I just went out to the garden to see what’s what. Our weather has been so bleeping hot that I haven’t spent as much time as I normally would.
My husband and I built a really nice raised bed square foot garden so that I could grow some of our veggies. We spent a lot of time on it, building 4 foot x 4 foot, 8 inches deep wooden boxes, lining the bottoms with plastic and mounting them on ‘tables’ of metal about my chest height so I wouldn’t have to bend over double or get up and down on my knees. We ran irrigation so that we can control the watering. We used Mel’s Mix, a combination of peat moss, vermiculite and as many different kinds of compost as we can find to create a really nice medium that plants love. It’s easy to plant, water, weed, and harvest.
Yet it was mostly wasted effort this year, due to our much cooler and wetter than normal spring followed by August weather in May. There is just no way that lettuce, broccoli and spinach can thrive in this heat. The plants practically boil in the ground.
As you can see, everything is bolting, wilting, or dying. Even the cantaloupe can’t handle this weather.
Today’s project is several sessions in order to clean everything out, harvesting the onions and leaving things ready to plant, hopefully if we have good fall weather. My greenhouse is 120 degrees inside, even with the automatic exhaust fan running continually, so I turned that off. I’ll concentrate on cleaning things up and trying to be ready for my next chance.
Meanwhile, we’ve been enjoying truly incredibly tasty tomatoes from the one planter in the nook created by the back of the house and our screened porch. They are YUMMY. If that’s all we’re going to get now, I’m still smiling.
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