Hmm.  Given that it is summer, and my blog layout design is a “winter-y” design.. I think perhaps I should get around to finding or making a non-seasonal layout.

Anyway.  Summer is definitely here where we live.  This weekend it’s supposed to get to over 110 degrees.  My poor garden, I’m glad I built the shade structure over it.

My celebrity tomato plant keeps getting attacked by tomato worms (they burrow into the tomato and eat it from the inside, causing it to rot on the vine), AND those that don’t get attacked end up cracking.  I just can’t seem to win with that plant.  My cherry tomato plant is still plodding along despite that nearly all of the bottom branches are completely bare (no stems at all) from having to clip off the dying ones.  And my better boy is now trying to take over the box that IT is in (like the celebrity did) and has a few branches that span the entire width and length of the box (4×4) plus a foot or two.  It’s still budding tomatoes too, although I wish the birds would bugger off… (if it’s not worms, it’s birds).  I’ve only managed to get one good tomato off of it in the last month thanks to the darn birds, and I picked that one before it was completely ripe.

My watermelon plants started growing like crazy, all the way up the five foot trellis with one of them now snaking horizontally across the top of the trellis, too.  I think I spotted at least three good budding melons so hopefully by the end of the month we may have some big enough that we can eat?  They’re up high too, so I won’t have to worry about my daughter picking them off long before their time.

Despite that my cucumber plants are sprouting baby cukes like crazy, they never get very far (I presume due to the heat)… I think I found *ONE* little one this morning that seems to be getting further along in growth than all its predecessors, so maybe I’ll get a lone cucumber, we’ll see.

The corn was a bust.  It got hot too fast and many of them started drying up before I had a chance to pick them, so I left about six ears out for the birds to pick at and eat if they want.  They weren’t very big either, maybe six or seven inches was the longest ear of corn.  There are still a few small ears that I left on hoping they would grow, but I’m not holding out much hope.

I pulled up the peas last weekend, they were done.  I left the beans but they don’t seem to be producing anymore, so I’ll probably do the same with them soon.

There are quite a few things I will do differently next time around, in addition to planting earlier in the spring, many of the plants will get their own designated garden beds so they don’t have to compete with other plants, and to increase yield.

So now I just have to start planning for next spring and figure out how much more timber I’ll need to buy, and what size beds to build, in addition to purchasing the soil ingredients again as I have very little left from the spring planting.  I’m not sure I’ll do another shade structure though.  There seem to be quite a few people who garden around here without it, so if the one I have survives until next year, I’ll experiment and see how the uncovered beds do compared to the covered ones.

It seems to have stayed on vacation.

I rarely keep up around here on my ol’ blog (gee, as if that wasn’t obvious), and my other blog is even more neglected.

I guess it’s in part due to how busy it has been at work, and there are no plans to hire anyone new to help with the workload.  So we’re all burdened with a never-ending pile of orders to work, with no end in sight.

Then when I get home, I either just want to sit and surf, or more recently, kill Zombies in a new Popcap game that my husband suggested, “Plants vs. Zombies”.  I think I played that game for nearly four hours straight the other day.

Meh.

The garden is still going well.  Several ears of corn are on the stalks, although I have a bit of an issue with damn aphids on the flower stalks on those, though.  My beast of a tomato plant seems to make orange tomatoes (rather than red), so I’m not exactly sure what type it is.  My cherry tomato plant seems to be struggling, the stems & leaves are dying off from the bottom out, yet it continues to grow up and out like it’s trying to outrun whatever is killing off the lower stems.  And now the beast tomato plant is having the same issue, so I am wondering if it’s either A) something contagious, or B) a nutrient deficiency.

My peas are about done, they fell over before we went on vacation and didn’t take to being tied up very well, so I think they’ve got one foot in the grave and will probably be pulling most of those up before too long.  My poor beans haven’t been doing great whilst being dominated by the beast tomato plant, so I may pull those up too.

I never did get any sweet potatoes like I planned, so those will have to wait for another year I think.

Aside from the mystery issue with the tomatoes, the biggest problem I’ve been having is the damn birds getting to the tomatoes before I do, sometimes before the tomatoes are even ripe, despite the bird netting I put up around most of them.  Ugh.  Stupid birds, leave my mater’s alone!!

So anyway.  Just a quick update, now it’s time for the long drive home from work.  Yay.

