the vegetable squash are about as tall as they will get because the new vines coming out of the center appear to be going more for length than height and size.

Garden two:

I am so please with myself for keeping this one so neat and clear. As you can see we lost one of the broccoli plants to a storm that knocked it over. It wilted quite a bit, but then it sort of stopped and I’m pretty sure I saw new growth on it when working yesterday. So who knows, it might come back or might not.

Cucumbers, coming a long nicely.

Broccoli, which will likely be harvested by the end of July. As it turns out there won’t be a second batch of broccoli because I do’t have any more seeds. Maybe I’ll buy more, maybe not.

There will be more of these, in fact there are already more in the two days between me taking these pictures and posting them.

The upside down planters are also doing very well, but I have to check them twice a day to make sure they aren’t drying out too much, and I water them with a 2 liter bottle daily, unless it rains.

I actually pulled this beauty and added it to a salad with some of the black peppers. Yum.

So, looking and doing great. This is the fun part of gardening where the plants are all established and other than checking for problems you pretty much just sit back and enjoy.