This Week in My Garden: July 16, 2015

This is the year. This is the year we're going to get actual red tomatoes. We already have 2 ripe cherry tomatoes, and those slicers are well on their way! The two previous years we've been here, I've ended the season with pounds of green tomatoes. I do love fried green tomatoes and a good green tomato salsa, but the point is to make actual RED tomatoes that we can eat fresh. And this is the year.

Perhaps this it how it will go. Each year we'll have one vegetable that does really well. Last year it was sugar snap peas. This year our sugar snaps were a bit of a bomb. The year before that it was cucumbers, which last year were pretty disappointing and seem to be heading that way again. I would hope that eventually I'll figure things out so I can have a bang-up crop multiple years in a row. But no luck on that front yet. 

We're finally getting little fruits on our delicata and pattypan squash plants. There aren't that many, but I'm crossing my fingers they'll make it. For some reason, growing actual pattypan squash feels like it would be the coolest thing ever since they look to me like something that couldn't actually come from nature. 

I've let the weeds take over a bit since I've been so busy keeping the rabbits away and murdering slugs and now cabbage worms. I hate to kill these guys. They're such a pretty shade of green, and their little bodies remind me of the caterpillars I  collected when I was a kid. But, like with the slugs, I really have no choice when they're eating the crap out of my brussels sprouts.

And I just saw a few Japanese beetles on the green beans, which I have absolutely no problem killing because they disgust me. Last year, I waged an all-out war against them. 

I'm not giving up on the cucumbers entirely yet, but I think the zucchini, the eggplant, and the cantaloupe  are likely goners. And there's some new white patchy stuff on the sugar snap peas, which I remember from last year. Anybody know if this is just something that happens at the end of the plant's life? 

What's going on in your garden? 

p.s. A peak back at the beginning.

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