Too Much of a Good Thing ~ Cucumbers

The garden is looking fantastic and I can't say otherwise.  Yes, it has been a tedious month or so watering just about every single day but it has paid off.  This past Sunday we got a nice round of three good rainfalls that gave us another two inches and we are almost at four inches for July which is manageable and the lawns are starting to revive.  June was rough though.

The cucumbers did very well.  Yesterday was Pickle Day.  I canned 12 pints of bread and butter slices (last year was dills) and put the leftovers away as refrigerator pickles including two pints of dill spears which I am looking forward to.  The pickles took up all of the ready pickling cukes and the slicing row has been over running us to the point that I have been giving them away.  The first flush is over and the vines still looked good with a lot of flowers but I was done with them.  They had served their purpose and the pickles are in the jar.  It was sort of a luxury to pull cucumber vines that were still healthy and not diseased and crumbling into powder.

I still have the Burpee Salad Bush plants.  The closest plant in the foreground is a few weeks behind the others and not producing yet.  These should keep us in munching cucumbers for another month or so.

The leaves of the other rows were just starting to shows signs of mosaic virus but it would have been a few weeks before they failed entirely.  Just as well to get them out so they don't pass it on to the salad bush that I wanted to keep.

I have a few later plants of salad bush tucked away elsewhere with the new strawberries.

Yup, the cucumber jungle is gone!

Buckwheat is planted in its place and covered to keep the birds out.

Another good reason to get the old vines out is to protect the cantaloupes from diseases. 

Look at those vines go!

I have seven or eight good sized fruit developing.

And lots of little tiny ones.

The last two times I attempted cantaloupes they didn't amount to much so we are very hopeful for this crop.

The sweet corn is in the pollination phase.  Last July we had rain like 14 out of  

16 days in a row right in the middle of pollination.  That made for some really ugly ears but I still filled the freezer.

This year I am hoping for some pretty ears to eat and share.

The second planting is doing well to.

Sweet Corn looking good!

My annual flowers are also looking great despite not being watered at all through the dry spell.

Last fall I ordered these Rudbeckia Sahara.  I am really pleased with the range of color I got.  I couldn't have done better picking them in person.

I love the ruffly "double" flowers.  The blooms in the upper right looks very close to traditional echinacea but the others are pretty unique.  These will need to be reseeded to establish.  They do not spread by roots and may not be hardy through the winter.  Many people grow these as annuals but I am hoping to get them established as perennials or biennials.

 

Quick Update

 I'm in a Dog Day sort of gardening mood but I want to keep up on photos to track progress.  At this point the watering and repellent spraying is getting a little tedious.  Everything is looking wonderful, and pests are scarce which is a big help.  The Japanese Beetles are out in force but very few in the garden.  They are out there but not in numbers where any one plant is suffering.  No cucumber beetles yet.  No Squash Vine Borers.  I am expecting mildew to start because we have had a lot of high humidity.

Cucumbers

We've got cucumbers!  Gardeners all do it - we over compensate.  Back in 2019 and 2020 I had way too many cucumbers.  I vowed only to plant two or three vines of slicing cukes at a time.  In 2021 I had virtually total crop failure on two plantings of the eating cucumbers.  So this year I over compensated.  I planted a dozen slicer vines, a dozen pickling vines and and three bush style.   And they are performing their heads off. 

Pole Beans

While the bush beans chose not to participate this year, the pole beans are over achieving.  The beans will be ready soon.

Cantaloupes

The cantaloupe vines are looking awesome.  I am still covering them at night for warmth.  We had a few chilly nights down near 50 or the low 40s and I think it helped.  There are pollinators all over them.

Peak-a-Boo

Sweet Corn

My main gardening goal this week is to keep the sweet corn watered.  Six foot high corn stalks take three times as much water as two foot high stalks. Especially on a windy day.  The tassels are out and the ears are starting to emerge.  Sweet corn has a very noticeable leaf roll in response to heat or drought stress.  The upper leaves stand straight up instead of curving down.  We got an inch of rain earlier this week and that helped me catch up on watering the corn and now the leaves are beginning to relax.

Comparison of two plantings four weeks apart

Banana Peppers and Hot Peppers

Lots of Tomatoes Hiding

I've had a little blossom end rot again this year which is no shocker since we have had such a dry dry year.  I don't like to over water tomatoes but for the most part I have a lot of fruit developing.

Tomato  Plant

The peas are all out and I am planting buckwheat in their place.  I harvested and dried enough pea seeds to replant next time.  The potato plants are beginning to yellow out and I pulled one bag.  From one seed potato I got 8 useable taters and there were still a few small tubers well attached so I repotted the plant to see if they will continue to develop.  The plant never wilted a bit so in theory it should continue to grow.

Too Many Zucchini

 Even if you pick them small and toss the imperfect ones, there is a lot out there.  Time to make zucchini bread.

The plants are HUGE and healthy with no signs of disease or pests.

For the first time in a few years I have actual honey bees working on the blooms.

Footnote: Rain

 We got three tenths inches of rain last night which put about 50 gallons of rain in my tank and I am set for the week!  It was a very isolated little rain storm so we were super lucky that it chose us. I only had to water one plant today.  

The Cracks of Doom

 The Drought Monitor has our area down as "excessively dry".  This is as dry as I have ever had to deal with in the garden.  I cleared the strawberry bed in preparation for transplanting the new plants next month.  Since the bed receives no water it is a good indicator of how dry our soil is.

Strawberry Bed

But some crops do very well with constant moderately warm temperatures, sunshine and carefully monitored watering.  Here are some comparison photos from the blog last July.  Last July was our wettest July on record and it rained 14 out of 16 days in a row in mid-July.  My July rainfall total was 10.1 inches.

