Another Friday, another photoessay. Even though we are experiencing more normal summer temperatures, it hasn’t seemed so bad. Maybe because it’s in the 80s and 90s rather than 100s? As long as we don’t have those 100 degree temperatures stretching out as far as the eye can see on the long-range forecast, I’ll be happy.

Here’s the whole garden for this week, but from the other side this time. You get a better feel for how the tomatoes have grown from here. They are huge! There are some really nice green tomatoes set on.

This is a branch of green tomatoes on the ‘Golden Honey Bunch’ grape tomato in the vertical garden. Isn’t that truss of tomatoes neat? It seems to just keep getting longer!

Our bush beans and pole beans are both busily blooming away! This purple flower is from the ‘Emerite’ pole beans. We haven’t had great luck with pole beans in the past, so I really want these to succeed.

It looks like we have a touch of Early Blight starting on a couple of our tomato plants. This was on the ‘Jetsetter’ tomato. We pruned off the affected leaves, but I think we are getting just enough rain that it will keep spreading up the plant. Oh well, these are the trade-offs we make for a cooler, rainier year!

We are getting close to being ready to harvest the shallots, but it is pretty neat to see them growing. They are partially grown out of the ground, so you can get a sense of how big the bulbs are.

We jumped right in and planted some squash seeds in the area where we have been harvesting the garlic from the Pizza Garden. Since it is a small area, we also took the opportunity to try out the barrier method of preventing squash vine borers. I don’t know if it will work, because we had squash in this area last year. They overwinter underground and the moths emerge in the late spring or early summer, usually late May. Then they fly around and lay eggs at the base of the squash plants. Putting the row cover over the plants (in this case seeds) keeps the moths from getting to the plants. If the moths haven’t flown off yet, this method won’t work because I will have trapped them with the plants instead of away from the plants. Since we are planting late, I hope it works. We’ll leave the row cover on until the squash plants either outgrow the hoops or until they start blooming, whatever comes first.

Have a great weekend!