August 2026 Summer Garden Tour

Good morning everyone and welcome back. If you're new here, hi I'm Brie. I garden in Kansas Zone 7 and today I'm going to show you what my garden is looking like here at the beginning of August. We've had a very challenging season up to this point. June was our third rainiest June on record in I think 100 years and then July was one of the driest and going from one extreme to the next has definitely brought its challenges this year and I'm just going to share all the ins and outs of how the season is going with you today. First and foremost the only trellis doing well is the pumpkins. I have had the worst luck with my trellises this year. My birdhouse gourd that I thought was going to go absolutely crazy is pretty much just stopped growing in general. I ripped out all of my green beans because they just I could not keep them alive. They just kept wanting to die. I've had such an issue with cucumber beetles this year and I've never had an issue this extreme with cucumber beetles before and they have pretty much took out all of my cantaloupe as well. I got a few cantaloupe but I have no other flowers on it and I don't know if I'm gonna get any other cantaloupe and then of course I do have a few luffa but the luffa isn't really doing that great. At this point if you go back to probably like 2024 this is what the trellis looked like in June and this is what it's looking like at the beginning of August currently. So yeah I think it's one of my saddest trellis tunnels I've ever had. I'm happy that we're probably going to get three luffa. It hasn't set any other luffas and at this point we're getting so late in the season that I don't think that they would really mature in time at this point and then you might be able to see my really sad black beans and kidney beans over here. It is insane. I have planted three rounds of black beans and kidney beans this year and the ones I planted I want to say like eight weeks later caught up to these ones. They're outperforming these ones and these ones are just dying back. I don't expect to get a decent harvest out of these two rows at all at this point. They are completely dying back. You can see they're pretty brown and then I'm probably just going to plant this out with lettuce or maybe just let it be. I might throw a cover crop on it. I really haven't messed a lot with cover crops but this in-ground space gave me a harder time and I'm thinking it's one of those things I'm just going to have to continue to amend and I thought that might be an option for winter. So I think in 2024 I had 80 something loofahs. I think in 2026 I'm probably going to get a total of three because at this point it's pretty much too late. If they set much of anything else at this point they're probably not going to mature in time. I could just use them like a zucchini. If you do have loofah and you're growing loofah and you have a bunch of tiny ones at the end of the season as your first frost is coming you can chop them up just like zucchini and they taste honestly identical to zucchini. But yeah this is uh not looking too hot. One thing I did do which I don't have high hopes for either but I'm just trying anything at this point in hopes that maybe I can turn this around for like September but everything I read states like this isn't really something to do but you know what we're gonna try it. I had a ton of snap peas and snow peas that I soaked overnight and watered help with germination but they say that peas just don't like to germinate in hot weather which is true. They're a cold weather crop but I planted all this out with peas. Will we get peas? I don't know. I don't know. We're trying. So here's a better look at the beans. The black beans really didn't do too bad. Like I have some decent size like beans on here but these also got hit with some blight. I didn't have like the worst luck with the beans. You can see I do have beans on these plants but they are definitely starting to die back. They're supposed to die back. That's what these plants do but they just they really didn't produce a lot. Like I have way more flowers on the ones way over there that I planted two months later than I do on these ones. In early spring we dealt with a lot of rain and a lot of cool weather and a lot of these plants just stayed kind of stunted and never really took off and then the things I started to plant out in June once I harvested my garlic and broccoli and things like that we had a pretty rainy June but then we got hot into July pretty quickly and I think those things just timed out perfectly. So I'm really glad I did some rounds of succession sowing this year because the beans is one of those things I find really really interesting because I have so many beans. So here's the kidney beans over here and then here's the black beans. The black beans have so many flowers on them and we're starting to get some like pretty decent beans as well. I was just looking at this a little bit closer last night or no is it the kidney beans? Yeah the kidney beans over there barely have any beans on them at all. Like they're actually doing terrible and the one and the kidney beans over here are doing amazing and they were simply planted out about seven weeks later. Let's look at all these little baby kidney beans popping up but then you dive into here and look at all of these beautiful beans. But then my tomatoes over here got hit with blight so hard and they were dealing with sun stress and then just rain and water and they just dealt with a lot of stress. You can see there's a lot of leaf curl to them. There was a lot of blight to them that I've cut off and they look so sad. They don't they don't look happy. I'm getting tomatoes off them but they don't look happy. Then you turn over here look I have this patch over here. I have this patch. I have this patch and guys the tomatoes I'm getting on these plants are insane. Like look at look at all those. I am so excited. We have so many coming in and I planted these out what was it mid-June because the broccoli just came out. So yeah I had broccoli over here with carrots and then I still kept the carrots in the ground and I planted out all of these tomatoes and then I harvested the carrots as these tomatoes were getting bigger just to make sure that they got some good airflow at the bottom. And