Garden Update

Its been a while since the last garden update, so here is another. The biggest development is that I lost the Cucumber to some sort of disease. Here is a picture of what it looked like shortly before its death. Sorry about the poor picture quality.

Whatever disease it had attacked the leaves making brown spots all over them until the leaf died. Unfortunately there are tons of leaf diseases bacterial, viral, and fungal that can attack Cucumber leaves and to my untrained eye, the pictures that I found online of each of them look remarkably similar. I tried spraying it a couple times with a baking soda solution that seems to help with powdery mildew on the squash, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the Cucumbers.

My bean plants may also have some sort of leaf disease. Here is a picture of what some of the beans looked like a couple weeks ago.

The brown spots also spread and killed the leaves on these plants. There is a chance that it is just old age for the beans since this happened as the second harvest was winding up. I'm not to upset about the beans either way since I got quite a bit of production out of them.

The tomatoes are doing very well. One of the plants (Heirloom Old German) dramatically slowed its growth and has almost 2 dozen large tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing thats a determinate variety. Jaime already has plans to make sauce out of those. The other plant (Heirloom Isis Cherry) continues to grow like crazy and has fewer tomatoes on it, so I'm guessing that is an indeterminate variety. Some of those are starting to ripen. That plant grew up to the top of my 8' wooden poles, so I pinched off those shoots (had to use a stepladder). I'll let some lower shoots grow up to the top now. Here is what the tomatoes look like as of mid-august.

Note in the picture that the vegetation is much thicker up to about 4'. That is the height of the previous stakes that I was using to hold up the tomatoes, and I had been trying to prune the plants to keep them at that height until I got the taller stakes. Thats what I'll be doing now, except it will be up at 8' now. The 3' high tomato cages are under there somewhere, too.

I was at a farm this past weekend and I took note of the way they supported their tomatoes. They were growing in a hoop house covered in plastic. The frame of the house had poles running the length that were about 10' off the ground. There were strings running from the poles on top down to horizontal poles on the ground, making 10' tall taught strings next to each plant. The tomato plants were spiraled up the strings as they grew and that seemed to be enough support for them. Not a bad idea. I could probably do the same thing around my wooden stakes next year.

I also learned while I was at the farm that scallions and green onions really are different. Green onions are just young onions that haven't grown bulbs yet while scallions will never grow bulbs. That is something to keep in mind for next year. I have two types of seeds that I was using to make scallions. One that was labeled "bunching green onions" did stop growing when they were still really small and made bulbs. The other was labeled "spring onions", and some of those continue to grow (and are pretty good-sized) without making any bulbs.

I didn't really have much hope for the pepper plants in the spring because they started out so slowly and were way behind all the other plants. They have done very well in the hot summer weather, though. There are probably about 6 or so peppers growing on each of the 4 plants. They are a sweet pepper variety that should ripen orange. I was expecting them to be smaller than bell peppers, but the largest of them are now approaching bell pepper size and are still green.

The Zucchini plant continues to grow vigorously. Even after trimming it back a bit, it has grown to be a dense canopy at least 10' by 10'. It is called a bush variety, but it seems to be basically a viney variety with really stubby vines. Zucchini production has been somewhat sporadic, though. Many of the baby Zucchini have shriveled soon after flowering, possibly because they aren't getting pollinated well enough. This week has been good for Zucchini, though. I harvested three large ones and there are two more that will get picked in the next couple days.

The Spaghetti squash continues to be the winner of the "Which plant can take up the most ridiculous amount of space?" contest. I originally allotted 5' x 5' for it. I let it take over the melon patch after the melons didn't really work out. Then I let it take over my paths and some shady areas that I wasn't planning on planting. Then it started climbing my fence (with mixed results). Then I let it take over the potato patch. It has been trying to take over the Zucchini area, but the Zucchini is putting up a pretty good fight. The Zucchini being taller and very dense, shades the squash vines that try to wind through it. Had I planted the squash in the middle of the garden and let it go where it wanted, I am quite certain that it would completely cover the entire garden. Its hard to tell how much squash we will actually end up with because its such a tangled mess and the squashes are various sizes. I've probably seen a dozen or so squashes, a couple of which are probably around 15" long and must weigh around 5lbs each.

One of the vines that went through the potato patch kept right on going past the potatoes, over to a lilac bush, and has climbed vertically into the bush. That bush is about 20' away from the planting location of the squash vine. Its now about 8' high in the bush and showing no signs of stopping. I'm curious to see if it will make it out the top of the bush, which is about 15' high.