August 2021 Garden Update

How is your garden growing? 🙂 Ours is doing pretty well. I’m very happy with the changes we made to our vegetable garden this year.

I injured my back and had a couple of long days sitting and resting, so I made a fun little slideshow of photos from our gardens. Enjoy! (The play button is in the bottom left corner of the photo below.)

Irrigation, Weed Control and General Garden Maintenance

In our Kitchen Garden we have drip irrigation set up. The drip irrigation is run on a timer, so I don’t even have to remember to turn it on and off! The ground is covered with a nice layer of wood chips. Since I’m growing in swimming pool gardens, there is very little weeding to be done.

In our East Garden, we use our PVC drip irrigation system. July and August are the months we get rain in the afternoons and evenings. I don’t have an actual watering schedule. I check the garden each morning and if it’s dry, I water. I water the tomatoes, squash and bell peppers on one setting for 30-45 minutes, and Grampy’s hot peppers, the cucumbers and sunflowers on the other setting. I set a timer on my phone so I remember to change it or turn it off.

We have part of the East Garden paths covered with wood chips. It is helping suppress the weeds quite well, even with the rain we have been getting. I think it also helped that we did not rototill the area in the spring like we usually do, stirring up all those weed seeds.

On Wednesday mornings, I focus on weeding in the garden and around the property. I also prune and tie up the tomato plants and winter squash. We are growing tomatoes and squash on cattle panel arches.

Pests I have dealt with this year are mainly squash bugs on my zucchini plants. I’ve kept them at bay by hand-picking off the adults and removing the eggs from the leaves with duct tape. I spray my plants with neem oil to help deter the squash bugs. They do not seem to be attracted to the Canada Crookneck winter squash as much as they are the zucchini.

I saw a few little bugs on my bell pepper plants, so I sprayed them with neem oil as well. I haven’t seen any more and will reapply every week or so.

I also had an issue with budworms eating my petunia flowers in the planter by the porch. I applied BT spray and it seems to have taken care of them. I am applying it weekly now as a preventative.

I only apply the neem oil and BT sprays in the evening after the sun has gone down. This lessens the risk of harming the pollinators or having the sun burn the leaves.

East Garden

• Tomatoes: No tomatoes to harvest yet. Lots of green ones on the vines. We did have one plant nearly break near the ground. I think the wind had caught it. We banked soil up around it and it is doing fine. We are keeping our tomato plants pruned near the bottom to avoid dirt splashing on the plants from the rain. This helps avoid disease.

• Bell peppers: If things continue to go well, I will have lots of bell peppers to chop and freeze. I love to use them in recipes in the winter. I wish I had planted some colored bell peppers also, but the colored ones tend to rot on the plant before they turn color.

• Poblano peppers: We are growing these in tomato cages this year. Usually we stake them and tie them to avoid the weight of the fruit breaking the stems. The tomato cages are working nicely. The plants are between four and five feet tall and are loaded with peppers.

• Monster Jalapeno peppers: Grampy harvested 15 peppers and made jalapeno poppers. He says the heat on these are medium and they have good flavor.

• Biggie Chile: Grampy roasted one small batch of chile from these plants. They roasted and peeled well.

• Big Jim Chile: We have lost one of these plants. It stayed small and finally wilted and died. The Big Jim chiles are several weeks behind the Biggie chiles as the nursery didn’t have them until later so the plants were smaller when we planted them. We haven’t harvested any chile from these plants yet.

• Cucumbers: The cucumbers are a jungle! We were supposed to only have one plant, but Grampy never thinned them. We will likely be overrun with cucumbers again, which will make the chickens happy. We usually grow them along the fence, but this year they are growing along the ground. I prefer to trellis them, to save space and make it easier to pick them.

• Ajvarski and Red Hot Chile Peppers: Since these were planted near the end of June, they are small. But they are growing! They are all a foot tall or taller and all the ones we planted survived.

Kitchen Garden

• The zinnia seeds I planted in place of my failed lettuce and spinach have sprouted but have not yet flowered. I do have zinnias flowering in the East Garden. I love the pop of color they add! I also have a bunch of volunteer marigolds.

• My strawberry plants appear large and healthy but I don’t often get to the berries before the bugs do. I am considering whether strawberry plants are a good use of space.
• So far the zucchini have not taken over our lives. 🙂 We have been able to keep up with the production. We’ve had stuffed zucchini and sautéed zucchini. I am going to try this recipe for Zucchini Cake.
• Canada Crookneck Squash: We have two plants in the East Garden (sharing a trellis with the cherry tomatoes) and five in swimming pools in the Kitchen garden. Of the seven plants, two of them in the swimming pools have wilting and yellowing leaves. I don’t see any insects on them and I don’t think it’s a case of over-watering. I am going to keep better track of the soil moisture to make sure they are getting enough water. I am suspecting a deficiency in the soil. I am going to fertilize them to see if that helps. There are several squash forming on the vines. I’m excited to cook one, as we haven’t had this variety of squash before. It’s supposed to be like a butternut squash but sweeter.

Perennial Plants and Fruit Trees

• Raspberries: We haven’t had a huge harvest of raspberries yet. Just enough to go with a meal or two. I did go in and clean up the weeds and try to tie up the bushes. I’d really like a better trellising system for the raspberries, and ideally, more space between the rows.
• Grapes: There are many bunches of grapes on the vine. I did trim it back a bit to keep it out of our Linden tree and the pear tree. The grapes are usually ready in September.
• Fruit trees: Our pear tree has tons of pears. We’ve never had this many before! And to think last year, we pruned it back and said if it didn’t produce this year, we would cut it down. It must have been listening. I referenced this article to learn when to pick pears, as they do not ripen on the tree. The apple tree my dad planted has lots of apples on it. It will need to be pruned before next year. I need to watch a good video on proper pruning of fruit trees.

That’s all the garden news for now. Hopefully my next update will have a photo and me and my first tomato sandwich of the year! 🙂

Happy gardening!