The Garden Chronicles - Week 14
No rain at all this past week, but the humidity dropped a bit and it was pretty nice overall. The week ahead, however, is supposed to be the hottest yet — upper 90's, with a chance of one or two 100+ days, and heat indexes of 110.
I'm not looking forward to that in the slightest, and the national weather says that much of the country east and south of me will be in the same boat. A big heat wave is coming for a lot of us.
Stay cool. 
- Sunday -
Evening shade.
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It was pleasant, too. The breeze was out of the north most of the day.
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Corn.
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Rutgers tomatoes and a few onions.
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I though this was a potato that was coming back after surviving the May weather, but now I'm not so sure. I'm starting to think it's a wild deadly nightshade that fooled me by popping up in just the right spot. I'll let it go for a while and see what it does. If by some chance it does turn out to be a potato, I'd hate to pull it now and ruin it.
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Lettuce. Some old ones harvested, some new ones started.
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Carrots.
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I see a carrot cake or two in the very near future.
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The new carrots. I think I'm going to replant the row on the left, under boards this time. I picked up some new 8 footers.
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Beans.
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Where the turnips and beets were. The second batch of turnips failed. Too hot for them I suppose. Before long I'll pull those few remaining beets and prep this spot for fall beans.
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Butternut squash next to some kohlrabi that was too small to pick before. They'll be out of there soon, though.
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Big Beef tomatoes.
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Eggplant.
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The nearly-drowned peppers are back to where they should have been about a month ago.
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The backup peppers are just starting to flower.
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Still picking blackberries.
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Watermelon vines.
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First and second cucumbers. The third has been planted on the next trellis.
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The first one is producing heavily now.
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They seem shorter this year. Maybe it's just that one plant. We'll see what they look like on the second plant before long.
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I've never done this before, but I'm going to try growing a Waltham Butternut on a trellis. I hope the vines can take the weight of the squash. Wish me luck.
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Cantaloupe. I've done this for years and I know these vines can take the weight of their own fruit. It may seem unlikely, but it's true (with small to medium size cantaloupes, that is, not the jumbos). They don't drop off until the stem goes soft when they're almost ready to eat. It's like a signal telling you which ones are ready. Pretty neat, actually.
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Some little worms have eaten the tops of a few corn plants, but they should still put out silks for ears down below (I'm hoping so, anyway).
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This is what the good tops look like.
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The first Japanese beetle I've found this year. I hope it's the last one, but I know it won't be.
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Not the best year for zucchini so far. I pulled the first sickly plant, turned the soil where it was, and added some peat moss all around to increase the organic matter in the soil. I fertilized too. I'll let the empty place sit for a while and then try another one.
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The planter.
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More blackberries and the second cobbler of the year, which, as you can see, almost bubbled over in the oven. 
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Blackberry cobbler and vanilla ice cream.
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Salad fixings, ready to eat — leaf lettuce (small bowl), romaine lettuce (big bowl), the very first tomato of the year, and some cucumbers.
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More cucumbers from a couple of days later.
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Leftover chicken and turnip stew ( recipe here ), but with kohlrabi in it instead of turnips. It was great. I bet I could even use kohlrabi leaves in it instead of the kale. I'm completely sold on kohlrabi now.
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I hung a trail cam on a tree in the yard on the south side of the house, down by the creek. Bambi makes an appearance in one of the shots below.
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See you next week.
Who else is getting that heat wave this week?
You have a great garden!
Hey, thanks.
It's coast to coast across the south.
Love the article as always. Are you going to make pickles ?
Not planning on it. I only like crispy pickles, and every homemade pickle I've ever had was mushy.
I might give it a try if someone knows how to make them crispy like Vlasics.
Chongqing, where I live, has a few nicknames, but one well deserved is "One of the three furnaces of China".
A/noon Dig. Everything is looking great...well done..Love the deer pic's..Would swap you some cold for some heat...Over Winter and still have 1.5 months of it to go...Where are you sun, sand and surf...sob...
It is 102 currently in Waco Texas!
