July 2026 - the month when the wheels came off

I was feeling maybe a bit cocky about the garden by the time July arrived.  Yes, it had been pretty hot in June, but we had gotten 5.62" of much needed rain, and the garden seemd to be holding its own without me having to give things extra water.

Then, when we got .2" on July 2, .44" on July 4 and .37" on July 6, I thought maybe this July wasn't going to be the typical hot dry month that we normally see.

It was a worse.

For the entire month of July, we got only 2.13" of rain, with almost half of that (0.95") of that coming with only three days left in the month.

But the lack of rainfall was made even worse by the temperature.  The days were very hot.  There were only three days during the entire month where the high for the day was below 90° F.  We had eight days where the high was at or over 100° F, with the temperature reaching 106° F twice.  On July 21st, with the temperature at 106.5° F and the humidity factored in, the heat index was 129° F.  

Early in July, the garden didn't look too bad, because we had gotten a bit of rain, and the high temperatures were only in the mid to low 90s.  But on July 7th, the temperature passed 100° F.  I decided to be proactive this year and get the shade cloth up over the tomatos, okra, bell peppers and cantaloupes before they started showing stress from the intense sun.

It was cloudy that day, but still hot, and I was happy to have the shade cloth up.  Disaster averted... or so I thought.

A couple of summers ago an armadillo (probably injured) dug a hole in the garden and died.  I had filled the hole in at some point, and figured that was the end of that.

But as I was putting up the shade cloth, I discovered that the hole had been dug out again.  "Hmm...," I thought to myself.  "That's odd."  Had the armadillo that lives under RAF's observatory been in the garden digging again?  I made a mental note to get the shovel and fill the hole in, but as with most of my mental notes, I lost it somewhere in my collection of mental notes and didn't think much else about it.  

I should have.  I should have thought a lot about it.

Rewind for a second back to June - something kept eating the leaves off of the green beans and the Kentucky Wonder pole beans.

I've always blamed rabbits for any damage like that, but then I hadn't seen any rabbits in a very long time.  Whatever it was, I decided I should put up some wire to protect the beans.  I took a scrap of old 2" x 4" welded wire I had salvaged when RAF and I last went to the landfill and sloppily fastened it up around the bean plants growing up the trellis.

The bean plants did grow and were actually looking pretty good.  But on July 1st as I was making my rounds through the garden, I was horrified to find the wire laying over on the ground...

and many of the poor bean plants had been eaten down to the stems!

Things went downhill from there.

In hindsight, I think a lot of what happened in July was my own doing.  As I mentioned in my last post, I had declared last year that I was NOT going to allow zinnias to take over the garden this summer.  I actually did pull up a few that were in the walking rows, and even some that were in the growing rows, but they got ahead of me again, and once they started to bloom, I just couldn't bear the thought of cutting them down.  The butterflies and bumblebees were on them every day, and there just didn't seem to be many native flowers blooming that the insects could depend on.  

So the zinnias stayed. They quickly took over. The garden turned into a giant zinnia patch with food crops growing in amongst them.   

It was beautiful. But............

It turns out that a giant zinnia patch makes excellenct cover for groundhogs to come and go as they please.

Yep, groundhogs....  A groundhog had visited the graden before, but it hadn't really done too much damage.  But this year, the mama groundhog that had lived so peacefully out in the brush pile for the past few years discovered the garden and this time she brought one of her little ones with her.  It was they - not rabbits - who were the culprits behind the disappearing bean leaves.

What started out as just missing leaves on a the bean plants escalated quickly.  So what do groundhogs eat other than beans?

They eat sweet potatoes.

They eat morning glories.

They eat crimson clover.

They eat carrots.

They eat squash plants.

They eat cantaloupe plants and the cantaloupes on them. 

They eat cucumbers.

They eat sunflowers - small...

... and large.

They eat tomatoes - ripe...

... or green.

They eat watermelons...

... even when some fool tries to put something prickly in their way to stop them.

They do not eat zinnias.

At one point, I did get the shovel and put dirt back into the hole.  It didn't matter.  The next day the hole had been dug out again, and it was bigger than ever.

They aren't scared of us at all.  They come right up to the carport slab.  They do run when they see us, but only after they've given us a good looking over, and even then, it's not a frantic "I have to save myself!" run.  It's more of an "I wish they'd leave us alone" run.  

I startled the little one in the garden late one evening.  It ran to the safety of the hole, and I stood very still a few feet from the hole, just watching.  It kept popping its head out of the hole and looking at me with its big dark eyes - which incidentally are topped by little white eyebrows, and are framed by long dark eyelashes.

Even as angry as I was, I couldn't help but think, "What a beautiful little animal."  But doggone it, it needs to STAY OUT OF MY GARDEN!!!!  

After about five minutes had passed, I decided I would try to scare it enough that it would leave and not come back.  I started shoveling dirt into the hole and banging on the top of the row.  Of course I didn't fill the hole in all the way because I didn't want to trap it there...I just wanted to scare it (although I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have mattered if I had filled the hole in).  I then covered the hole with a bit of wire and put a piece of broken brick over the wire, just to make it have to work to get free. 

The next day, the wire and the brick were pushed aside, and the dirt was back out of the hole.  

