The Good and the Bad

So, I am going to start with the bad news. We had two watermelons growing great....... until the landscapers got a little too excited with their weed eater. They cut one of the watermelons off the vine. So now we are down to one watermelon, but it is growing well and is getting close to the size of a basketball.  I am going to count the cut off watermelon in the total harvested on the right.
Also, while the landscapers were at it, they mowed down all the leaves from the sweet potato vines that were trailing into the space between our beds. The sweet potatoes will probably do just fine because they grow so aggressively. They are now growing the other way and trying to take over the garden.

One last piece of bad news. Two cantaloupes ripened, but before I picked them some animals picked and ate them for me. They left a little piece to tell me they were there. They must have been good. Just so you know I did eat the cantaloupe I picked a few weeks ago. it was good.

More bad news. The first part of the summer was hot and dry, but now it has turned into a regular Mid-South summer with hot and humid conditions. The tomatoes have been suffering from blight, quite a bit of it. I have been spraying, but it is hard when it rains every other day. The only tomato plant still setting flowers is the cherry tomato. Hopefully the others will recover when the weather cools down and we can pick another round of large tomatoes. 

Good News

Okay, enough of the bad news. On to the good news. 
The peppers are producing, and I have picked 7 of them weighing 1.2lbs. There are still many small peppers that are growing on the plants so we should expect many more. 

The seedlings of the fall vegetables are growing well. After putting them under a grow light for a couple weeks I moved them outside under a shade cloth. Now I am having to defend them from the bugs. They are hungry. I'll be planting them in the next few weeks for a fall crop.

The potatoes are up and growing and I have hilled them two times now. From the six I planted I have three good plants. Here you can get a sneak peak at the short segment I did on hilling potatoes.

The cucumbers are producing, and I did not even notice one of the growing cucumbers until it was almost too large. So far I have picked 2: one large and one small. There are many more on the vines so there should be quite a few.

More baby cucumbers on their way

We got another squash. In previous years the squash plants have all been killed by squash vine borer by this point. I wonder if having so many plants so close together makes it hard for the borer adults to find the squash plant. Also, I am not sure why they are so small. It may be because they are often the shade of taller plants or it could be that they have more competition than usual from the roots of other plants.
Also, one squash bug has found the squash. I found a set of eggs on a leaf. i tore off that part of the leaf and threw it away.

To round it out I have also picked another 2 eggplants (0.8lbs), 13 full size and 32 cherry tomatoes (2.8lbs), and a little basil (0.05lbs)

A week or so ago I noticed that the plants were starting to turn a little yellow. Most of a time in a raised bed this is because the nitrogen has washed out of the soil. I put about a tablespoon of nitrogen around each plant (not the sweep potatoes, they will grow only foliage with nitrogen fertilizer) and in the week since they have turned back to a happy, healthy green.