That whole “get outside early, before it gets hot” thing is just not working. After finishing my morning rounds, it was already 25C/77F, with the humidex putting it at 31C/88F! As I write this, it’s actually cooled down a tiny bit, but it’s going to go right back up again this afternoon.
One of the garden beds that has me a bit perplexed is the eggplant and hot pepper bed. I have not tried to replace the plastic around the box frame, that got shredded by the wind, so they’ve been exposed to the wind and temperatures like everything else beside them. That bed does get a bit more sun than the other two beside it. The peppers and eggplants, though, just don’t seem to be growing. This seems like more than transplant shock. They’re just stagnating, and I don’t know why.
Which makes what progress I am seeing in them a bit surprising.
As small as they are, I am seeing flowers opening up among both the Classic eggplant, and the Little Finger eggplant. There are flowers on the Cheyenne hot peppers, too, but I would almost expect that. These peppers were started the earliest. They should be big and bushy and have fruit developing by now, so having a few flowers appear is late for those. For the eggplant, though, would have expected flowers to appear after they’d gotten much better. Especially considering how large the fruit is supposed to get at maturity. The normal fruit size, even for the Little Finger variety, is bigger than the plants are now!
Aside from that mystery, I found a couple of ripe strawberries among the older plants in the asparagus bed. Yesterday evening, I’d picked a few from the bare root strawberries that were planted this spring, and the tiny strawberries grown from seed in the old kitchen garden. The strawberries in the asparagus bed are having the hardest time of it, because the deer keep eating the leaves, so anything out of there is bonus.
There are sugar snap pea pods developing, and I’d picked a couple last night. This morning, there was just one, ready to pick. I’m only picking these because, the more they are harvested from, the more they will produce.
The real bonus this morning was the garlic scapes!
Almost all of the scapes were ready to be harvested. Of the ones remaining, they should be ready to harvest in the next day or two. So we’ll probably have one last harvest, and then be done for scapes for the year.
We need to plant more garlic. 😄
The mint that keeps trying to take over the bed is managing to get into the raised rectangular bed with garlic, tomatoes, onions and shallots in it. Since I was weeding them out, anyhow, I picked enough for a day’s use.
It’s not much of a harvest, and this year, it doesn’t look like we’ll get much that can be harvested through the summer. The bush beans have been decimated by slugs, so I don’t expect anything from them anymore. They mature fast enough that I could replant, but there’s no point, unless we can get rid of the slugs.
I should pick up some cheap beer for slug traps. Even the last Zucca melon is getting decimated, and it’s of a size they normally wouldn’t be able to damage that much. There is evidence of slug damage on some of the melons and winter squash, and at least a couple of melons have simply disappeared, but they seem to really like the Zucca melon – enough to get up into that kiddie pool raised bed it’s planted in!
The shelling peas are of a size that they need to be trained up into the trellis netting. There are very few pole beans, but they are getting tall enough that trellis netting needs to be added on that side of the bed, too.
The hot pepper growth has been stagnant, but so have the bell peppers in the high raised bed. They’re not getting any bigger, though they certainly look healthy, small as they are, and some of them are starting to bloom, too!
Most of the tomato varieties are also showing blooms. The only ones that aren’t are the last San Marzano transplants. Considering how much later they were planted, that’s not a surprise. The ones planted in the old kitchen garden almost all have flowers and are getting tall enough we’re going to have to start clipping them to their bamboo stake supports.
Along with all that, we need to get the weed trimmer and lawn mowers out before the grass gets too tall again. We still have standing water in places, and the ground is still saturated in others, but we should still be able to get at least some of the mowing done. That will give us grass clippings we can add to some of the garden beds as mulch, too.
Also on the list it so finish assembling the log frame on the one low raised bed. I was able to accumulate more cardboard that I plan to put under the logs, first. So they’ll need to be rolled away, the ground under where they will go needed to be levelled off more, the carboard laid down as a weed barrier, then the logs rolled back and permanently attached to each other. I just plan to cut notches in the shorter end pieces to fit them over the ends of the side pieces, to set them snug against each other. I still have some broken pieces plant supports I got a few years ago. They were hollow metal tubes coated in plastic, and with so many rocks in our soil, they broke very easily. I’ve used some of them, already, on the current trellis bed. I used an auger bit on my drill to make a hole through the logs at the short ends, then drove the broken lengths of supports in, to hold them together. I plan to do the same thing when assembling the new frame. It needs to be done very soon, as the winter squash is starting to grow into the paths, and will soon be too big to move out of the way without damaging them.
Meanwhile, the temperature and humidex is already starting to get hotter again. Our humidity levels are supposed to reach over 90% at times. I’m amazed we have an only 25% chance of rain this evening. I would have expected thunderstorm warnings. We do have a small system with storms in it passing us to the north, but not anywhere near where we are.
Well, summer is summer, and I’d better get used to the heat, if I’m going to get anything done.
The mosquitoes, on the other hand, are something I will never get used to!! Mosquitoes, horseflies, deer flies… they’re all just brutal this year!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 
I was just wondering this morning if strawberries will grow from seed since they produce runners to clone themselves. Do you know if those plants will be as hearty? I’m loving our strawberry patch this year but the asparagus tanked badly and I lost almost all my seedlings with the June freezes overnight. Barely anything to harvest yet. It’s been a tough year down here!!
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