Garden Report

Fungus continues to attack the tomatoes, but most of the fruit (so far) continues to grow and ripen. A few tomatoes succumb to blossom-end rot. I should be making salsa, but can't seem to get to canning with the deck a driveway repairs, the conference we attended this week, and some house re-arrangements in anticipation of next week.

It is not good to flood a garden. Your green bean vines may decide to grow mold. But hey, they were getting near done bearing anyway. The beans in the raised bed should be ready for harvest in another week or so. I wonder if it's okay to throw moldy vines into the compost heap? I have to keep telling myself that, as long as we have a stocked grocery store, it's far better to have had the garden flood than to have suffered the basement floods that so many people had.

I hope it won't do the potatoes any harm to stay in the ground for a week or so after the vines shrivel and die. I'm not going to get around to digging them until next week or the following week. There are a LOT more potatoes in each hill, and they're much bigger than last year. Chalk up one for old wive's tales.

The variety of blackberry I planted is weird. The canes want so badly to grow horizontally, right smack along the ground. That makes for very dirty berries when ripe. But the size! Oh my goodness! Some of those blackberries are nearly as big as my thumb! And oh-so-sweet! It seems that the vines are more willing to be vertical (or at least off the ground) as they've been in the ground longer.

The hubbard squashes are growing and looking good! There's fungus on the sole zucchini plant, too, but it's managing to limp along. (And with zucchini, you don't want it going like gang-busters! "Limping along" is just fine.) There's a volunteer vine coming up where the spinach was. For curiosity's sake, I didn't weed it. It now has fruit and appears to be a Delicata Squash vine (a small heirloom winter squash I planted last year). On the topics of volunteer plants and fungus, it's interesting that the volunteer tomatoes coming up in the compost heap are not speckled with evidence of the fungus.

The basil is growing like crazy, thick and tall and bountiful, but I still can't grow any cilantro this summer.

The carrots are finally showing evidence that they exist. I've been planting and replanting since late March. Hooray! We may eat some after all!