Runaway October

Hey guys. Remem­ber me? No? Dan­git. I don’t blame you.

I have lots of excuses, but no real rea­sons. Maybe it’s my short atten­tion span?

Sum­mer is on full blast here in Ari­zona. When I say full blast I mean you walk out the front door and are lit­er­ally blasted with Sum­mer Heat. My poor gar­den has seen bet­ter days.

Today

Con­sid­er­ing we get to plant some­times as much as a whole sea­son ear­lier than other parts of the coun­try, I can’t com­plain. We ended up with more toma­toes then we knew what to do with. We made many batches of salsa and lots and lots of fresh tomato slices. I even exper­i­mented with ketchup, but it turned out way way too sweet and pretty much ined­i­ble. Boo.

The boys wanted in on these pic­tures.

This is one of a few big har­vests. We basi­cally ended up with a lot of squash, jalapeños and tomatoes.

Does this look like a zom­bie ver­sion of that guy from Veg­gi­eTales to you? Me too!

We also planted ONE “hon­ey­dew” plant and ended up with a few good sized mel­ons off of it. It’s still going strong though. It LOVES the heat appar­ently. It takes up a huge amount of space still. It’s not a hon­ey­dew by the way, I’m think­ing maybe a Cren­shaw or Casaba melon.

Those leaves are about hand sized, for ref­er­ence. In the bot­tom right, is my Span­ish laven­der bush. It seems happy to have a lit­tle bit of shade.

The heat is caus­ing the jalapenos to be red and small from the start.

Some strag­gler toma­toes. About 70% of the cherry toma­toes ripen okay, the oth­ers suc­cumb to the sun and shrivel up.

I’d say all in all, the gar­den was totally worth it. There’s noth­ing quite like find­ing your boys nes­tled in your gar­den fill­ing up on tomatoes.

Some things I’ll do dif­fer­ently next spring:

• Space out the toma­toes a smidgen more.
• Cage them imme­di­ately, and con­tinue to sup­port them as they grow.
• Read up on cucum­bers. I think that by the time my pick­ling cucum­bers came up, it was too hot. You can find itty-bitty inch long cum­bers one day and the next they’re shriv­eled and gone.
• Plan for sprawl more. The toma­toes over­took the green beans, dill and car­rots. The one squash plant took out the lemon thyme, cilantro and most of the spearmint.
• Pos­si­bly plant a week or two ear­lier. I don’t have to worry about frost much, but I do have to worry about the sun killing things right as the fruit matures.
• Pos­si­bly some kind of shade cloth over the whole thing too.

So, that was our gar­den this year. Still debat­ing on when to rip things out to pre­pare for the win­ter garden.

How did yours come along?

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