Corn Tasseling and Other Things in the Garden

The Buhl sweet corn is tasseling, and I can see little corns forming. So cool.

The long season Morado corn is already as tall as me. It's supposed to end up 8-12 feet tall. Only a few stalks lodged at the beginning when they were a foot tall, but they're all staying nice and upright now even with all the rain and wind we've been getting.

Buhl sweet corn tasseling. They're only about 4.5 feet tall at this point.

A few of the stalks only have a single ear forming, but I've counted a few stalks with possibly 4 ears starting.

Baby Buhl corn? So cute. They're actually a very well rooted variety with no signs of lodging. I can actually see them forming more roots at the bottom of their stems, so they're very stable. 

The Butta(F1) zucchini is making babies! My husband got me a big spiralizer for Mother's Day, so I'm incredibly excited. This yellow zucchini is very prolific.

This baby Tuscany melon is about three inches long, but I've seen them get this large and yellow and fall off. So fingers crossed that doesn't happen.

Looks like this is the only baby the Charentais melon has set. They haven't made many female blooms yet and the bed is fairly overcrowded so pollinators probably have problems getting to them.

The onions that were started from seed are making me crazy. Half the bed died out when the Cipolle di Tropea red onions got powdery mildew. The Borettana Cipollini onions aren't swelling up yet, but otherwise they're coping with the rain well. I went ahead and seeded beets in the back half of this bed.

Tall Top Early Wonder beet in the onion bed. They popped up in just 3 days with the warm weather we've been having.

The leeks are doing wonderfully. I've never gotten them to this size in Kentucky before. This variety is American Flag. I'm growing them in clumps of three about 8-12 inches apart. I tried trenching them last year which worked very well, but the squash plants ended up overrunning them.

The Fruiting Vegetable Garden in June

Golden King of Siberia, a giant yellow-gold tomato. The plant has wispy leaves and seems to hate our hot weather but it always manages to produce, interestingly it seems to put effort in ripening one giant tomato at a time. This one is about the size of my hand already I had to prop it up under a piece of string because the whole plant fell over trying to hold it up.

Purple Cherokee really seems to enjoy this year's drier weather. During wet years this variety cracks terribly which means it rots before ripening, either way it really needs to be supported so the tomatoes don't come in contact with the wet ground or be grown in raised beds with good drainage. It's a great variety that puts on lots of fruit, but I don't think we got a single tomato that didn't rot during last year's floods.

All the tomatoes are three weeks to a month behind, I had to replace 40 plants this year due to varmint destruction. Even so, it looks like it'll be a decent year for tomatoes.

Celebrity (F1), I decided to grow a hybrid variety just as insurance against weather related issues. I've grown this variety before in desert country, it puts on two big flushes of tomatoes so would be classified as more of a semi-determinate. These fruits are more pointed at the blossom end than what is normal for this variety and they're not as ruffled on the shoulders, so I don't know what that means breeding wise. I do know it's a cross between a roma-like paste tomato and some round variety.

Homestead, a new variety for me. It's putting on some nice big bunches of tomatoes but they seem to be growing slowly.

Pear tomato, a red Italian variety that's supposed to be nice and big with gorgeous ruffles. The big one is about the size of my palm but still has a long ways to go.

The cucumbers are finally coming on like crazy, there are little cucumbers everywhere which I've been hand-pollinating everyday.

Ahhh, summer squash season is close at hand. The bees haven't found the squash plants yet so I've been trying to remember to hand pollinate, but it's difficult because the flowers don't stay viable very long. I purchased a couple of Yellow Crookneck plants but they've been hit by squash vine borers, they've recovered but aren't much bigger than this seeded plant.

The zucchini plants are massive already, 4-5 feet across. So exciting. I tried pollinating them this morning so fingers crossed.

The Korean melons have set 3 or 4 fruits and they're starting to take over the pepper bed. I'm really hoping this is the same type of melons we ate while visiting Virginia. Unlike the Crimson Sweet watermelon plants which keep growing and growing but no female flowers have shown up yet.

The snap pole beens are infected with rust with all the lower leaves dying out as the disease climbs up the plants, it's unlikely we'll be getting much green beans. They were heavily infested by flea beetles this spring which weakened the plants to begin with.

Santa Fe Grande is setting lots of little peppers. It's one of the hottest varieties I grow. The peppers are thin-walled but have a great flavor which I use in our salsa. We can salsa at varying levels of heat, but the heat does seem to mellow over time. I've increased the types of peppers and tomatoes in our salsa, and it is so good. The flavors are so complex and magical.

This year we have Serrano chile, Anaheim, Numex Big Jim, Numex Joe Parker, Santa Fe Grande, Lemon, and the hot Fish pepper. Sweet pepper wise, we're growing Corno Rosso, Carmagna Rosso, and Jimmy Nordello. Our daytime temps have been in the 100's (38 degrees Celsius) and nighttime temperatures at 75 degrees, so the plants have been aborting their flowers. This week it's supposed to cool down to the upper 80's (31 Celsius), so hopefully the plants can set more fruit before the next heat wave. Otherwise I'll be resorting to store bought peppers, knuckle bite.

Bamboo Ridge Trellis for Cucumbers and Pole Beans

I finally finished trellising the 25-30 foot row of pole beans on Thursday, the 25th. It only took a week of lacing brown string between top and bottom bamboo poles and untangling pole bean vines. The yard-long asparagus beans were knee high when I began but by the end of the week they're reaching the almost 6 feet tall posts. They must be loving the heat and humidity.

The other pole beans were so much longer and took forever to untangle. Hours upon hours. Heat upon heat.

In comparison this side of the trellis (which I actually did first) containing melons, cucumbers, loofa, and bitter melon was so much easier to trellis. It only took 2-3 days which included setting up the bamboo structure, zip tying netting to the bamboo posts, detangling vines and trying to get tendrils to attach to the netting.

All in all it took a week and a half of work in ninety-some degree weather. Our yard backs up to a shared alley, so there were lots of witnesses to me sweating up a storm mostly neighbors and passersby. Even a work crew with a big machine scraping weeds growing in the alley and the men later laying down new gravel. Ah well. Life goes on.