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.
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| Caged tomato plants. The front row are all cherry tomatoes. |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Siam Queen basil is doing really well. They're surprisingly bushy without having to pinch off the main growing tip.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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| The bush beans are blooming. Hooray! Snap beans, here we come! |
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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.
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The Adirondack Blue potatoes are doing much better after being fed. No more yellowing leaves or anything.
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| The Blues are even blooming, hopefully they're actually making potatoes. |
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.
