First Sweet Corn

Today I determined that the first ear of corn was ready, and the second ear was 98% ready so we went ahead and had sweet corn for supper.

The ears were well pollinated but slender.  Full length, but smaller in diameter than farmstand corn.  That may be a limitation of growing them in raised beds instead of deeper open soil.  We'll see.

Autumn Crown Pumpkins

I'm finally getting some pumpkins and Honey Nut squash.  They are so late that they probably won't amount to much but its still fun to watch them grow.

I pulled out the older row of SV4719CS cucumbers because I just didn't need them.  The second planting doesn't have a spot of disease on them.  Johnny's Seeds advertises their Bristol variety as having "high resistance to anthracnose, angular leaf spot, cucumber mosaic virus, scab, zucchini yellow mosaic virus; and intermediate resistance to downy mildew, powdery mildew, and papaya ringspot virus. NOTE: Not fully immune to downy mildew, Bristol has been shown to survive the disease significantly longer than non-resistant varieties".  I guess they're right!  This is the first year for this variety and I'm very pleased with it.

Another Johnny's variety that I'm a big fan of is their Dunja zucchini.   This variety has "Intermediate resistance to powdery mildew, papaya ringspot virus, watermelon mosaic virus, and zucchini yellow mosaic virus" and I've always had good luck with it.  Above is a plant that is the result of two seeds.  I always plant two seeds together because one "vine" grows left and the other grows right and you get a nice looking mound of leaves all season.  Zucchini plants can get pretty rough looking by the end of the season because the large, older leaves at the base die off leaving a bare stalk.  I have not yet had to remove a single leaf from these two plants.

My late planted bush beans are just about ready.  I probably could have rounded up enough for a meal tonight but they would have been real little.  

The plants look amazing.  I always have a little trouble with some sort of wilt in this bed.  Several plants will get some wilted looking leaves, but the overall health of the plant allows them to outgrow the problem by leaps and bounds.  See my army of watering cans along the fence?  I used to leave them all over the landscape but this year I didn't plant as many containers of annuals so less watering.  This little army makes fertilizer day go quicker.  I put fertilizer in all of them, fill them all at once and water until I run out.  It takes two rounds to feed all of the veggie plants

The second planting of bush beans (same varieties) was looking a little pale this week.  I don't consider this bed to be poor, but they obviously needed a nitrogen boost so I side dressed with blood meal and fed them with fish emulsion.

Speaking of poor soil.  In the above photo, there are two beds of buckwheat cover crop planted on the same day.  I knew that other bed was poor but I would not have guessed it was THAT bad.  Wow.  The bed was very compacted and have no earth worms in it.  It obviously needs a lot more work.

 That is one thing I really like about planting cover crops.  It allows you to observe the health of your soil.  This bed above is obviously the healthiest of them all.  The buckwheat is blooming and needs to be worked into the soil before it goes to seed and becomes a nuisance.  I planted two more beds in buckwheat tonight.

And now for the Mid-Summer Slump.  The tomato plants are looking rough.  Actually, this bed didn't do that great to begin with.  The container plants out paced them but once they got septorial spec and blight it moved really fast.  The plants are producing well but I have to remove the fruit before they are fully ripe and let them ripen in the house so they don't get sunburn.  You can see how bare the container plants are.  I thing its time for some green tomato relish and for these plants to go bye bye.