Did Our Garden Survive a Week Without Us..

Good morning everyone. It is July 31st today and we just got back from a week-long camping trip. You can see all of our camping stuff is in there. We just got back late last night and so I thought I'd take you through the garden after a week away. It's not in its best shape but I think it's important to see kind of what it looks like as we get towards the end of summer and transition into the fall gardening season. So come on in. Starting to look a little bit like a jungle in here. This mixed planting bed here. We've got some pole beans there. We've got all of our cleome flowers. These are all self-seeded. This tomato plant is a purple zebra. Starting to see some disease down here. You'll see a lot of the tomato plants are starting to get some disease as well. On the tomato tower we're just about nine feet tall now or so. We've got some of our Mr. Stripey which was one of our favorites from our taste test. You can see this Cherokee purple has a decent amount of blight although a decent number of tomatoes on it too. And then this one is Mortgage Lifter. A lot of big tomatoes on there. It's actually doing one of the best as far as disease as well. You can see a little Septoria there but doing pretty well. And then over here these are all the Berkeley tie-dye. This one also you can see a pretty good amount of disease there but we got to get a lot of these harvested. These are probably two-ish pound tomatoes Mortgage Lifters there. The Beefy Red were grown in cages and we tend to get more disease on those grown in cages. That being said you also get more tomatoes so there's quite a lot of tomatoes still in here. I'm not sure if you can see all these down here but a ton of tomatoes. So even though we're kind of getting to the end of the life cycle due to disease there's so many of these big tomatoes in here that I still think it's very very productive even though they're getting some disease. You can see some more Beefy Red right here. Again not the most disease resistant but very very productive. And then Butternut Squash is just getting close to being ready to harvest. Got our Ginger down here. It's smaller than last year but it's starting to wake up a little bit. I probably need to pull some of the asparagus off because it is getting a little bit shaded out in the back. While the tomatoes might be starting to get diseased of course the peppers are just cruising along. We have had so many harvests of these Poblano peppers here. Only thing is the volunteer pumpkins are starting to try to come into this bed but there's a lot of peppers in there. The paste tomatoes we started later so they're looking kind of younger less diseased here. One exception to that is actually the Paisana which has been usually our favorite. I don't know if it's just this bed. Now yes there are a lot of tomatoes on there but these ones are already looking somewhat diseased whereas a lot of the other varieties are looking much much better. So we're just about time for the first picking here as far as our paste tomatoes. Other things we've been picking is the corn. Let's go look at that over there. We had some a storm when we were out so a lot of the corn has sort of fallen over but this corn is ready. It's honestly super good. This one we planted a little bit earlier. We ate some last night and then we've got a slightly earlier, sorry later corn here. One of the things you can see is this gourd is using the corn to climb over and let me show you that. This is called bottle gourd. It's new for us. We haven't eaten it but we let a few get too big and they are massive. Let me show you. We've got this about 16 foot high panel. You can see the gourd kind of coming over there and then down this way I've got some sunflowers underneath here. The sun gold cherry tomatoes there. The sun sugars are over here by the zinnias but let me get you in on this bottle gourd plant. Now the small gourds you can eat similar to a zucchini but of course we've been kind of inundated with zucchini. So let me see if I can show you these gourds here. These are probably three plus feet long and I have an even bigger one over there but it's hard to get to because of the corn. Zinnias down this way. These are all self-seeded and then this is the sun sugar. To be honest it's a little shaded out because of all of the peach trees here. Got another tomato that's escaped its cage. This one's also a purple zebra. Looks like something tried to get this one but that's what they look like. Got a whole mound of pumpkins. There was a compost pile somewhere back there. Still some newer pumpkins showing up but I think there's some bigger ones here as well. Somewhere in here yeah there's some bigger ones. I'm trying not to make you dizzy but we've got the peach trees. Still haven't harvested those. We've got the fig trees. We do have ripe figs so got a pretty good amount of ripe figs here. Looks like this tree needs water but it's got a lot of ripe figs as well. I better get to watering those. That's the one problem with growing them in the containers. Now I think the birds have found out that these figs are super good as well but there's so many on here I think we should be able to share. That's the big advantage of growing these in containers. In our climate if you let them die back to the ground lots of times you are not getting ripe figs and we will continue to get ripe figs all the way up into first frost with these. Coming down this way hopefully I got the timing right. These are our carving pumpkins. I've got some here here and there's actually some way in the back there and you know we've as we've talked about so much we have so much cucumber beetle pressure. You can see there's a bunch right there that I can try to kill but hopefully no squash vine borer because that's the thing that will often completely take out the pumpkins. Somewhere in this sea of zinnias there's also tomatillos. We did not do a good job of keeping these staked up. One good thing about tomatillos is even though we've been so lazy about harvesting them is that they tend to stay good for a long time even if they fall off. So you can see all of these tomatillos down here but we should be able to harvest those and make some green salsa. Got these white coneflowers here. The heliopsis are kind of