I can’t say the garden has been all that impressive this year, so there really isn’t much to report, but I figured I should get something posted here mostly for the record’s sake. Weather has finally been consistently warm, but June was very wet, frequently cloudy, and just generally bleh…but that last week of June, we were finally in the 90 F range for much of the week. This week is a bit cooler, but it seems like the rain has finally slowed down and may continue that way for the rest of July.
This past weekend, I chopped down the remaining lettuce and spinach. We hadn’t been eating it for weeks and it was mostly going to seed, so I chopped it down and am leaving it to compost in the garden. We’re keeping the kale for now, as it’s in the most shaded spot (clearly not in this picture…), but we aren’t optimistic we’ll get much more. Maybe we’ll be surprised!
The tomatoes are looking good! There are ‘maters on there, but they’re still green and small. The cages Brooke’s Dad made for her birthday are holding them in pretty well, allowing us a change to keep the weeds in check around them. Given the size of them, I’m still betting it’ll be a few more weeks before we can pick any of them.
The peppers look pretty good too, but they’re mostly long and skinny…and hotter than Brooke intended (again). A few of the plants haven’t produced peppers yet, so we don’t know for sure what we’ll ultimately end up with. I thought she planted some bell peppers, but I haven’t seen many (any?) of those yet.
The zucchini straight up died. Dunno what happened there, but it just shriveled up. Brooke planted a few more seeds in that spot, so maybe we’ll get some late-Summer or early-Fall?
Calvin planted watermelon plants, also. Three plants came up and they appear to be doing alright. There aren’t many flowers, so it remains to be seen if we’ll get anything out of it…
In the rest of the plot, we tried planting some beans, but nothing ever came up. Brooke went ahead and planted some green beans in a few rows, since that plot did mostly nothing (more on that in a second). The big story for this year is that the green bean plants just didn’t do much, which is something we never have happen.
The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing as well as they always do! We’ll have plenty of them, but assuming they remain on the usual trajectory, we won’t start picking those until the end of August at the earliest, if not September.
Four sad, pathetic, green bean plants. They at least have some flowers, but at most, we’d get a handful. We think the rain hit in such a way that the ground hardened after planting, preventing the (new!!!) seeds Brooke planted from getting through the surface. That’s speculation, but it’s a reasonable theory. Regardless, Brooke planted some more seeds this past weekend that clearly won’t be ready until Fall, if at all. It’s a “Hail Mary,” but at this point, we don’t have anything to lose.
And last, but not least, Brooke and Calvin did a bit with the bees this past weekend. They took care of the (copious) weeds around the hives and put down some paving stones out in front of them to try and keep some paths open for the bees to come and go while keeping weeds out of the way. The size of the hives prevent me from getting too close with the weed eater, so this seems like a reasonable solution. Calvin took a peek in the big one and is pretty sure it’s all capped honey up there, so if those three supers are full, we’ll get a good harvest this year! The small hive still may not amount to much, but any swarm is a gift, so we’ll take it!