August 18, 2021 by Jeanette Rueb (Peachy00Keen)

July 2021 Garden Journal — Peachy00Keen

Location: Mountain West, USA; Southwest/Central Idaho
Zone: 7a
Lot Type: Dense Suburban; Back of house faces due east
Soil Type: Clay/Sand, Amended

Thursday, 7/1

Pulled some weeeeeeds. That’s 80% of what I do out there these days. The other 10% is cutting the lawn.

Sunday, 7/4

Harvested my sugar snap peas and lamented about the fact that something keeps eating my strawberries. AND MY PASSIONFLOWER. I sent an email to Logees, begging them to help me figure out what was wrong with the plant that I so desperately want but seem destined not to have. I also took a bunch of photos of how things are looking around the garden.

Wednesday, 7/7

Logees said to neem it up to combat whatever was eating my plants. They said it’s probably caterpillars. Whoever it is, it’s very inconsiderate of them. I also went out and bought a bag of diatomaceous earth before I heard back from the greenhouse. They said DE doesn’t work super well in their experience, but I still might lay some down around the berries, if nothing else. Their suggested course of treatment was to use neem oil once every few days for a few applications, so I’m going to spritz my plants every four days for five or six treatments, or at least until I see prolific new growth. That may mean neem forever. Who knows. But I will grow this passionflower, goddamnit. Speaking of passionflowers, the surprise nettle I grew got crispity crunchity over the last weekend when I was out of town and my house became more of an oven than usual with a broken AC. My croton also dropped a bunch of its leaves, my peace lily looked like death and is going to lose about five leaves at the base, and my 30-year-old jade tree has started dropping entire branches because of the heat. About a week after the incident, the lily has popped back up and looks like nothing ever happened, my nettle is growing all new leaves, and my jade… is still dropping branches, seemingly bigger and bigger ones every day. The croton appears to have resigned itself to death. No real surprise there.

Friday, 7/9

We have AC!! Now that I have a place to come in and actually cool off from the hundred-degree heat outside, I’m way more enthusiastic about doing stuff outside. I have to trim the grass and pull some weeds today, and I have some new things to plant! I bought carrots for the failed section of the greens bed, once I get the grass out, and I bought LEEKS to put in where my peas are (they’re spent, so I’m pulling them out). I’m not sure how they’re going to do going in this late in the season, but there’s only one way to find out. Things are looking pretty good so far. I let the clover get really high last time, so it’s not as nice and controlled-looking back there right now. The grass was like “NOW IS MY TIME TO SHINE” so my yard kind of looks like a teenager’s beard. Hence, I’m going to give it a trim today. Everything that’s supposed to be growing is growing well, with the exception of my okra, which I think, at this point, has forgotten that it’s a plant and what that entails. I’ve got a couple of squash on my biggest spaghetti squash vine (which is at least 20 feet long), and my honeydew that I grew from a couple of seeds I popped out of a melon is also doing great. My tomatoes are about due for more food, too. The cherry tomato plants are the biggest of the bunch, and they’re at least as tall as I am, if not bigger (and I’m 5'2", so that’s impressive, but probably not as impressive as you were imagining). Out front, the sunflowers look excellent, and I learned that the Firecracker variety (my shortest ones) apparently produce multiple heads per stalk! My gladioli are also looking glorious, and my rosebush, tamed from a wild, unruly tangle, is on its third round of flowers since spring. It looks lush. The zinnias I planted approximately 0.01 seconds before a massive deluge a couple of months ago have, in fact, all washed down to the bottom of the garden, and they are about to pop out flowers as well. My lavender is doing great, though it’s kind of fallen over in the heat. It’s okay. Me too, buddy.

And I sprayed Neem on a bunch of other plants in the backyard, mostly preventatively.