falling down a little bit. Got some other perennial flowers. The cucumbers we started really early. They are really I should have taken these up weeks ago but a few of the vines are still actually producing decent cucumbers. One issue that I've noticed is with the thin-skinned ones which are super tasty we tend to get a lot more cucumber beetle damage on those. They still taste good but usually you want to peel them first. Melons have been amazing. You can see the vines are starting to come to the end of their life but we've been harvesting a ton of melons. Sweet potatoes taking over the world as is typical. I don't know why we have more tomatoes here but we do. These are kind of bigger slicing tomatoes. Good for burgers. Celebrity. More heliopsis here and then the pumpkins you can see they're starting to yellow. Those are the sea muscata pumpkins so they store for a long time. Those are doing well. You can see one right here. Over on this side we've got all of our watermelon. We have been eating these. Man are they good. New variety for us. Big tasty. It's a little bit bigger than the Anza watermelon but it is super super good. You can see some of the watermelons starting to get a little diseased but they're basically at the end of their life cycle here and there are it's hard to see them but there are so many watermelon in here we probably won't even get to eating all of those. We talked about the melons. A lot of melons here. Melons do slip from the vine so they have just been kind of falling off and we've been eating them as they fell. In fact when we got back there were four melons that had already fallen off. We've got the Korean melons here and I see a few melons I have to go pick over that way. Ground cherries are doing what ground cherries do which is sprawl all over the ground. Super tasty. This is Aunt Molly's. Only issue with that is they do self-seed all over the place. Let's take a look up this way as we enjoy the sunrise. Right here we have the blueberries. They're all survived in the pots. I definitely have to water those. It's one again issue with potted plants. Raspberries. We did a hard reset on the raspberries this year. A few weeds I got to get out of there but we're starting to get the late season raspberries now. So raspberries will at least our varieties will create berries on both this year and last year's canes but since I did a hard reset we're only getting the ones at the end We've got zinnias. Unfortunately these are just so big they're kind of falling over. Some of them have cages. These are really big flowers too. Very pretty. Over here this bed that looks nice and healthy and green that's a sort of a refreshed bed. It had our garlic in it and now it has our second batch of zucchini which shoot we already let that one go too far so we got to get in there and pick those. The reason we do a second batch let me show you actually. I'll walk over here. So here's this nice refreshed batch looking super healthy. This was the batch that we planted in May and you can see some of the plants are still alive but others you can see this one's kind of flopped over. This is almost for sure squash vine borer. I'll check and see whether I can see any of the frass that you normally see which is kind of the yeah I think I see some here. You'll see kind of a sawdust type looking thing coming out of it and that's kind of the excrement of the squash vine borer but we're gonna take all this zucchini out since we have the new zucchini over there. This is the time of the year that the peppers really shine in that they're still just trucking along producing a ton of peppers. You can see all these bell peppers in here. The jalapenos that we really didn't need that many of. You can see all these big bell peppers there. The peppers in general are just so much more disease resistant than the tomatoes that they'll continue to produce well into the season. We've got all of our bush beans here. I actually did a big harvest of bush beans before we left and we probably have another harvest to do now and then we do have other beans in here as well. Up this way next to the eggplant we have pole beans. Eggplant has been just producing for months now. A lot of eggplant in there. We're running out of eggplant dish ideas and then the pole beans are kind of on the north side so they don't shade the eggplant but we can see we have to get in here and pick a lot of these as well. I do have a few things indoors so let's go ahead and go on into the grow room and I'll show you kind of where we are as far as some of the fall things that we're going to plant. We're down in the seed starting room now. We've got our storage number four cabbage as well as our Brussels sprouts. These really I should have planted those before we left but rather than do that I just decided to pot them up into bigger pots. Usually we like to get these out mid-July so hopefully we're not too late on those and then I've got our celery. We usually just grow celery for the fall because we don't really eat it in the summertime and then we also have all of our broccoli, cauliflower. Our target plant date is a couple weeks from now by mid-August so these ones are timed a lot better and we'll see as far as planting these out. I want to make sure the roots fully fill the four inch pots here first. Now other things that if you're in our zone you could still direct sow. You probably could still direct sow. Green beans usually need somewhere in the kind of high 50s days to maturity there. We're starting to get a little late for summer squash although you can still try it depends on kind of how late our first frost goes and then we do have those quick maturing sunflowers. They were under the cover. The pro-cut varieties do tend to mature really quickly and produce a flower really quickly much more than the kind of standard you know big mammoth sunflowers and things like that so anyway just thought I'd give you guys a raw update after coming back from vacation. I think it's important to see you know not only the nicely put together garden in the mid-summer tour that we did recently but also kind of a more realistic tour you know post-vacation not maintained disease coming on. We're all gardeners just like you so if you guys have any questions let me know in the comments. Happy gardening everyone!