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 Weedy Garden in June

We planted the garden about a month ago, so I wanted to give a little tour of what's been going on.

It's been a fairly hot summer already with temperatures in the 90's since the end of May. Certain varieties are adversely affected by the unrelenting heat. A few tomato plants that did really well last year are half the size this year, and they're setting less fruit. Namely Cosmonaut Volkov, Peron, Coustralee, Black Krim, and Black Brandywine.

Caged tomato plants. The front row are all cherry tomatoes.

Sweet potato bed. The Purple on the left are spaced maybe 3 feet apart, whereas the unknown orange type (likely Beauregard) are spaced about 1.5 feet apart. Some of the slips I grew of the orange are ultra tiny so I figure they probably won't make it.

The kale are doing surprisingly well. They're in the shadiest part of the garden so that is likely helping. There's a Portuguese kale and a Nero de Toscana kale.

The Asian chives are still alive, although one accidently got weeded. But the shallots are all dead. It was during the time we got 4 inches of rain and then it immediately went to 98 degrees for a few days (36.7 Celsius). I think they actually got steamed to death.

The lemon basil is loving the heat. To the left of them is a row of ground cherries, being next to the lawn is probably hard on them. The ground cherries planted in the tomato beds are easily 2-3 times bigger.

Siam Queen basil is doing really well. They're surprisingly bushy without having to pinch off the main growing tip.

It's really nice to have parsley around to use, but at the bottom of the pic are a couple of leaf celery plants which I expected to get a lot taller. It would be a bummer if they stayed this small with tiny stringy stems.

I'm experimenting with caging Aunt Molly's and the unnamed ground cherry. They really want to flop on the ground, but I keep forcing them into the cage as the stems get long enough. 

Most of the cucumbers have reached the top of their cages and they're just starting to set fruit. There are few bees out and about, so I hand pollinate these along with melons.

And a very weedy patch of Morado corn, it's about waist high. A few of the plants were knocked down by heavy rain, hilling up soil around the stems seems to be helping with that.

Mostly sweet pepper patch with melons planted in the center. They've just started to bloom but peppers have a hard time setting fruit when nighttime temperatures are high.

I actually weeded the Buhl corn today and I managed not to pull or step on any of them. They seem to be forming quite a bit of tillers even when the plants are small.

Can you see the leeks amongst the weedy grass? I weeded half the onion patch a couple of weeks ago and half the onion plants died. It's made me nervous about weeding the leeks and the rest of the onions.

The bush beans are blooming. Hooray! Snap beans, here we come!

The potatoes in pots had yellowing leaves, so I trimmed them up and fed them. But something is still going on with this pot. They haven't bloomed or anything so I don't think they're close to being harvestable. This was just from a mix of red and yellow seed potatoes.

The Adirondack Blue potatoes are doing much better after being fed. No more yellowing leaves or anything.

The Blues are even blooming, hopefully they're actually making potatoes.

The plan is to weed the Morado corn tomorrow after work, and then weed the leeks and onions this weekend. I'll have to spend a lot of time with the leek patch so they don't get accidently get pulled along with the weeds.

I'm having a really hard time getting New Zealand spinach to germinate indoors. I might try using the area that used to house shallots as a seedling bed.

Thank goodness it rained a few days ago. I was hand watering sections of the garden in the morning before work and other parts after work. Which is part of the reason I'm so behind in weeding.

I'll be sharing pics of fruiting vegetables soon. I won't be getting big tomatoes at the end of June like last year, mid July more like.