guys like literally there's so many tomatoes on these plants. Everything in my raised beds are looking so good. So yeah here's what the front space is now looking like. If you go back to July's garden tour I want to say that this area still looked pretty bare. Like all the beans were pretty small. Beans grow really quickly so I did two separate waves I think like two weeks between each other. Then here's another really interesting thing. So the cannelli bean I'm growing the ones I planted two weeks later are doing just way better than the ones I planted and that could just be a nutrition thing honestly with the beds and possibly this one being a little less but yeah no these beans are looking so so good. So I'm excited to see oh and I have so many frogs. So guys apparently frogs really help out with cucumber beetles and the moment I started noticing all these frogs the moment my cucumber beetles started to like get figured out a little bit. Sometimes you kind of just have to like sit back a little bit and let nature kind of control. Oh there's another one. Yeah no there's so many frogs. I have had to intervene a little bit this year when it comes to the pests because it has been such an issue but I expected that. So I haven't sprayed anything in my garden in years. It took me a long time to get like the beneficial bugs balanced out at my old property so I expected that to be a challenge here but again I've never dealt with cucumber beetles on this type of level before and it's insane how terrible my cantaloupe has done. This is the worst cantaloupe I've ever grown and I've always thought cantaloupe was like pretty easy. So yeah here's the cantaloupe. I did harvest three of them this week and then I harvested two others that ended up clonking out a little prematurely. So I did have bacterial wilt that ended up knocking out I want to say like three of my cantaloupe plants completely and then they also knocked out the cucumbers which is a common issue when it comes to cucumber beetles. What ends up happening is your plant just looks like it's dead out of nowhere and just wilts and it really just never unwilts again but I was able to get ahead of it on these ones but I'm not getting like any new flowers set at all. So I don't know if I'm gonna really get any more cantaloupe this year and that's another thing like these plants should be filling out this trellis completely at this point like the pumpkin is like it should pretty much look like the pumpkin but cantaloupe and as you can see they've they really haven't got much taller. I think they've maybe grown a foot in the last month. They really haven't grown much at all they just look really sad and honestly it's crazy. Yeah where's cantaloupe here? These have also been a little disappointing these were supposed to be the goldie honey bears like the fuzzy one I have over there and they just are regular branching sunflowers. I've had this happen one other time but they're still pretty but they're not the fuzzy sunflowers I was hoping for. One of the birds did get to my little smiley though and took some of the seeds but some of the seeds are still hanging on. I'll probably harvest that sometime this week and give that to the chickens. Oh looky there we have a swallowtail caterpillar on the celery. So I do need to cut off a little bit of the celery but the celery is starting to get to a pretty good size now. We're starting to see some decent stalks on this so I'm really excited about the celery. This is my very first time growing a regular traditional green celery and so far it's looking pretty good. I did plant some carrots for the fall that are popping up over here where I had the poppies and then where I had all of the onions I planted out a second round of broccoli like three days ago. I started these starts in June. I'm hoping that this is the year I timed out broccoli correctly. Broccoli's been a challenging one to get to head up. I also think a fall garden for me was challenging in the past because my old garden got so shaded out especially in the second half of the growing season to where it was so hard for me to get plants to grow up to size before it got too cold. Speaking of cucumber beetles there's a few right here. Get out of my sunflower dude. I'm trying to have you destroy my beautiful goldie honey bear. Yeah this one oh you guys this will probably be the best goldie honey bear of the season because my other sunflowers over here these are all supposed to be honey bears. They're doing okay. I don't think they're going to be outstanding by any means. I don't think they're going to be super tall but we should get a pretty pretty bloom out of these once they do start to bloom. I did have a few not pop up. I did replant them out but you can see they're so tiny. Oh also you guys the tomatillos have been doing insane. These plants are so big like so big and I'm starting to get all of my first tomatillos. Yeah the peppers are starting to do pretty well. I got some bells. I will say the paprika isn't doing that great but the cayennes are really starting to take off. So this is a variety I absolutely love. It's called the red ember and as you can see it's a bigger cayenne. It's thicker walled and it just it's really easy to work with. It still has really great flavor. I like to throw these into pickled peppers. I make a lot of red chili flakes with them and if you ever want to de-seed a cayenne and just make a cayenne powder this I love this variety. It's why I found this variety because I was so sick of finding these itty bitty cayennes that had like the thinnest skin on them and when I went to make cayenne powder they would just like deteriorate in my hand and it was so frustrating. So I went on the lookout to see if I could find a cayenne that was bigger and just like easier to work with and I've grown this one I want to say for three years now maybe four and it's definitely my favorite. And then here's our crazy asparagus patch. Honestly I've been loving watching this stuff grow. So yeah you can see all the asparagus spears popping up from one of the roots and I planted out a bunch of roots in the spring and some of these look really small but then I have a few other ones on this side that are pretty massive. Like look at these like actually crazy. Asparagus has been really cool to watch grow. It's just this