The garden has slowed down to a degree, mostly because rain has been very scarce. I’ve watered as best I can, of course, but there’s only so much a sprinkler can do. The temperatures this week have been great: the A/C has been off for a week and will remain that way into next week!
The green beans are “done,” it seems. You can see in the picture above, but the middle of the crop just died off all the sudden and we aren’t sure why. Regardless, Brooke canned 28 pints of beans, plus another 2 pints that didn’t seal correctly, and the 3+ quart-size bags we’ve given away to others. Brooke has also canned cucumbers as lime pickles and ended up with 7 pints of those, but the cucumbers are still coming so she’ll end up with more.
The tomatoes have taken off and have tons of green ones on, but we have relatively few that have actually ripened. And by “relatively few,” I mean “two.” We’ve stolen a few from the Gault’s next door, as it always seems like theirs ripen a month before ours do. I’m not sure what black magic their casting, but whatever it is, it works.
The soup beans are also vining out substantially, though the ones furthest from the trees are doing better. I’m sure it’s the excess sunlight they get over there, but still, worth noting.
The berries aren’t doing much right now. The Japanese Beetle War of 2018 spilled over to them for a little while, but I’m not sure they actually did much damage. We did lose all the peaches except for four that I picked early. After the beetles were done last week (seriously, it took a month this year…), there were still 3 or 4 peaches out there, but when we looked this week, we couldn’t find them. We suspect the neighbors stole them…grrrrrr…
The pole beans have some nice looking pods on them, so we think we’ll be able to pick some soon!
The peppers keep truckin’ along. We’ve got Margaret Peppers coming off the plants, as they’re starting to turn red. They’re bell-type peppers, but they’ve got an ever-so-slight “kick” to them that Meg doesn’t seem to mind. The other plants are mostly hot peppers of the Coyame variety (I think…they at least look a lot like those from last year…)
Last but not least, we added to the walkway over the past few weeks! Meg and Calvin helped a little bit, but weren’t as interested this year in concrete work. I think I ended up getting something like 20 or 25 bags (80 lb) of concrete mix to finish this up, though I’ve got a few extra I didn’t use. The intent is to put a few patio chairs out there and move the chiminea onto the platform, but I’m waiting a few more days for the concrete to harden more fully. I put sand and pea gravel on today, but I still need to get some more to fill in the gaps a bit better.
We’re happy with it, but may need to add a few more segments depending on which chairs we end up settling on. We’ll probably landscape around the patio a bit, but as it’s so shaded there, we need to be careful what, exactly, we plant nearby. Brooke has a large pot she picked up to get something started for next year already, so that’ll make an appearance once she gets some time.
Ultimately, we want some nice old metal chairs, or something similar, but they’re ridiculously expensive and you kinda need to run into them at antique malls, so we’ll get something for the meantime and keep our eyes open for “just the right chairs” to go there. It may be a bit before we find exactly what we want.
Also, in the space between the patio and the tomato garden plot, we’re going to put in a raised bed and a make-shift greenhouse for some lettuce. We want to get that going in the next few weeks so we have time to plant lettuce for the Fall, and perhaps a few other things. I think Brooke’s going to plant some herbs there, too, but we’ll need to wait until next Spring for those. We’ll see what she picks, I suppose!