Our summer trial garden is about a month old now so I thought it was time for an update.
We lost 1 tomato plant to some type of fungus. We babied it and isolated it but to no avail, it died anyway.
Remember we started our garden a month later than most people so. . .we are not harvesting yet, but there is fruit on the vine-well at least a little fruit, but the vines are really big!!
This is the pride of our garden, our sole surviving tomato plant. It looks like we will have 3 harvests of cherry tomatoes, at least so far only 3. This plant is thriving and I really expect more fruit will develop on it. Now if we can just keep the worms out of the tomatoes we will be okay.
These are the ones hidden in the above photo. They are starting to lighten up and hopefully turn red.
Our pepper bush suffered a lot from the lack of water when we were out of town so we pruned all the dead leaves and although the plant is leggy it looks healthy. We had a few buds on it last week but they have since fallen off. Time will tell if we get any fruit off of this plant.
Squash seems to be really growing well. We have 6 squash plants and they are all growing and blooming. We even have a few tiny squash on the plants. Some earlier squashes never grew, they started and then dried up, so we are hoping for better luck with these.
If we get as many cucumbers as we have blooms and vines from this plant, we will be eating cucumbers everyday. However, the plant is doing really well and is full of blossoms but no fruit yet. We are still hoping!!
Zucchini is another plant that is really growing big with lots of blooms. The pots are so full of plants that I had to stake them. And this is our newest baby, a tiny zucchini.
We (especially Larry) have been doing a lot of studying to see what we did wrong so we won’t make the same mistakes again. The biggest mistake we made was not spacing the squash far enough apart. Evidently squash takes a lot of room and we did not account for that.
As for the scales that the tomato plant developed, we think it was probably like that when we bought it. The plant became infested with scales much too quickly for it to have happened after it was transplanted.
Going out of town during the first couple of weeks after planting everything was also a mistake (however, we went to visit our grandkids so it was well worth it). The first few weeks are when a plant adapts to its new surroundings and they require regular watering and sunshine. We trusted our plants to nature and unfortunately it did not rain while we were gone so the peppers suffered.
Thus far, we have not used any chemicals on our veggies and we are trying hard to maintain that.
Remember this was an economic trial. If the price of fresh veggies continues to rise, we will break even if we only get a few cherry tomatoes. So with that in mind we have already started our fall garden. This time we are starting from seeds and we planted carrots yesterday. We are praying for a bountiful harvest this year.
So, how does my garden grow? So far we are very pleased and are looking forward to harvesting cherry tomatoes in the next few weeks.