And a couple of days later, I discovered a new hole a couple of rows over.  I suppose having to dig its way back out of that hole made it realize it needed an escape route "in case that mean woman tries to bury me alive again!"

I had absolutely and unequivocally lost. The garden was completely decimated.

I gave up.

But fools are called fools for a reason, I guess.  I still have it in my head that I can outsmart them.  My brother-in-law said, "You wouldn't want to shoot them, would you?"  I shook my head no.  I don't think I've reached the point where I could stand to have anyone do that (not yet anyway). 

So first, it seems like the best approach is going to have sturdy cages around everything with something around or over the top to keep them from getting in.

(Oh...did I forget to mention that they apparently can (and will) climb?)

And second, the zinnias will not be allowed in the main garden anymore.  I will still grow zinnias, but there are areas in the back of the garden that are too poor to grow food crops, and I think the zinnias will love it there.

The garden simply cannot be allowed to turn into a "jungle" again.  I hope that if the groundhogs don't feel so safe coming and going maybe they'll not come and go so often.

I put lots of work into the garden this year, and I feel so deflated.  In spite of all that work, everything has pretty much been a bust.  And it wasn't just because of the groundhogs.  

• The potatoes did Ok, but it was too dry and when I pulled the vines, there were only a few decent sized potatoes. Most of them were very small.  
  
  
• The garlic and onions did Ok, although because of the dry weather, they were much smaller than I hoped for.
  
  
• The green peas were loaded, but I only harvested a few before they were totally coated over with powdery mildew.  I could probably still have picked them, but it seemed kind of yucky and I was afraid all that mildew might make us sick, so I just cut the vines down and threw them in the compost.
  
  
• A couple of the Savoy cabbages did ok, but other than a few broccoli florets here and there, none of the brassicas produced anything - and then they were completely eaten up by Harlequin bugs.
  
  
• I harvested a total of three very small yellow squash.  The squash vine borers took out every one of my early plants just as they were starting to bloom, and the groundhogs did in the rest of them before they even got to bloom stage.
  
  
• I managed to harvest just enough okra for us to have fried okra one time.  As I've said before, a person who can't grow okra isn't much of a gardener.
  
  
• The corn looked so healthy at the end of June and I was just sure we were doing to have a nice harvest.  But from three rows of corn, I only harvested about 20 ears that were worth anything. 
  
  
  
  The rest of the ears didn't get pollinated, likely because it turned off so hot just as they were starting to shed their pollen.  The raccoons got my little sister's corn this year, and as I was pulling the husks off of mine, I was grumping to myself, "I should have just left these for the raccoons too."
  
  
• The white sweet corn made a few ears (we ate four), but when I went to pick them, my hand got covered in fire ants.  Who knew they would climb up into the corn like that!  I never went back for any more.
  
  
• The San Marzano tomatoes that were loaded down all went to waste.  I didn't pick a single one, I'm ashamed to say.  
  
  
• The slicing tomatoes all went to waste as well.  I think the dry weather caused the Rutgers to suffer from blossom end rot, but the Cherokee Purple and Mortgage Lifters were ruined by stink bugs again. 
  
  
  
  The only way to peel them was to take a peeling about 1/4" thick, and that pretty much left nothing but the pulp and seeds in the middle.  Trying to peel them made me mad and more than once I smashed the goopy mess down into the bowl and said, "FORGET IT!" 
  
  I had planned to spray the tomatoes with Kaolin clay this year to see if that would protect them, but then I let all of the vines fall over, and then the groundhogs found them.
  
  
• We did get to eat a few of the Tommy Toe tomatoes (which were also loaded), but apparently they are quick and easy snacks for the groundhogs and those little tomatoes all disappeared almost overnight.
  
  
• My jalapeno peppers were grown from seeds I had saved, and apparently the plant had cross-pollinated with a bell pepper or something.  The peppers looked like jalapenos, but had absolutely no heat to them at all.  They tasted exactlly like a bell pepper.
  
  
• I picked a few poblano peppers, but never did anything with them, and eventually just threw them on the compost.
  
  
• The apple trees made a few apples, but because I didn't spray with the Kaolin clay, they were all hit by worms of some kind, and most of the apples rotted on the tree. 
  
  
  
  
  
• The fig tree died back to the ground, but did put back up new growth and actually started making figs.  Unfortunately, the little figs have all shrivled up and fallen off because of the heat and drought.
  
  

I could go on and on and on with my sad tale, but I think I should not do that.  Instead, I'm going to start thinking about planting my winter cover crops.  Thankfully, the groundhogs don't seem interested in monocots - they've not bothered the Sorghum Sudan grass (or the crab grass) at all!  So I think I'll at least be able to grow cereal rye again even if they are still coming through the garden on a regular basis.

I said something to RAF the other day about not being able to grow a garden to save my life.  He said, "It did seem to do a lot better back when you were tilling."  And he does have a point.  I don't think I've grown a good garden since I stopped tilling.  

There's just something that I'm missing...somewhere there are pieces to the puzzle that I can't find, and until I find them, I think I'm going to continue to struggle.  I don't know why it has to be so hard.  But I guess the only thing to do when the wheels fall off like they have this year is pick the wheels back up and try your best to get them put back on.

Maybe next year will be the year when I figure things out. 

Maybe.