July Gardening Update

 

Every day I look forward to coming home from work and spending at least a few moments in the garden with my little dog friend. Rusty loves gardening, especially when we come back in the house with a basket of goodies! 

I had a slight panic to find cucumber beetles on my burpless cucumber plants. However, after doing a bit of reading I am confident that the plants will survive. I have harvested 3 mini cukes and one full size one so far, which is about 3 times as many as I got last year (which was 1)! 

The constant 90 degree temperatures are doing a number on my plants, though. It seems like my zucchini and yellow squash are only making little cuties, not full size fruit. They are also having a lot of fruit fall off before they can be pollinated. I have tried hand pollinating a number of times but have only been able to take in 2 of each vegetable, unfortunately. 

I pulled up the pea plants as they were slowly dying in the heat. I saved a number of dried out pods to harvest the seeds and have a bag of frozen peas as well as a handful of fresh leftover. I am getting a few bush beans here and there, and lots of mixed salad greens. Harvested my first cherry tomatoes today! Looks like I might have some problems with blossom end rot on the Roma tomatoes again. Am starting to wonder if they are more trouble than they're worth!

A few things I'm planning on for the immediate future are building garden storage units with disassembled pallets. I have access to them through my folks' store and my stepfather said he will help me take a bunch apart so I can construct a tool cabinet and a chest. Ultimately, I'm going to also use the pallet wood to build a little greenhouse for keeping seedlings covered in the early spring.

Another project on my radar is erecting shade cloth poles. I don't anticipate summer weather getting any cooler in the future. I know most garden vegetables require "full sun," however it is quite apparent that the combined heat and sun are giving them issues. A tiny bit of reprieve throughout the day should help. And shade cloth only reduces sunlight by 10-20%. 

I spent this past weekend doing some additional summer planting. All of the gardeners I follow online suggest trying to get the most out of your growing season as you can. It is mid-July. My first frost is mid-October to late October. In years past, I had pepper plants continuing to fruit into November! On Monday I planted peas, basil, zinnias, cucumbers, and zucchini in the free area from which I had removed flowers last week. If you'd like, you can watch as I did it! See the video below...

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