Hi all! It’s time for check-in #3 on my summer gardening efforts. Overall, things are going well, but there have been big ups and downs.
The new raised bed we built is doing well. Krysten planted corn in the center one, and a couple cucumber seedlings in the rightmost one. The cucumbers have been slow to develop and grow. I think this is because of the extreme heat. In the last week or two, one’s growth has accelerated and it’s finally growing one nice cucumber. I may harvest it and slice it up to use as an ingredient in a nice summer cocktail drink tonight (It’s Friday as I write this draft!). Do a web search for “porch swing” cocktail recipes.
Since we got the fencing up that encloses the whole space, we have had 0 evidence of animals munching our crops! Huzzah! However, we DID see one deer in our yard and it was eating our hostas elsewhere on our property (and has continued to; the hostas are mostly gone now). So, we DO have deer, but they haven’t been interested in our vegetables (yet). I wonder if they don’t like walking on the gravel we have down?
Tomatoes
We have been harvesting a lot of tomatoes! One of our plants grew very large and tall and ended up flopping over the tomato cages we built in the last update. We needed something taller! We were worried that the tropical storm in the first week of August was about to topple the biggest one completely, so we hurriedly built an extension. We found some scrap wood in the garage, attached it vertically to the sides of the raised bed, and strung twine around nails in the boards back and forth from board to board. This seems to hold it up well and while the tropical storm wasn’t too bad here, there was no damage afterward. We need to do the same for our second largest one this weekend.
The early blight issue I spoke about in the last update has seemed to be controlled by pruning more heavily and keeping air flowing. However, our smaller tomato plant has been slow to fruit and has some holes/spots on the leaves. After perusing the HGIC site, my guess was that it was Septoria leaf spot which is a fungal disease, however as a couple knowledgeable HGIC coworkers proof-read this post, they said it was actually most likely from flea beetles. It may sound like I’ve got the inside connection with experts, but everyone can send in questions to our Certified Professional Horticulturists for help like this!
There are prevention and control directions on the HGIC page for flea beetles, but since the damage isn’t large at the moment, I think we’ll leave it as-is now, and plan to clean up and remove garden debris to reduce overwintering sites for the beetles when we wind down the growing season this year.
Overall though, we’ve been harvesting more tomatoes than we know what to do with, so we’re happy with our tomato efforts here! I’m considering making a whole lot of sauce.
Squash and zucchini
In the last update, I mentioned I suspected squash vine borer larvae to be killing my zucchini plant from the inside. I did the surgery and discovered I was right.
I remember reading on the HGIC site at some point that in general with cucurbits, you can cover parts of the plant that grow above the soil with soil, and they will begin to root. I cut the plant to disconnect the borer-infested segment (which was pretty much down into the roots) from the good parts. I ripped out the roots and infested stuff, then planted the remaining stuff back in, mounding soil over it.
For a few weeks, things seemed promising. Most of the large leaves did not make it, but some younger and new leaf sprouts were growing strong, and a small fruit started growing. This suggested to me that after some time, we’d likely have this zucchini plant back from the dead and producing again. However, that little fruit died and rotted, and the leaves and stems suddenly showed damage.
Our squash had been doing great. It kept producing great fruit at a rapid pace, and kept expanding. It was healthy; not showing damage from squash vine borers or cucumber beetles like the zucchini had. It expanded outside of the raised bed and sometimes those leaves would appear wilted. We assumed it was because of the extra heat from the gravel and the hot sun.
All was going well until a few days ago – it began wilting everywhere and wasn’t recovering. Fruit production stopped. We took a closer look, and we’re seeing the same squash vine borer type damage we saw with the zucchini! Noooo! It looked pervasive. I wasn’t about to do more larvae extraction (it was gross, and squash isn’t my favorite vegetable).
So, we called it on both the zucchini and the squash plants. 2:35 pm, Friday, August 10th, 2020. We ripped them out and tossed them far from the garden. We’re making space for some sort of cooler season crops (the planning hasn’t started yet).
Next year, we are absolutely taking the following prevention steps (taken from the HGIC page on squash vine borers):
- To prevent egg-laying, wrap a collar of aluminum foil around lower stems or dust or spray lower stems with spinosad or pyrethrum.
- Cover plants with floating row cover until flowering.
- Plant early to lessen injury. Use transplants instead of seeds. Or, plant squash seed mid-June.
- Butternut and cushaw are resistant; yellow crookneck less susceptible than zucchini.
Green beans
We’ve been harvesting a few green beans from the mature plants that survived the rodent massacres that happened before we got the fence up, but it wasn’t enough to make a meal out of. Several weeks ago, I planted more seeds to replace the eaten ones and those have grown and should be fruiting soon. I hope that we can have some dinners with roasted green beans soon; they are my favorite of our garden veggies after tomatoes (and since tomatoes are fruit, I could say that green beans are my favorite veggies).
The zinnia we planted in the center of the green beans has gotten large and is crowding them. We will likely try to tie it up to keep it more vertical than horizontal.
There are a couple bean leaves with holes munched out of them from some insect, but nothing to be too concerned about yet.
Moving forward
We’re still having fun with the garden. It’s great to be done building for the most part. Krysten has been adding a few pots on the outskirts with flowers in them which makes the space look nice. I think in the next season, we’ll probably add more flowers in pots and save the beds for the vegetables. The flowers have overcrowded vegetables in some instances in the raised beds, and we should be able to attract pollinators close enough to the vegetables via potted flowers.
I’m looking forward to more tomatoes and our first meal with green beans. Perhaps in the next update, I may present our plan for cool-season crops.
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– Dan Adler
HGIC Web and Communications Manager