Awesome, you came back!! Thanks for visiting!
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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