Garden Report

Everything seems to be going so good with the garden. It always happens this way though. I think I’m doing so great with weed control and I walk out one morning and the weeds are over my head. 

Depending on which weather report I see, we could have storms with hail the size of mini vans this weekend but . . bad word, bad word (trust me . . I just said a few!), look at Sunday night’s low!

This is what makes gardening so hard and I know Mother Nature dishes it out to all of us, no matter where we’re located but I do believe this is the hardest place I’ve ever tried to garden. Tomatoes stop setting fruit when the night temps are above 70 degrees. That’s in our forecast for mid-May. We’ve had 95° degree highs already. Some of the greens have already bolted due to the heat. I didn’t get any broccoli . . it went to flowers right away because of the heat. It is supposed to be 92° today. Hopefully a couple of hours at 39° won’t destroy things but a couple of degrees lower and it could.

You cannot successfully grow a garden when the lows are in the 30’s and the highs are in the 90’s. No matter how much effort you put into it . . some things are just impossible.

OK . . enough complaining. I’ve done what I can do and that’s all I can ever do. I’ll hope for the best and by Monday, hopefully I’ll report that it didn’t get as low, and definitely hopefully no lower, than they predicted.

These are probably Sweet 100. I didn’t look at the tags but they’re a small, bite sized tomato. In fact, I had several of them while out working this morning.

The tomatoes all seem to be growing and healthy.

I believe by this evening, I’ll have some bean blossoms opened up.

I’m really happy with the beans.

We’ll probably have squash blossoms open by this afternoon too.

Lettuce is doing great.

Squash on the left, turnips in the middle and carrots on the right.

I need to thin some of the beets but will wait til after the bad weather in case some of them are damaged and have to come out.

The artichokes are doing fine. This is one left from last year (the only one that survived because Vince didn’t realize that area was not supposed to be tilled up!) And look at that . . whose toes? Surely no one is wearing flip flops in the garden! Bad Judy!

Can you see all those peas? Six rows of peas! The cold weather won’t affect them. I’m waiting for them to get big enough to shell.

They’re getting there but they need another 5 or 6 days and I can pick and shell them. I’ll freeze those.

Just to prove that sometimes I have failures . . the worms have destroyed one row of kale. Thankfully I planted another row in a different part of the garden and they haven’t found it yet. I don’t use any pesticides so sometimes, the worms win and that’s what happened with this row of kale. They haven’t touched the lettuce in the row right next to it. The worms also got all the cabbage and last year, I didn’t have a single worm hole in my cabbage.

I’m very pleased with my garden so far.