I Hate July

I hate July for gardening.

I've lost one of the yellow squash plants already. I presume to squash bugs. When the squash plants go, they just die quickly. I have 4 zucchini and 3 yellow squash left to go. No harvest from any of them yet.

About 3/4 of the tomatoes (at least) have blossom end rot. Next year, I will plant from other seed. I will also plant further apart. (The plants seem healthy with plenty of stocks.) I may even try staking them like my elders do. Of course, this calls for a lot more lime, but I'm not so sure that water or lack of it doesn't also play a role. I haven't harvested from the newest plants yet, so there may yet be hope.

The bean are up but a goodly proportion have had their first real leaves nibbled away. The crop was just planted to keep the ground occupied, so it isn't a great loss. I expect to harvest all we can use eventually, even if it isn't much.

I harvested grapes. I really don't like the variety (Mars) I planted. I was late and didn't get everything I should have, but I'm not sure what we will do with them anyway.

I just feel that failure is all around me out there.

July Is Slow

We finally got rain yesterday. A lot of rain; about 2 inches. It knocked over some tomato plants, but other than that, everything just seemed to really thrive. It seemed that the zucchini and yellow squash added two or three leaves per plant over night. July is slow, but the zucchini and squash are taking off. I noticed today that I had squash bugs on every plant. They aren't very fast or clever, so they are easy to catch and destroy. But every time I looked, I saw 2 or 3 more, mostly in the mating position. I know the odds of outwitting them totally is low, and I don't plan any extravagant pest control applications, but I am dedicated to killing them whenever I can. There are also some little yellow and black striped beetles I haven't identified yet. They seem plentiful.


The cucumbers really liked the rain. I picked a bunch today. There has been a bumper crop all season.

I decided to plant some green beans today as well. It may be a little late in the season, but I have an empty bed. I had a mixture of seeds, so I dumped them out on the table, counted 196 out (8 rows 12 deep) and put them in the open bed. We are expecting more rain later. It seems like a good time to get them in the ground.

Hot July

Temperatures in North Carolina have been very hot of late, into the high 90's. I've used a lot of water from the water barrels, at least 10 gallons per day. The plants in the raised beds are doing ok. Amazingly, the grapes have sustained themselves and are gradually ripening. They don't get any extra water. I planted them where I did because I thought there must be some underground water source, an underground spring of sorts.

My disappointment with the grapes is not that they have actually produced fruit, but that the vines have been slow to grow. I suspect now that I should have cut off the fruit and forced the vines to grow, but I didn't do that and I'm not actually convinced that it would have had that much effect.

The zucchini and yellow squash I planted is now up and growing. I have seen nothing of the cilantro or cucumber seeds I planted at the same time. It's entirely possible that I have no clue about what I am doing with seeds, especially seeds I have saved myself.