Not Inundated and Some Plans for Next Year

 

I thought that we would be inundated with vegetables right now. I'm not complaining, because we have a steady take of food almost every day. However, there's been a slowdown. I haven't seen a new pumpkin starting in weeks. After an initial swarm of massive English cucumbers, there are just a couple on the vine now. The tomatoes - all 41 plants - are, so far, not producing more than we can eat on a given day. 

It might be the complete lack of rain. It might be the consistently high temperatures. It might be the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that has been inundating the city regularly. 

But the fact remains that we're not exactly buried in veg. 

We have tried some new dishes. We ate stir-fried zucchini 3x last week. We're eating lots of cucumber sandwiches with dill & cream-cheese. I put up two jars of refrigerator pickles. Last night we tried a tasty summer squash curry (we put a can of garbanzo beans along with two smallish summer squash in a blender with two teaspoons of curry, a couple of cloves of garlic, half of a big onion and, in this case, too much salt). Served over rice. Very tasty.

Still, we'd thought that tomato sauces and soups and salsas would need to be canned for later. It hasn't happened yet.

For next year, plans are beginning to coalesce with some learning from this year. It turns out that sugar snap peas and cucumbers are good companion plants. I think they'd work nicely together on the same trellis. The peas are all done now and I took down their trellises and pulled up the plants. The cucumbers are just now coming into their own. That would make a nice succession.

Likewise, peppers and garlic go well together. The garlic has all been pulled now, and the peppers are just now filling in fully and starting to produce. So next year, with the much larger amount of garlic I already ordered, we'll be planting a full bed of them.

I think it will be a good idea to segregate the different kinds of squash. The pumpkins and summer squash seem to have choked out the spaghetti squash and the Hubbard squash.

I learned last night that it is a very good idea to aggressively stake tomatoes early. I'd thought they could sort of support each other and also lean up against the chicken-wire walls of the beds. Not so. Once they began fruiting (and they're just at the early stage), they began sinking. A lot of the vines were in the dirt last night when I took a good, close look at them. So I had to spend more than an hour planting stakes and tying them up. The bed now looks like Vlad the Impaler paid us a visit.

Carrots. These have been an almost total disappointment. They're supposed to grow nicely in tomato beds. In my experience so far, they get choked out. I think we need to try a new companion, or just planting them on their own. I've got some promising seedlings in with some peppers, but they are tiny. They've got until October to get busy and produce, but I'm beginning to worry.

That is all.