The pic shows the summer garden transition. Most of the spring planted goodies are gone and not much of the new stuff is up yet. The trellis work in the foreground will be the new cucumber patch. There’s another cucumber patch planned for another part of the garden. The plan is to plant two different varieties in two different locations. At each trellis I’ll start 4 plants, each separated in time by 3-5 weeks. I’m trying to cover varietal differences, timing differences and soil condition differences to see if anything works in the middle of the summer here. Not very likely but………………. Doing the same time and spatial separation on summer squash but going exclusively with the Cavili, light green, squash that was so successful this year. I know from history that every other variety I’ve tried has just cratered in the heat and humidity of our summers but these plants were strong right up to the end and showed no signs of heat capitulation. This will be a real test.
I haven’t mentioned the sweet potatoes for a while. I ended up with only four plants growing but that might be a good thing based on the size of the vines. Wow! I have no idea what’s going on under the surface but the foliage is incredible, a deep, deep green/purple that keeps growing and growing and growing. The computation says they’ll be ready for harvest July 24.
After yanking all the exhausted items from the garden, I spread the pile of compost that was ready, about 2 yards, in the area where the corn performance had been a bit lack luster. Then started a new pile. So I’m back to cooking two piles, one full and the other about half way and ready for new input over the next couple of months. The one I label full is actually overfull after I loaded and loaded and loaded last week. It’s so full I can’t turn it until it cooks down for at least two weeks. I started that pile at the end of May and anticipate using it in October; the brand new pile will be a December event. You’d think I’d eventually run out of space to use the compost but it does further disintegrate and get consumed in the garden and it’s a really big garden area to keep up with.
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