It’s been just under a month since I planted most if not all the seeds and did the transplants of the tomatoes, peppers and strawberry plants.  Everything is growing prettty well, the tomato plants are taller and the Better Boy has two tomatoes growing on it, and the cherry tomato plant has one tomato growing so far.  There are two little strawberries on one plant, and while the peppers have been flowering despite their short stature, only one so far has a jalapeno growing; on the others the flowers fell off, either with it being too hot for a couple of days, or being attacked by spider mites (which I did see on those plants).

I’m disappointed with the radishes; it got too hot too quickly, so only a few have bulbed so far and those were smaller than my thumbnail.  For both types I planted, their maturity date is less than 30 days (22 and 28 I think)  so if they’re not going to bulb now, they aren’t going to.  I’m pretty sure the date I planted them was March 27 or 28.  I pulled some up this morning hoping for something big enough to try eating (still may eat the tiny ones, just to try), but it was quite disappointing.  We’ll have to try again in the fall when it cools down.  It doesn’t help that for an entire week our temps were well over 90 degrees (I think we even got to 100 one or two days), and that pretty much spells doom for radishes. Ah well.

I found some plans for an arched structure that is supposed to be a greenhouse, but I’ll be using it sans door/window as a shade structure with 50% shade material.  I ordered everything I need for it online except the 20′ lengths of PVC pipe, which we’ll be going to get at Home Depot later this evening.

I also designed and installed a drip system for the two beds, as the porous soaker hose was wetting everything too quickly (and not targeting the right areas), so I scrapped that and went with the 1/4″ drip system hose and such.  I still soaked the soil too fast when I was testing it and had quite a puddle of water outside the garden beds, but I adjusted the outlets so hopefully the next time I need to water (probably in a day or two), it won’t saturate too quickly and will be just right.

I’ll be glad to get the shade structure up, some of the leaves on the corn have burned on the extra hot days we had so I’d like to have it done before the next 100 degree day.  Then I’ll add a thermometer to gauge how much cooler it is under the shade structure.

I’ll have to take some new pix later; I have some from last month still on my camera, haven’t downloaded them from it yet so I don’t have anything to show at the moment.  Eventually I will though. 🙂

So far everything except the watermelon has made an appearance in sprouting.  I ended up transplanting 16 of the radishes that came up in pairs into an adjacent empty square, and there are still a few that have a too-close neighbor sprouting up that I’ll either need to try to transplant or thin out… that is, if the stupid springtails don’t get them first.  Today when I checked my plants, the poor little radish leaves had little itty bitty holes in some of them, and one poor thing was completely consumed.  Gah!

So I wrote to an online garden supply place that sells live pest control (you know, ladybugs, lacewings, and the like) and asked them what they thought would be the best bet against the springtails.   Hopefully I’ll hear back soon enough that I’ll be able to get an order of something in by mid-day tomorrow so it will ship quickly…

So anyway… there are corn shoots, several green onions popping up, and several carrots.  I have some new peas sprouting, although I lost three of my transplanted beans due to high winds breaking the stems (they were only about a foot high), so I started three more seeds in a baggie on the back sliding door to replace those, since the beans I planted in-ground still haven’t popped up yet.  I may have to replace two of the transplanted pea plants likewise, also due to broken stems.

I have two strawberry flowers that look like they’ll be strawberries in a couple weeks, and my cucumbers sprouted, too.  Though I’m only supposed to have one per square, so I’ll probably have to pick which one to remove.  Oh, I forgot that I still am not seeing any chives yet, either.

My transplanted pepper plants are still doing well, although they’re all still pretty darn short, I do see some new leaves on them.  Grow, peppers, grow!  My cherry tomato transplant is doing the best of the three transplants, the celebrity is doing the next best, and the better boy, I’m not sure about, it seems to be struggling.  It had some blackening leaves which I clipped off in case they were diseased and am hoping it will recover.  I DO see a couple of flower buds on it, though, as well as the other two tomato plants.  The cherry tomato’s flower buds have actually started opening, so I am thinking (hoping?) it will fruit first.

I have ordered some diatomateous earth to combat the anthills I have seen starting to pop up around my garden boxes.  I am hesitant to use the DE on the actual garden soil although it is perfectly safe for humans, I don’t want to kill off the bees that are already visiting, since for now they’re landing on the soil mostly, I presume for some water, and DE is just as deadly to them as to the other insects.  And if I end up getting some live pest control, well then that would only serve to kill off those as well, and that would be no good at all.  So as much as it pains me to see my poor little seedlings being devoured by those little beasts, I’ll have to put up with it unless I can come up with an alternate quickie fix until I can get some beneficial bugs.

I wonder how they’d do against a water/soap solution sprayed on the soil?