Garden in July

Even though we got the garden in late this year, things appear to be doing really well. Normally by this time we’ve been able to harvest quite a few sweet peppers but only a few so far.

This Summer has been an odd weather year to say the least. Where normally we’ve had a few hot spells, so far things have been really mild. Why only this past week did we hit the 90’s for the first time. Even when we went to plant in early June, the weather was drab, chilly and quite wet. In fact, I had to delay planting by another week and didn’t really get things in the ground until 6/9/2005.

Looking at one month of progress, I’m going to cover how the peppers, tomatoes and eggplant are doing.

I tried some new things with the peppers this year. Namely I did starts from seed starting in mid-April. The starts did relatively well but took quite some time to “take off”. Looking back on it, I wish I had started these guys back in January possibly in my office. There’s always next year on that. In any case, most of those peppers have really started to thrive and are starting to catch up with the purchased starts from Bi-mart.

A little note on Bi-mart. Bi-mart was the original warehouse store … sort of the Oregonian version of Costco or Sam’s Club. I went and visited there on the weekend around 6/9/2005 and low-and-behold a truck pulls up right as I’m getting there with some of the most amazing pepper starts I’ve ever seen. I asked the guy driving the truck and he said they were out of a local farm in Woodburn (about 45 miles north of Corvallis). He had lots of sweet peppers (California Wonder and Bell) as well as habenero, thai and jalapeno. These were all immaculate and in 1 gallon containers. The cost for these beauties? Frickin’ $1.50 each … are you kidding me?! I snapped up 3 sweet, a jalapeno and a habenero. I went back a week later to find they had been cleaned out except for one fantastic looking thai hot pepper plant and a “cherry bomb” hot pepper plant. I snapped those up as well …

The lesson learned here is that it’s silly for me to do the sweet peppers from seed when Bi-mart is such a great resource. Next year I’ll be doing some more exotic stuff from seed and saving shelf space in our garden window for herbs, etc. All of my sweet (and jalapeno, thai and cherry bomb) peppers will be coming from Bi-mart now.

I’ve had a bit of a tough time with bugs this year. It appears the mild winter made it really easy for the Japanese Beetles to come back in force. I’ve only caught (and subsequently dispatched) a few of them but they are gaining momentum. I finally resorted to some Safer soap and that appears to be at least slowing them down. They have just moved on to the flowers (zinnias and sunflowers).

I had a rough go of it with a few peppers that I started from seed. These of course were the ones I was most excited about. My fish, black hungarian and senorita peppers I’m most excited about. The fish have really started to take off now. It looks like I’m going to actually get some fruit off of both the black hungarian and the senorita’s as well. They went from this, to this in less than 4 weeks.

I am also doing two long cayenne pepper plants as well. Last year my long cayenne plant did gang busters. I actually took seeds from that plant and did the starts myself. They aren’t off to an amazing start, but I’m hoping to compensate by having two of them going at once.

My tomatoes are going bonkers. We are doing three varieties this year (and even have some un-determined volunteers showing up); Cosmonaut Volkov (slicer), Silvery Fir Tree and a Sun Gold. These are going crazy. Still very few flowers right now so I’m getting a little nervous about my cages; they simply will not hold up these beasties.

We are also doing two varieties (’asian swallow’ on the left, ‘dusky’ on the right) of eggplants this year. Last year we tried to do some eggplant and it did not do so well. The year before that we had a great harvest so we felt like it was sort of hit-or-miss. This year, we tried doing the eggplants with black plastic over them (around their base to keep the soil temperature up at night). So far so good. These things are looking amazing.

It’s only July and this keeps getting better and better all the time.