The Ornamental Vegetable Garden: August weather to begin July

The 90 degree weather we're having all week is severely limiting my time in the garden. Luckily, most things are taking care of themselves. The lettuce bed, which was more ornament than food, looked quite lovely up until a few days ago when the plants began to seriously bolt and flower.

I don't plan on purchasing seed for next year - or hopefully any future year - but will save seed from these plants to sow next spring. I have no idea how much they will have cross-pollinated, so I'll be interested to see what kind of crop I get.

'Marketmore' cucumbers are producing beautifully, just as they have every year I've planted them. So far, I've harvested five, and there are many more forming. The old wagon wheel is working fairly well as a trellis.

Baker Creek seeds always sends free seeds along with their orders, and this year I tried the 'Lao' eggplant they sent. I'm not an eggplant fan, but this one produces small, round white fruit, and I thought that would look pretty in the garden. Of the four little seedlings I planted - which were pretty in their own right (and produced lovely little purple flowers) - two were immediately eaten up by some tiny insects I never saw and had to be pulled, and the other two, which I planted at the back of the wagon wheel, are subsumed by the cucumber vines.

The 'Henderson Bush' lima beans I planted on June 1 are filling out and starting to twine.

I wasn't supposed to plant spring cabbage this year, but I forgot I was going to try a fall crop to see if the insect damage would be less. The rabbits ate down the few I had, and then the cabbage worms wreaked havoc on the ones that came back. So I pulled all but two that weren't thoroughly disfigured, and they may not get to stay either.

There's also one 'Mrs. Maxwell's Big Italian' tomato in a cage in that plot, which became a hodgepodge when the cabbages were eaten and the zinnias failed to come up. I finally sowed crimson clover seed throughout, and that's made a carpet out of which the zinnias have finally managed to grow and flower.

From another angle, after pulling out cabbages

'Mrs. Maxwell's Big Italian' tomato from seeds a neighbor gave me are a potato leaf variety like 'Missouri Pink Love Apple', but they're quite a bit earlier fruiting. The plants are smaller at this point because I planted them later than the pinks, but maybe that's why they're fruiting earlier. The pinks were planted when the soil was still very wet and cool.

Several days ago, our last rain was a quick downpour accompanied by high winds, and it smashed down all the flowering arugula, so I cut it off and replanted. The carrots and beets planted in the same bed are probably happy that happened.

The beets that didn't get eaten off by the rabbits were mostly hidden in the shade of the arrugula, so they're still pretty small.

'Bull's blood' beets

Every morning when I go to the garden, I visit the berries I planted in the wildflower garden. I've eaten the last of the raspberries from 'Glencoe'. They were delicious, and there are twice as many canes that will bear fruit next year - all of four versus the two this year. But they produced a lot of berries per cane.

That one 'Navaho' blackberry finally ripened, but it wasn't particularly tasty.

There are more coming on, so I'll see if that's going to hold true.

I only managed to get two 'Tarpan' strawberry plants to live, and one of them has produced one ripe berry, with others coming on. They were as slow growing as the celery is (four months from sowing the seed indoors to setting out a plant). I actually bought this variety of seed, not for the berries but for the uncommon red flowers and runners, to put in a hanging basket. The flowers come and go so quickly that I only saw a couple of them. I'm going to try again next year, hoping to get more plants so I don't have to have other plants in the basket hiding them.

In the end, I harvested more peas than I thought I might get after the rabbits ate them. And then I pulled up the plants and sowed cowpeas (black-eyed peas) another neighbor gave me in their place.

I sowed the cowpeas on the 24th, and they germinated in three days, even without rain. The ground was moist, and the sun was warm, so I guess that's all they needed. After they sprouted, I laid down a layer of grass clippings, which I would have done as soon as I planted them if I'd had any available. I use grass clippings to help retain soil moisture and prevent soil splashing onto the plants when it rains.

The 'Petit Gris' melon vines have reached the top of their cages.

And a couple developing fruits have appeared, which has me thinking about how I'm going to let them fully ripen before picking and yet beat the raccoons to them.

I was thinking that the 'Petit Gris' plants were doing much better than the 'Savor' plants growing in the bed that has been mulched with tree bark because of that mulch. Those plants haven't even reached halfway up their cages yet, and I haven't seen any fruits. However, that may be because the vines growing in cages have so many leaves in a relatively small area that the fruit is hidden.

But it may not only be the mulch that's creating the difference. In one of the beds, I have one each of 'Petit Gris' and 'Savor', and the 'Petit Gris' is outstripping the 'Savor' there, as well.

'Savor' on the left, 'Petit Gris' on the right

Peppers in front

The extra vines I stuck into the compost pile are doing well, but I haven't seen any fruit on them yet, either, and I don't remember which varieties they are! Label. Label. Label.