Garden Update: Week 18

My poor little garden. The weather has not been kind to it. We had a really hot June and then a cooler and really wet July and now it's August and super hot again. The garden is not fond of this type of treatment. I have gotten a few little harvests of tomatoes and beans and peppers.

Despite my best efforts, almost the entire squash family of plants did not recover from the powdery mildew and I pulled up the dead/dying ones last weekend. The butternut squash is the only thing that seemed to look okay. I'm skeptical that it will actually produce a squash but we'll have to wait and see. It has lots of blooms but that's about it.

I dug around for potatoes too, the vines had all withered and died a couple of weeks ago. I found enough potatoes for one meal for us - they were bite-sized. The purple Peruvian were bigger but there were more of the la ratte potatoes. Again, I'm considering the weather in relation to this grow-fail. I don't know if I'll try potatoes again, maybe sweet potatoes since I think they grow in this climate a little better. We had the tiny potatoes roasted in the oven with olive oil, sea salt, garlic and rosemary.

The tomatoes are not doing much better, the horned tomato worms are every where and I've only been able to locate and pick off a few of them. The Roma tomato plant from the compost is doing the best, although the tomatoes are more the size of grapes than Roma's. I'm okay with that though. I have a lot of green tomatoes but not many without splits and a black spot or two. From what I can tell some of the plants have blossom end rot too. The green beans and the purple pole beans are blooming again, taste-wise I prefer the green beans but the pole beans grow really well.Hot weather has it's benefits, the peppers are exploding because they adore the heat. The golden bell peppers are huge and a couple might be ready to pick in the next week or so.

I have more Serrano peppers than I know what to do with and they are HOT.

My eggplants aren't not thriving, I did get one that was a decent size. There are a few more on the vine but I don't know that they'll make it.I'm going to try to plant a few fall crops in the next couple of weeks. I bought October beans, arugula, cauliflower, broccoli and rainbow swiss chard. The beans will be planted this weekend but the other things will probably have to wait until the first of September. Doug has a plan to make tops for the beds so once it finally gets cold I'll be able to turn the raised beds into cold-frame boxes.

Lastly, my second crop of figs is starting to come in. I grabbed a couple and just ate them in hand. They're a little smaller than the first crop but still tasty.