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My Poor Garden
It's not all bad. The first half of summer was devastatingly hot and dry, but Mid-July through mid-August finally brought us plentiful rain and the garden recovered. Now September has continued the earlier trend toward hot and dry which has meant the end of some things. Even so I'm still harvesting
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| Sweet peppers |
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| Okra, which is benefiting from |
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| Greywater, which we finally got set up. |
I'm also getting
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| Cantaloupes. They are small from not enough water, but they are very tasty and sweet; perfect for the two of us. |
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| Green beans. Just a handful every other day or so. Not enough to can but enough to enjoy for dinner. |
I'm getting tomatoes again although the plants look pretty raggedy.
I call these my “comeback tomatoes” because every summer my tomato plants succumb to blight. Gardeners are advised to pull and destroy such plants immediately, but I rarely get around to doing that. I find that when the weather begins to cool down a bit, the plants make a comeback with new vines and leaves and more tomatoes.
I've been seed saving too: tomato, cucumber (now finished), cantaloupe, and green beans.
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| Sweet basil going to seed. |
What's not going so well is the annual takeover by the wiregrass. Those midsummer rains saved the harvest, but also caused the wiregrass to start growing again.
Wiregrass is one of the few things that thrives in drought-like conditions. What makes it discouraging is that it takes over heavily mulched areas too. It just grows and grows like an indeterminate tomato vine, both underground and over the top. Nature is a mightier conqueror than we like to think, and every year I feel like this stuff sends us back to gardening square one.
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| Wiregrass in the tomato bed. |
The tomato rows you see above were mulched with cardboard, empty paper feed bags, and about six inches+ of wood chip mulch.
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| You'd never believe this was all cultivated earlier this summer. I tried to grow summer squash here, but it didn't make it. |
I might have finally found some answer for it, however, in this article, “Resolving the “Wiregrass” Problem.” I don't know if I have the same species mentioned in the article, but it indicates that the stuff usually grows in low-phosphorous soil. I know our soil is low in phosphorous, so if I can resolve that, maybe I'll resolve my wiregrass problem as well.
In the meantime, I'm getting the hoop house ready for fall planting.
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| Wiregrass comes up in the hoophouse raised beds too. |
Temperatures remain in the low 90sF (low to mid 30sC), and between that and my bone dry soil from no rain, I somehow don't feel like fall planting. August and September are our times to plant cool weather veggies, however, so I need to get on with it.
One last garden shot
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| Jerusalem artichokes are blooming. |
And that's it for me. How about you?
Source: http://www.5acresandadream.com/2016/09/my-poor-garden.html
