The State of the Garden Address.....:)

[CathyA]

How's your garden doing now?
I'm a little happier this morning, since we got a little rain!! Still nowhere close to what we need, but it sure gives the garden a little hope. This is only the second tiny rain in about 2 months. I didn't have to water today!
I'm amazed at how quickly cucumbers grow. Its the main producer in the garden right now. But you really have to watch for hidden cucs, or their production will really slow down. They can be really well hidden. Whenever my cuc production slows.......its always because of a huge one hiding somewhere.

I have picked just a couple Blue Lake green beans. I hope I can get alot more before the jap beetles eat all the leaves. My roma pole and my kentucky blue poles haven't even started making blossoms yet. I sure hope the weather improves before they decide to never blossom.

I have absolutely no zucchini yet, which is really unusual. They usual start producing really early and go like gang busters. I'm not sure what's going on with them, unless they really prefer rainwater to groundwater, or its just too hot for them. Very unusual.

My butternut squash are growing, but keeping the squash bugs away is a challenge. My peppers are doing okay, but seem to get sunburned easily. Tomatoes are slowly growing. I'll have a red one in a couple days, but that's because some ground-dwelling rodent must have dwelled right under it and killed the plant. So I'm letting the green tomatoes slowly ripen on their own.
Cherry tomatoes are doing well.
Snow peas are gone.

How does your garden grow?

[iris lily]

Record drought. It sucks. Watering multiple times weekly. It sucks. But DH is pulling in a good number of veg produce: zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, beets, lots of sweetcorn, and the okra is just coming on. Okra LOVES hot weather. DH borrowed one huge section of garden from me for the year, and he's got big squash, gourds, and pumpkins coming on.

[Gardenarian]

It's been a cold summer out here is San Francisco. The plums, however, are extraordinary!! We had to thin them out a lot to keep limbs from breaking! Tomatoes, eh, not too good. Zucchini got rot. Greens are all flourishing and winter squash are spreading like mad (but not many blossoms.)

We had a light rainfall this week (we usually have no rain May-October.) More weird weather - but welcome!

My roses are gorgeous this year.

[citrine]

Tomatoes, Basil, Oregano, and Jalapenos are doing fantastic. My hydrangeas look sad even though I water and feed them. Their colors are a dark pink and a lime green! I bought blue ones initially!
We put in a few other plants this year, so tiny....hopefully next year they will get bigger. We are hoping to make the raised garden beds this fall and have them ready for next spring.

[treehugger]

We had such an unusually cool summer last year that we ending up wasting a whole lot of effort and water for little return on garden produce. So, this spring, we weren't too sad that we didn't have the time or energy to put in a garden. We live in a drought-prone state, so it really is sad to use that much water and not even get much to eat!

That said, I am missing not having a garden this summer. But since we joined a CSA in February, that makes up for it, mostly. We do (always) have herbs in pots, so at least I have plenty of basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary to cook with. Sure wish my Italian parsley would get it together and grow.

Kara

[CathyA]

I guess when I posted my initial post, I was still high on it having rained. haha We are in a "severe drought" here too. I've been watering the garden mostly every other day and sometimes every day. Its just surviving. With the early, wonderful spring we had, if it had rained appropriately and not been in the lower 100's, this would have been an unbelievable year. But alas, I guess we're just not supposed to get perfection. it spoils us, right? haha
The temp dropped into the 70's after the rain, but now its mid 80's with the heat index at 98 and heading higher. The ground is already drying out. Oh well. It was heaven for the couple of hours that it lasted.

[Blackdog Lin]

No rain here either - DH is watering the garden every other day. Even so, this is the best garden year we've had in a long long time. Must be the perfect spring we had when putting the garden in.

The green beans did so well that I finally asked DH to mow them down - I picked those darn bushes 10 times (yeah, 10 pickings, 1/2 to a full 5-gallon bucket each time). The corn did very well, we lost the zucchini and cucumber plants to squash bugs, the potatoes didn't produce much but we enjoyed eating the few pounds we ended up with, and the onions are all dug but there aren't enough of them - I'm about out of them already. We're down now to tomatoes, peppers and okra. I'm picking a 5-gallon bucket of tomatoes (about the most georgous perfect tomatoes we can ever remember growing!) every second or third day, along with 3-4 pounds of okra each picking.

So we're heavily involved right now in canning salsa. I'm sitting here in the corner of the kitchen and behind me is the detrious of last night's canning session: the pressure canner laying out, the island still half-covered with tomatoes, a basket of peppers that didn't get used, plenty of dirty dishes, and looking oh-so-lovely on the counter on a tea towel is 7 quarts and 7 pints of fresh-canned salsa.

A good garden year is truly a blessing, isn't it?

[Gregg]

We're still in a rental while working on our new house so its all containers here. Cherry tomatoes and about a dozen different herbs are going gang busters. A few tiny cantelope and watermelons on the vines. Green beans and zucchini aren't doing anything worth mentioning. Cukes are producing ok, would be a lot better except I put them in containers that are too small.

Tried the topsy-turvy upside down tomato pots this year. Don't like them. They're too small, miss a day of watering and goodbye tomatoes. Besides, the plants just grow and curl around them and head upward toward the sun. I've deduced the pretty pictures of big, healthy, heavily fruited plants hanging straight down were all probably grown upright hydroponically and then flipped right as the photographer showed up. Live and learn.