We have been back for more than a week now and everything is cruising along pretty well. I’m really enjoying the automatic watering from the drip system. It’s actually life-changing in a way. I don’t think I’ll ever do a garden without one again.
Of course, there are still some problem areas in the garden. The little roma tomato plants that came in a bundle of 6 or 8 have never done very well. They are the plants that had leaves dying from some disease (I think it may have been caused by thrips). They’re still looking very poor. But at least the rest of the tomato plants are growing like crazy. In fact I think we needed more tomato cages a week or two ago. It’s going to be tricky to get the plants into cages at this point, but it must be done.
The zucchini plant has leaves everywhere, but hasn’t been successful producing more zucchini after the three monsters we picked last week. It has both male and female flowers, but the new zucchinis seem to get aborted not long after they get going. I’m hoping it’s just a delayed response to allowing so many zucchinis to get so large last week and that things will return to normal this week. We’ll have to see.
The herbs in the front yard need to be trimmed again or they’ll go to seed again, and nobody wants that.
The jalapeño peppers are looking awesome, but I’m sort of sad to realize I only have one plant. For some reason I thought one of the other plants was also a jalapeño, but it looks like there’s only one jalapeño, one poblano, and three bell pepper plants. All the pepper plants are looking great, but I sure hope the poblano gives us a pepper soon. There have been plenty of blossoms, and the plant is quite tall, but so far we don’t have any fruit on that plant.
The Armenian Cucumbers vines are getting aggressive, and flowering like crazy, but there’s no fruit on the vines yet. The eggplant is behaving similarly. We’ve had a ton of beautiful purple flowers, but haven’t seen any fruit yet.
The artichoke plant continues to grow, but it’s clear from comparing it to the artichoke plants in the yards of my neighbors that we won’t be picking any artichokes this year. I think we may be on the two year plan for those. It’s certainly interesting to watch them progress.
