June 2022 Gardening Journal

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Wow.  It's almost mid-June already and I never really even posted anything in the May gardening journal.   So just a "catch up" post here.

It's been a sad couple of weeks.  A man who was a my former boss and long time dear friend died on May 30.  I still just can't believe he's gone. 

RIP, rotto.  

I promise you I'm going to "steal a piece of pie" one of these days.

The garden seems "slow" this year but then maybe I'm just misremembering how things have been in years past.  The squash seemed to take forever to start to grow, and we just got our first little squash off of the plants last week.  Bad thing is that there are absolutely no pollinators visiting the squash blooms.  The only blooms that have set squash are the ones I've hand pollinated.  Very sad and depressing.  

Thankfully, squash is easy to hand pollinate.  I just have to remember to check the blooms every morning and I've not been very good at doing that.

Three little hand-pollinated squash. Within a couple of days after this picture was taken, this vine had completely wilted, probably due to a squash vine borer.

The cucumbers didn't set any fruit for a good while either, but we have finally gotten three small cucumbers and I have seen some pollinators in among the vines (including a hummingbird).  I think one of the main problems with my cucumbers is that the plants are too thick.  Gardener Scott said, "It's Ok to kill your plants," and I should have listened.  I think every cucumber seed I planted came up and I didn't thin them at all.

My jungle of cucumber vines.

I'm not sure we're going to get very many cucumbers at all.  The ones I picked today were already starting to be "deformed" by the heat, and once that happens, the cucumbers are usually done for.  It was 96° F with a 79° dewpoint (heat index of 121° F).  But we'll see.  If I keep water on them maybe they'll keep producing.

We have harvested one nice little head of cabbage and a few carrots.  The carrots weren't very big, but I cooked some in the air fryer last night and they were very sweet and good.  

I've also picked a couple of little banana peppers that we just ate raw.  Those were pretty tasty too.  

The broccoli and Brussel's sprouts aren't going to amount to anything.  I'm just leaving them so the different kinds of insects that feed on Brassicas will have something to eat.  There are just so few insects around this year!  I'll try those again this fall and hopefully will have better luck.  Interesting update on my broccoli experiment, where I planted three in cardboard boxes filled with compost.  The ones planted directly in the ground are probably three times the size of the ones in the cardboard boxes, so I think the box method didn't work out.

Cross-striped cabbageworm (Evergestis rimosalis) feeding on my Brussel's sprouts.

The fennel has already started to bolt, and since I don't really know anything about growing fennel or what to do with it once harvested, I guess I'll just let it go.  I didn't realize it smells like licorice until the other day when I pinched off the top of one where it had turned black.  Nice!

The strawberry plants have what I think is "Common Leaf Spot."  That's too bad.  I wonder if that came from the wild strawberry plants that I have growing in my flowerbeds, although I don't remember ever seeing anything like that on those plants.  Maybe it won't hurt them too much.  

The Gala apple tree has Cedar Apple Rust, but that was fully expected.  

So far I've not seen any sign of it on the Enterprise apple tree, but it does have some strange gray spots on some of the leaves.  Not sure that those are...possibly powdery mildew?

I gave up on that first corn and okra I planted, and on the second corn and okra I planted, and started over for a third time.  But this time, I went ahead and dug out some more raised rows, put a trench down the center of each row then added some of my aged cow manure in the trench.  My thinking is that I can water down in the trench and avoid the "water runoff" that I've experienced with the first raised rows I made.  The  corn was planted on either side of the trench, giving me the equivalent of four rows in the space I used to use for just one row.  I think that will be fine...the plants on either side of the rows are about a foot apart, so there should be plenty of space for them.

This picture was taken just after the corn had come up, so you can still see the trench down the middle of each raised row.  I've since covered the trench and sides of each raised row to try to help hold in moisture.  The corn is now about four inches high.  For the most part, the plants at the south end of the row where things normally don't grow so well look almost as big as the plants in the rest of the row.  That might be from the added cow manure, or it could be from having their roots up a bit higher so they weren't sitting in water for several days after our last round of rain.

If I had any doubts about pesticides in my composted cow manure, I don't have any now.  Tomatoes are supposed to be one of the crops most susceptible to those herbicides, so I planted a cherry tomato in the center compost bin to see what would happen.

Tomato plant on May 12, 2022.  It looked to be growing Ok, and even had a couple of little tomatoes on it.  The celery plants also seemed to be growing fine, with no ill effects from being planted in the compost.

Same plant on June 5, 2022, now a sprawling monster of a vine with lots of tomatoes and blooms.  The celery is being almost completely crowded out.

I can't seem to get my cantaloupe vines to grow this year.  The first two were planted in the same wide row as the squash, and the first one is blooming, but it's just a tiny little thing...very disappointing.  I've planted a third hill in some of the "candy dirt" in the north side of the garden and will be interested to see how those plants do. 

The radishes and Bibb lettuce were done a long time ago, but I've left a few of them to make seed.  I'm not sure why I would want more radish seeds, because I've decided once and for all that I just don't care for radishes, but thought it might be interesting to try to save some seeds.  RAF does like them, so I'll at least try to grow a few for him.

There are lots of other pictures that could be added, but I've probably rambled on enough for one day.  I'll close this this one:

The south flowerbed has just been showing off!  In this picture, butterfly milkweed, dill, cilantro, larkspur, Rudbeckia, Echinacea, and not yet in bloom, Monarda.  Not shown are the orange day lilies (ditch flowers, as my friend Kim calls them), catnip, and green milkweed.  While it's beautiful to look at, it's sad that there are so few insects visiting the blooms.  I don't know what we're going to do when the insects are gone.