July 2 2023 Garden Check-in

 Time to visit this year's crop, before this year's disaster wipes it out. We've had gardens destroyed by insects, derecho, and hail. It seems gratuitous, as in other years, gardener incompetence has sufficed. So far this year, though, so good, mostly. 

Let's go from left (east) to right in the backyard. This box is an attempt to grow watermelons and cantaloupes.

 The cantaloupes are destined to climb a trellis, in theory leaving room for them and the watermelons. The watermelons seem to be off to a good start:

The cantaloupes, less so.

They don't need the trellis quite yet. It may be silly to try to grow watermelons and cantaloupe together, but since they may well be pulverized by ice rocks falling from the heavens anyway, maybe it doesn't matter.

On to my most hail-resistant garden, the carrots, as they do most of their work underground. Last year I covered 1/2 of my carrot garden with an old bedsheet after planting, and didn't cover the other half. The covered half germinated, the other half didn't. So I covered the whole garden this year, and amazingly, it all germinated - except the part where I apparently forgot to plant anything. I have reseeded that and covered it with a piece of the same Oklahoma State University bedsheet I covered the whole box with - the one I got for $1 at the Salvation Army. 

Carrots have been one of the more successful plantings the last couple of years (I grade on a curve - that means not complete failure). This year is looking good.

The picture may look odd because I have the garden covered with a green mesh netting to keep out critters, and it seems to help. But look at how many are growing!

Westward ho! to the tomatoes and cucumbers:

There are even tomatoes almost ready to pick. As the cucumbers (foreground) grow, they will get a trellis to climb.

Now to the salad and herb garden: 

This was originally intended to be about 3/4 full of onions and cauliflower that I stared early in the winter in window boxes. The only ones that survived are two cauliflower, which you can see to the far right of the garden. Should they grow up, I will get purple cauliflower, which I think sounds cool. You can get boring old white cauliflower at the store any time. 

The failure of most of the winter crop left room for more, which I am filling with bush beans, mint, basil, and some lettuce that I recently started. 

Next: beans and okra! Here you go:

The beans are doing well on the right side of the trellis are yellow pole beans; the ones on the left are the same kind of bush bean as in the herb garden, just started a couple of weeks earlier. The rest is okra. A close up of the bush beans and okra:

So far, so good.

That leaves us with the squash garden. This garden I started last year, and it is the only one that isn't based on "Square Food Gardening." Last year I started squash, which was doing well until wiped out in the hailstorm. This year, squash! I am using "Table Queen"- "(aka Des Moines, Danish) Set the standard for Acorn squash; started the rage for small individual fall squashes. Introduced by the Iowa Seed Company of Des Moines, Iowa in 1913." From Seed Savers Exchange. 

I planted them in mounds of potting dirt Vickie discarded in planting flowers this year (I'll have to do a flower-only post featuring them - her flowers look great). The queens seem happy here in West Des Moines in Vickie's used dirt:

I try to use varieties you don't see in stores, because why take the trouble to plant a garden of the same thing you can buy at a store.  I have four different kinds of carrots in three different colors. Assuming they survive, of course.

I have to be happy. Everything is growing except most of the stuff I started over the winter, and much of it seems to be thriving. Some sort of natural disaster is probably coming along - maybe a tornado this time, or lightning, or plant-eating catfish falling from the sky. But if disaster fails to arrive on time, we should have good garden veggies starting this month, and especially in the fall.