A cold week in July

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May and June have been unusually warm. Temperatures have been over 30°C/86°F most of the days, and the rainfall, which was slim, wasn’t enough to keep the garden growing well. I was getting ready for a bad gardening year with burned soil and dried-up plants. Sure I was watering my garden, but in this kind of heat that doesn’t help much.

Then last Saturday, we finally got a weather change. Luckily there were no big storms. The rain came calmly. Since then, the temperature has dropped to almost spring temperatures with rather cold nights. They have dropped so much that I’ve switched to autumn clothes and the house cooling is turned off.

The weather change was just what my garden needed. The plants are slowly recovering from heat exhaustion. Many of them are now growing rapidly and doubling in size. I was afraid that diseases would start as soon as the rain started, but luckily a couple of foggy mornings and late afternoon rain prevented the sun-rain exchange, so all my plants are still very healthy. Just to be on the safe side, I’ve sprayed all my blight-sensitive vegetables with homeopathic blight prevention.

Cucumbers and zucchinis

Although the summer has been very hot so far, cucumbers and zucchinis seem to enjoy it. I’ve never had such big zucchini plants. So far, I’ve harvested leaves, flowers, and stems twice, and I’m harvesting zucchinis twice a week.

Cucumbers are covering the whole bed now, and like zucchinis, I’m harvesting them twice a week. I’ve sown cucumbers in 5 different places in the garden and times, and this should give me a neverending production during this season. The second sown cucumbers, which I’ve tied with strings, are almost ready to flower, and I’m sure the rest will be following soon.

Peppers, carrots, and cucamelons

Peppers have finally recuperated from the storms in May and heat exhaustion in June. The combination of watering, grass mulching, and additional fertilization helped out and they are finally growing as they should. I’m even starting to harvest them every week and they keep on flowering.

Another flowering plant are my cucamelons, which are growing well this year. The plant didn’t climb on the poles as I wanted it to, so it is a bit hard to harvest with all the tangled vines on the floor, but I’m managing it. Every week I harvest a handful of small cucamelons.

Carrots have also recuperated from the initial growth problems. They are growing well now, both first and second sown plants are starting to form healthy roots, and soon I will start picking out the bigger fruits to give the rest of the carrots more pace to grow.

More broad beans

Of course, after this kind of weather change, I had to do some more sowing and planting. I’ve transplanted the beets and chard, which I’ve sown in containers, and I’ve sown more beans, broad beans, and carrots. Since I still haven’t taken out the broad beans which I’ve sown in winter, I’ve decided to add broad beans to the two brassica beds in the garden. I have just enough space for a couple of houses on each bed. I’ll add poles for the broad beans later, and they will not be in the way of the brassicas. With this sowing, my garden is full, and there is no more free space.

Continuous harvests

Right now, I have two harvests a week of beans, cucumbers, blackberries, lettuce, and zucchinis. Peppers are slowly coming, and chard is harvested once a week. This week I’ve also harvested my first tomatoes, a couple of earlier fruits are turning red. Soon more tomatoes will come.

The colder week will help my garden a lot and give it a much-needed break from the heat. The seeds will have time to germinate, plants will have time to grow, and once the heat returns, plants will have enough energy to give me more vegetables to harvest.

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