Cucumbers July 2021

Cucumbers 2022

Pole Beans July 2021

Pole Beans 2022

Sweet Potatoes July 2021

Sweet Potatoes 2022

Cantaloupes July 2021
Container experiment outcome: Fail

Cantaloupes 2022
I remove this row cover every morning and replace it mid-afternoon
to retain heat over night

But not everything has been watered.  I can see some fatigue in the perennials but my in-the-ground annuals have not had any supplemental water at all.  As they say... "Marigolds (and Geraniums etc.) are popular for a reason."    The Dahlias are also soldiering on and budding.  Being tubers they are more prone to rot anyway so the dry conditions are OK for them too.

Dinnerplate Dahlias bordered by Marigolds and Celosia

Marigolds, Snapdragons, Celosia

Naturally I cannot expect my container plantings to deal with no rainfall.  I water them about once a week.  The planters are large, the plants are drought tolerant and I used Moisture Control soil in them so they are doing well with normal maintenance.  

Geraniums, Papyrus, Ivy and Euphorbia

Some of my perennials do not look as lush as they might with more water, but they are still doing outstanding.  One thing I was looking forward to is the Rudbeckia Sahara that I mail-ordered last fall.  These need to be reseeded so some people grow them as annuals but I am hoping to get these clumps established as self maintaining perennials.  I an quite pleased with the variety of colors I received.

Rudbeckia Sahara

Rudbeckia Sahara

Rudbeckia Sahara

Rudbeckia Sahara and Happy Returns Daylily

Coral Bells

Celosia

Peachy Keen Verbena

We have a weather forecast of a front of passing thunderstorms passing through tonight into tomorrow.  I only have inches of water in my rain tank.  I am hoping the lawns and trees get a good soaking and I get some free water in my tank.

The Wharf

 We are calling this hardscape project "The Warf" because the pilings we sank along the edge to define the space look big enough to dock the Titanic.  This is the last step that finishes off our big dry creek bed project.  We have done a lot of these.  It all started with The Big Drain which dealt with getting water off of our front yard to the buried culvert along the road.  Then we replaced mucky mulch on top of a French drain.  The mulch held too much water and had to be replaced with rock.  We wanted it to look natural so we created The Dry Creek Bed.

This turned out so well that we started looking to other areas of our lawn which were presenting a challenge.  We live on a flatish hilltop with wicked clay soil.  There are natural springs that pop up here and there.  When we switched to city water and stopped using our water well it was like all of the water just sat there.  It became impossible to mow some areas.  So we decided to abandon a large portion of the lawn outlined here in: A River Runs Through It

The River area turned out gorgeous: Up the Crick.  I planted a lot of grasses and perennials.  A Landscape Project  We love our dry creek beds.  Because of the current economic climate, we have not progressed with the greenhouse or building on the stone pad, but we needed to keep going with the stone because there is still a portion of the lawn which is impossible to mow half of the year.  Terrible.  Mucky.  Standing water.  Sod floating on top of water bubble sort of problem. Big ruts.  Dying plants in bed edges.  Yuck.  It even smells bad.  Like frog bellies.

We eased into the project by adding this flagstone "patio".  This fixed a bit of a traffic flow problem.  I had avoided that area and never walked all the way to the walkway.  I would jump up on the deck as soon as possible,  The flagstones are very inviting and I immediately began walking all the way to the walkway.  It made it look finished and not like the raw, neglected edge of another project.

Once we got over that hurdle, the remaining corner seemed easier to tackle. 

This gets us about to the crown of the backyard.  As square and flat as the lawn is you don't really see a "crown".  But there is one and the water was being trapped up against the RR ties of the stone pad.  We put down road stabilization mat to keep the rock from disappearing into the clay.  The pilings are the last of a huge telephone pole that we have used along the last River bed.  They are 17" in diameter and buried 20 inches into the ground.

To be honest, the clean gravel was such a huge improvement you could stop right here.  The curved edge is just so pretty and fixes the problem of the blunt ending of the RR ties.  It really dressed it up.  But wait... there's more!

The boulders were staged for invasion.  We got this truckload of boulders months ago.  The pile had to be sorted through.  My husband and the neighbor moved every rock sorting them by size into flat stones and round stones and picking out the prettier ones.  Even with a tractor, there is a lot of heavy lifting.  This is by no means the total of the load of boulders.  We've used some of the plainer rocks for other drainage issues, and there is still a sizeable assortment of rocks available for future use.

At this point it would be nice if there was a "drag and drop" feature in real life.
Point and click.

The Boulders are placed to form a "creek bed"
But we're not done yet.

We dug in a few planting areas for grasses and hosta.

There is #1 crushed gravel at the bottom, but the rocks just perch on top of that.  We shoveled in a lot of #2 washed stones to bed down the rocks so they are emerging from the gravel, not sitting on top.  For the last two projects we bought truckloads of "bank run" which have a variety of smaller rocks (softball size).  But this project really wasn't big enough for a truckload of bank run.  But Dad has a creek...

We recruited the neighbor to help pick up rocks.
This is beautiful bank run.

This is where my love of all things galvanized paid off.
When I told my husband I could round up six or seven washtubs he almost didn't believe me

Again with the heavy lifting

Tub loads not truck loads

The softball sized rocks were scattered into area to give it more texture.
It is like painting a picture.   You have to add many layers to get the detail you want.

This new area improves the view from many angles.

Part of it is in shade for most of the day.  I planted Hosta in the shade and may add a bit more to the mulched portion of this corner.  But I'm not in a hurry to over plant.  I have enough to deal with in the river bed on the other side of the pad.  Both Hosta and Daylilies grow amazingly well but have to be constantly sprayed to keep the deer from ruining them.

The view from the house is really nice.  Time will tell if it has improved the mowing situation enough or if we will need to tweak it a bit more.