Shaker Garden Thread: July Edition

Hey Shakers! It's been almost a month since our last garden thread. July is here and that means full-on summer for most of the Northern Hemisphere! How does YOUR garden grow?

Mine has been inundated with rain, so much that low-laying beds were getting too much. It's been hard to keep the mildew and other plant viruses down, but we have started to harvets some nice things. In the picture above you can see the banana pepper, sweet bell pepper, zinnias and cucumber along with an assortment of cherry tomatoes and our first ground cherries (the things with the husks--they're a tomato relative, quite sweet with a pineapple taste). The various tomatoes are Mexico Midget (red), Snow White (pale yellow), Sun Gold (orange), Brown Cherry (brown) and Gold Nugget (yellow). All very tasty stuff!

Unfortunately the corn is another story. Unlike last year, when corn earworm destroyed most of it, I had no caterpillar/larvae damage. Spraying Bt early seems to have helped. But excessive rain hindered pollination, so the above was all we got out of it. It was tasty, definitely--there is NOTHING like garden-fresh corn! Yet I am not sure it is worth my space and trouble for me to try again. (I say that now, of course. Next January I am sure I'll be slavering over the seed catalogue persuading myself to try it one. more. time, lol!)

For a successful seed crop, though, I cannot beat these sunflowers, "Hopi Dye" variety. This one is about nine feet tall! We're trying to save some for seeds, although the wet weather may not make that successful. They're also beautiful cut flowers, and fantastic for attracting bees and other pollinators. Definitely growing these again!

And this is another success story so far: the Seminole Pumpkins. This one is baseball sized; I also have softballs and a golfball coming on. They're native to Florida and like to climb a trellis. EXTREMELY bug-resistant; not only do they frustrate squash vine borers, they seem to shrug off a lot of insects trying to bore into the flesh of the fruit. I've found a few bite marks, but no holes. If I can get these suckers through, I might actually have some nice winter squash/pumpkin this year (which is good, because my cushaws have not done well with the rain.)

There's been an interesting benefit to growing mostly c. moschata varieties this year. The three c. pepo zucchini plants I planted (Black Beauty type) have done remarkably well. Only one has succumbed to SVB so far. I assume that the moths can't tell the difference between varieties and lay their eggs wherever. So the eggs get laid mostly on c. moschata, simply because of numbers. The larvae starve and die there, since they cannot chew through moschata vines effectively. Because I have only a few vulnerable c. pepo zucchini plants, hidden among the others, they are making it through. That hasn't actually meant big crops of any summer squash, again thanks to rain/poor pollination. But I may try this trick again next year to see if I can get conventional zucchini to survive past May.

In conclusion: more sunflowers! Feel free to leave your gardening stories and pictures in the thread below. Wherever and whatever your garden is--herbs in the window? a rooftop container garden? a one acre field?--you can talk about it here. (And Southern Hemispheres Shakers are explicitly invited to share any gardening you have on the go, whether it's winter crops or planning for next season or whatever!)

[Commenting note: please be mindful that everyone has different requirements, restrictions, and needs in their gardens. Broad prescriptions that everyone must/should garden organically, or cheaply, or low-water, however-you-do-it, etc. are not helpful. Thanks in advance for respecting this!]