The heat is on

With abundant sunshine and heat, the garden is in full swing now.

The 'Golden Muscat' grapes are looking good.  I'm excited to taste them in the fall.  This is the second year for the vines, which didn't produce anything last year.  This year they're growing so fast I've had to prune them back.

The caged melons are climbing upward now.  I'm REALLY excited for them to produce.  Hopefully, the marigolds all around them will mask the smell of the ripening fruit and interfere with raccoon feeding. 

'Red Swan' bush beans are producing abudant pods, and I've already harvested several batches.  Like red okra pods, they turn green when cooked.  They don't have any sweetness to them, though, and I doubt I'll grow them again, because they don't taste any better than grocery store beans.

'Red Swan' bush beans and 'Lincoln' peas

My idea of planting cabbages amongst the lettuce and carrots to "hide" them from cabbage pests was a total failure.  I don't know whether the decoy white cabbage moths I made did any good, because it wasn't cabbage worm that ate the plants.  I don't know what it was, but I suspect tiny grasshoppers for one.  They won't have been responsible for the holes in the middle of the leaves though, as they eat from the edges.

The cabbages I planted in the open spaces left in my tulip beds are faring much better.

'Omero' cabbage

'Primo Vantage'

'Marketmore' cucumbers are making their way up the trellis.

In fact, I found two extra early fruits that were very tasty.  One almost got too big before I found it.  I don't know why, but cucumbers for me are the hardest to harvest without overlooking some.

I want to try to pickle some this year.  Earlier attempts have been disappointing, but I found a "copycat" Vlasic dill recipe online that I want to try.  Especially since I planted some dill this year  in my cut flower plot.

Tomatoes have set lots of fruit (with the exception of my favorite variety - more on that in a bit), which is always exciting.

'Goddess Isis' cherry tomato

I'm trying two new (to me) varieties this year, because my favorite - 'Missouri Pink Love Apple' is such a sparse producer.  It's the best slicing tomato I've found for flavor, but it fruits quite sparsely, leaving nothing to can or make juice.  Also, 'Missouri Pink' is very particular about the temperature - too cold or too hot, and it won't set fruit.

I chose 'Valley Girl', a determinate variety (all ripening at essentially the same time)  for juice making and canning.  If they ripen at the same time, I can process them at one time.  They surprised me by being as smooth and pale colored as they are at this stage.

'Valley Girl'

The other new variety I chose is 'German Johnson'.  It's an indeterminate variety like 'Missouri Pink', so it should produce fruit over a longer period of time than 'Valley Girl', which is a better deal for fresh slicing. 'German Johnson' is advertised to do well in both colder and hotter temperatures.  Hopefully it will taste good, too.

It also has lots of fruit.

'German Johnson'

And this next one is the fabulous 'Missouri Pink Love Apple'.  I had to hunt just to find these couple of fruits.

'Missouri Pink Love Apple'

Red onions are sitting on top of the soil.  The whites and yellows are retaining their bulbs below the soil line.  I don't think I planted them at different depths, but it's possible, if unintentional.  At any rate, in previous years I've had trouble with onions rotting in wet soil.  Last year they were above ground in this manner as well, and they stored very well after harvesting.  So maybe having the bulb above the soil line is better in my garden.  I'll have a better understanding of that once I harvest all varieties.

The peas are spent, and the peppers I had planted amongst them and worried about getting enough sunlight seem to be doing okay.  I planted limas in place of the peas.

And they're now up and growing.

Over on the compost heap, 'Jarrahdale' pumpins (gray-skinned) and ground cherries are filling out around the Egyptian walking onions that grow wild there.

'Aunt Molly's' ground cherry

There are potatoes on the other side of the heap, most of which I harvested yesterday.  I didn't stab too many of them getting them out of the ground.

Potato flowers

Yellow and red potatoes

The perennial bed looks great this year.

And in the cut flower plot, the cactus zinnias are fantastic.

And now the bad part of late June gardening....the pests.  I've been spraying Japanese beetles for about a week now.  I failed to have a stock of Sevin - which I hate to use because of its toxicity - so I was using pyrethrin (also highly toxic to honey bees) and neem oil. Both killed the little b$%#@ds, but didn't provide any residual effect.  I was spraying twice a day.  

Yesterday I bought some Sevin, and the number of beetles was drastically reduced this morning.  In a few days I'll find out if that was just a fluke.

This is also the time of years that packs of raccoons come round to destroy anything in their path.

I trapped three and then decided to put everything out of sight overnight.  Before I did that, I put some garden cloth pins in the pots upside down so that the ends were all poking up out of the soil.

Unfortunately, that did not stop the raccoons.  So putting the potted plants out of sight at night has been all I can do if I don't want to keep trapping -- and I don't.  They also dug up every lupine seedling I transplanted into the garden.  Grrrrrrr!  Last year, I didn't have any more raccoons after the neighbors lit fireworks for several hours on the 4th.  I hope they do that again this year.

Have a great July 4th in quarantine!  Wear your mask when you go out.  I feel very luck to be far out in the country with a big garden in the time of a pandemic.  

Gold and orange cactus zinnias, 'Queen Lime' orange zinnia, verbena, 'Drumstick' allium