Tuesday, 7/13

Sprayed with neem again. It seems to be helping my poor little maypop. It has new leaves coming up on top. Now, something is eating my mullein. I scolded the spiders living in the bricks and told them to do their job better. I also fed the peppers. Since their growing season has only really just started, it's hard to say how much of a difference this seaweed slurry I'm feeding them is actually doing, but I can say that the tomato food is working wonders. I'll pay Zamzows whatever they want for that stuff. It's barley meal and magic, I swear. Despite not feeding the squash, I am already drowning in spaghetti squash. My honeydew plant is also going crazy, though I wish it would start making melons. I'm going to go hand-pollinate a bit today. Some progress pics:

Friday, 7/16

Went out and weeded/fed the tomatoes. They're getting big! I also discovered that EARWIGS are what's eating my fruit!! 😡😡😡 I'm probably going to see if there's a selective insecticide to get rid of them because we have a profusion.

I spent the afternoon pulling weeds, treating some of the plants for rust with a sulfur solution (lol fart juice), yanking out a monster plant that I thought was going to grow into a wild sunflower but 100% didn't, trellising the berry brambles because they were laying down, and KILLING EARWIGS. I scattered diatomaceous earth all along the back garden wall and around the peppers that got nibbled on the right side of the patio. I found THE COLONY living behind my blackberry bramble and I LAID WASTE TO THEIR METROPOLIS, MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I WATCHED THEIR CITIZENS WRITHE IN AGONY AS THE MOISTURE LEACHED FROM THEIR CHITINOUS BODIES, LEAVING ONLY DESICCATED CORPSES BEHIND. BEWARE MY NUCLEAR WINTER, FOR IT IS PENANCE PAID TO YOU AND YOUR KIN FOR THE CONSUMPTION OF MY STRAWBERRIES!!!

Also I determined that at least one of the two mystery plants is probably pumpkins, not spaghetti squash. Woo!

Saturday, 7/17

I harvested my first squash!! I think I jumped the gun a bit, but I was just so excited to bring it inside. I'll let the next one sit on the vine longer. I also determined that one of my mystery plants is another pumpkin! Hooray!! The cantaloupe plant is going wild and has tons of little melonettes on it, and my cayenne pepper plant is LOADED with green peppers (that I somehow didn't notice until about five minutes ago!!!) I also have one blackberry. It is not very black yet.

Wednesday, 7/21

Weeds were pulled and an attempt was made to contain my exuberant honeydew plant, which is loaded with melonettes. I'd call it a partial success.

Thursday, 7/22

Tidied up the grape vines. One of the branches is flowering again(???). Something I'd never considered before is making wreath bases out of the trimmed vines. The wreath I made out of the neighbor's willow branches that I trimmed turned out pretty great. I'll have to see how this goes. I pulled a bunch of grass, screamed at some earwigs, mowed the lawn, and generally cleaned things up a little. The tomatoes keep falling over. The cherry tomato plants have outgrown their cages and are now octopussing over onto the ground. Send help (and maybe some rebar.) I have no idea how I’m going to contain them as the season progresses, but I guess we’re going to find out! When I plant next year, I think I’m going to rotate my plots slightly clockwise. I’ll put tomatoes all around the corner where the onions currently are, move the onions over against the fence, probably skip spaghetti squash, shift the peppers over to make room for more, and do more pumpkins/melons (and add watermelon) in the places where the gourds and cucurbits have thrived this year. I might even move the onions over to the wet fence (south fence) to see if they’ll grow in that majorly soggy ground. The lettuce likes it, so there’s always that fallback.

Saturday, 7/24

So I'm doing lots of beekeeping stuff in hopeful preparation for keeping my own hive someday. It's currently honey harvesting season, but we're in a period of dearth right now, so the honey flow is slow (because there's not much for the bees to eat from flowers, so they're dipping into their honey reserves for food). Some beekeepers with sizable food reserves around their hives have better flows than others, so I reached out on a networking page to see if anyone was extracting so I could see how it was done. Long story short, I ended up going over to someone's house on a Saturday night and spending a couple of hours learning how to remove honey from frames with a centrifuge. It was pretty cool. One member of the couple also runs a local community garden, and she sent me home with a little Bluebeard bush (caryopteris) in a pot. I need to clear a space for it out front.

Tuesday, 7/27

I've been watching my mundo tomatoes grow and grow, and there's FINALLY ripe fruit!!! I pulled these two chongus supreme (that's my new variety name, I've decided) cherry tomatoes off the vine, and they tasted like heaven. I cannot WAIT for more!!!

Get gravel for the swing area (probably going to happen in the fall at this point.)