High 80s low 90s here , watering daily, little to no rain in my weather doughnut hole , it always seems to go around me , gave up on tomatos and carrots , my squashes are coming in but no flowers or fruits showing yet , the cukes are struggling . will have to wait on the taters till later but they are holding their own and have yet to lay down . cabbages and lettuces are edible now . about the only 2 bumper crops I have is weeds and sunflowers and I haven't planted sunflowers in 4 years......
105 in Fort Worth TX.
Then according to Chanel 4 it will get to 108 before cooling down to 100 the rest of the week.
70 where it's important, lol, in the house.
Always cracks me up when people complain about it being hot in Texas.
I'm always like "Really? It's July in Texas and it's hot? Oh, no!"
Had to replace our AC 3 weeks ago, and my sister is replacing hers this week.
Replaced ours 08/18. Trane variable/variable. Expensive but my elecric bills are negligible now compared to the old one.
I know, I know, it's always hotter farther south, but Missouri summers are more than hot enough for me.
St. Louis was one of the most humid places I have been. To me, it is right up there with Houston and D.C.
Oh yeah, this whole part of the country (for several states around) has high humidity in the summer. It may not get quite as hot as places farther south, but there's usually enough rain and surface water to keep it humid enough to make up for it.
I haven't live near St. Louis, but I did live in Virginia right outside of DC, and I swear the trees even seem to sweat there!
But we did gets lots of thunderstorms in the summers, but an hour after they stopped, you could hardly tell it rained.
I'm in Virginia. Last week the humidity was so bad that all of the windows in my house were fogged up in the morning, even though the AC wasn't set that low. It's been so bad at times that I can't keep my car windows clear. They fog inside and out, because the humidity is so high that you're always hovering near the dew point.
I think some of the humidity blows up from the Gulf, too. That swampy bayou air that gets sucked up across east TX and LA by the jet stream sometimes. Air coming in from farther west or the north is never as humid.
We lived in Falls Church and Sterling Park when my dad was stationed in DC.
I was born at Ft. Belvoir and one of my sisters was born in Norfolk.
Lol so was I, small world
109 here in balmy SA with a feels like of 111. I'm about to give up on my tomatoes.😕
I have a lot of potted plants on the deck that go from near death to happy several times a day.
I should just put them in large trays of water lol.
86 out right now, according to my phone, but not too humid. I went for a walk at lunch and lived to tell the tale. Upper 80s to 90s the rest of the week, so not as hot as where you are. Last week was one of those weeks when the air was so hot it hurt, and humid, too.
If you're looking forward to baking carrot cake, have you ever baked zucchini bread? - hot and moist it needs no spread.
Sure. I love zucchini bread. Pumpkin (or butternut squash) bread, too. Good stuff.
That corn is growing fast.
The last time I saw a Japanese beetle was when I live in Maryland, years ago. They use to swarm and cover trees. I use to go up to a tree and shake it and there would be thousands of them on there. They were bad for a while, devouring things in their path.
Have never seen one down here.
As much as I love salad you would think I would have a garden.
I need to come visit you. Haha
Unfortunately not enough to cut down for a baseball park.
I was out there watering earlier and thought I heard someone whispering... if you build it, they will come.
Did your father not play catch with you?
Ugh. Sorry, the 'if you build it' thing is all I've got. It's the the only line I can remember from that movie.
Don't worry. "The people will come."
It shot right up there, didn't it? Kind of makes up for it being over 2 weeks late.
Those Japanese beetles are something else. I know what you mean about covering trees. They tore the heck out of the apple tree a couple years ago. They were all over it. Didn't seem to care much about the other trees, thankfully. They do like corn, though. They get on the silks and can end up burrowing down into the ear. They're almost as bad as ear worms are sometimes. The bastards.
The damage to the corn looks to be corn borer, I believe it is a worm from a weevil that eats straight through the whorl so when the leaf emerges, it has the linear holes in the leaf.
Haven't really had a pest like the Japanese beetle you show, but further down those pests are what took my entire garden out last year. To keep those pests out I have a fence now and have employed the laser show again at night (realized last year I didn't have anything upright that would have the ghosts rise up off the ground spooking them, this year along with the fence I put up panels to achieve this, it seems this also worked on the rabbits).