big bushy fern I got. Yeah even though my birdhouse gourd isn't doing great I'm happy that I still have a few like pretty looking gourds on here. I also randomly threw the hyacinth bean over here and I'm starting to get a few flower pods on them. I wanted to plant out like the whole fence line once we had the fence up with these hyacinth beans but we still haven't got the fence up. But you guys these blooms are just absolutely beautiful and hopefully I do that next year. I'm really glad I still threw them up at the end of the trellis here. I have some mammoth sunflowers. They're starting to do pretty well too. They're starting to gain some size on them. I think these will probably start to bloom like come the end of the month. August will be the month of sunflowers around here this year. One thing I mentioned to you guys is that at the other property since we're back and forth at the moment I left all these volunteer sunflowers that popped up. It's been really cool to see just because we did have that hailstorm so I did have a decent amount of volunteers. I have a loofah plant and it somehow it's still surviving. I haven't watered anything in the old space at all. I had a zinnia pop up but that got knocked down but I have probably 30 volunteer sunflowers that are starting to bloom at the old property and that has just been really special. No goldie honey bears but a lot of those wild sunflowers that I've kind of just let go over the years. The pumpkins though are definitely the outlier this year. The pumpkin trellis is looking so good. I currently have four pumpkins set. This is a variety called the long island cheese pumpkin and then I also have a honey nut squash here both of which are vine borer resistant to where if you are new to gardening and you had issues with vine borer this season this is one of the few pumpkins I've been able to successfully grow because I have issues with vine borer. The other issue I tend to pretty strong issues with is squash bugs and shockingly enough I am having 10 times less squash bug pressure than I anticipated. I had way more squash bug pressure in my previous garden than I am currently having here. I have obviously found some eggs and I've killed them and I keep finding adults but when I'm watering at night or in the morning I water around the base of the plant and I might see one or two squash bugs pop up around the base like that's a really good thing to do if you're watering at the base of your pumpkin or your squash see if any of the squash bugs pop up because they'll try to escape the water and that's a really quick way to grab them they like to hide out at that base there and that's something I've learned over the years and I'm just seeing one or two squash bugs every few days and they come out when I'm watering and I just stomp on them real quick you know what having a year with less squash bug pressure has been nice I'm not going to lie I really did not anticipate this but the squash bugs did appear that first week of July and in that first week of July as well I did find my first hornworm I have not found another hornworm since but I have dealt with a lot of caterpillars this year I've had a lot of fuzzy white ones which I typically don't have an issue with I've maybe found like one or two over the seasons at my previous garden which I honestly need to see what those turn into like what kind of moth they are one of the issues I expect to run into in the next four weeks is army worms one thing we really recognized last year is we have a lot of army worms on this property and I did try to up front that battle a little bit I sprayed two different rounds of beneficial nematodes which those are also supposed to help cucumber beetles and I'm just saying I don't think it did anything for the cucumber beetles if it did oh my gosh my my issue with cucumber beetles would have been a lot more severe I'm telling you they're very severe there's one right now on my camera so I now have a hatred of cucumber beetles probably as much as squash bugs because those they're just so challenging because they fly away or they drop to the ground really quickly and they are a lot harder to manage hand picking and stuff so yeah I'm really excited about the pumpkin it's really starting to just go off at this point since the cantaloupe has done so poorly I really hope that this just takes over the entirety of this 12 foot space I have one pumpkin on this side one pumpkin on this side you can see they're doing really well it has been a challenging season I definitely felt prepared though with everything I learned in my previous garden to be able to navigate the unexpected of this space the weather is a whole other ball game that obviously I couldn't control but I've learned a lot and I've been able to really navigate this garden with all the challenges it has brought me this year and I'm pretty proud with how the garden is currently looking at the beginning of August I've had some gardens that by the beginning of August we've been so hot and dry for so long that the garden is pretty much dead and I still have a lot of abundance currently going on I feel like I did really well with succession sowing this year and kind of just being prepared for that next step and honestly I would hope after almost a decade of gardening this would feel a little bit more second nature and it really has even though this year has been such a challenge and I have had to be so hands-on I definitely expected that just trying to establish a new gardening space I have definitely been feeling exhausted though over the last handful of weeks just with how hot and dry it has been because I do hand water this entire garden and it takes me about an hour and a half to two hours to water this garden pretty well so I have definitely had to be pretty hands-on in this space but I am very proud with how the garden has turned out so far the next four weeks will definitely be the last little bit of the peak season in this space and I'm really excited to take you guys along for it it's definitely my favorite time of the year July into August is some of my favorite months so I'm really excited to see what other harvests we get out of this space in the upcoming handful of weeks and I will see you guys all along for that thanks for joining today and I will see you all in the next one bye