This week in the garden - #67

Okay. I give up. My spring vegetable garden is almost a complete failure.

The corn that started out so promisingly tasseled but never developed ears. The zucchini produced a few fruits and then collapsed. Usually that means squash vine borers have been at work, but this time it seemed to be a fungal disease.

The tomato vines look rather sickly. They are producing but not in the quantity that I would expect. The green beans, eggplants, and peppers are coming along but just don't seem to be growing the way they would in a normal year. They are not producing yet but I have my fingers crossed.

The only thing that has really been successful so far is the tomatillos which have produced a ton of fruits and are still blooming and producing, but, on the whole, it has been a very disappointing season.

I'm going to blame the weather again here. We had an unusually cool spring and I got a tardy start in the garden and so the plants were all several weeks later than they normally are. Even as they were growing, it was still quite cool sometimes at night - just not the kind of weather that spring vegetable plants expect and love. Perhaps I should have provided more added organic matter to the beds as well. For whatever reason, I'm pretty much writing it off at this point. Maybe I'll try again later.

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The white cat's whiskers are blooming. Behind them is celosia.

The old heirloom buddleia is full of these blooms. They are not as showy as the modern buddleias but butterflies and bees love them.

The red yucca is blooming among the Mexican feather grass in the bottle tree bed.

 Here's a close-up of the red yucca blooms.

More sunflowers bloom every day.

The crocosmia is beginning its long bloom cycle.

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It's very hot and very humid now even though, according to the calendar, summer is still a couple of weeks away. I've spent a lot of time watering plants this week, although we did get half an inch of rain on Thursday. In the next few days, we are expecting to see 100 degree temperatures for the first time in almost a year.

We might as well get used to the idea. It's going to be another scorcher of a summer.