Another update to our garden. We are starting to do our summer harvest of tomatoes (pretty late as compared to other years due to a cool and wet June), artichokes, onions, beets, squash, beans, peppers, and eggplant. We have been picking strawberries throughout the year and they have been good. I highly recommend Albion strawberries (read my post on those for more info).

We are still waiting for our melons. Cantaloupes are looking great and should be on here soon and the watermelons need to get bigger.

I have been disappointed with my raspberries. They have grow great and produced but the birds are eating them before they are big enough to pick. We will be buying a fake owl to see if that will help.

A word on our tomatoes. I am starting to see signs of fusarium wilt in our tomatoes. This is a fungi that block water to the leaves and eventually kill tomatoes. This problem is due to our inability to rotate our crops. Homeowners are constantly dealing with this problem. As we continue to not rotate the fungi will build up stronger and stronger each year and soon we will not be able to grow tomatoes, peppers or eggplant, (solanaceous crop). There are a few ways to solve this. First and easiest is to plant only hybrids that are resistant to these diseases. We planted a few this year and those are doing fine. The other, which we will eventually do is to solarize the soil and kill everything that has built up over the years. This means that we will pretty much have to take a year off since you need to take 6 weeks in the hottest part of the summer. Anyway, watch out for this in your own garden.

As for our Fall garden, we have missed the window of opportunity. As you might experience, life got in the way. We should have planted first of July, but since I have been away on work and Mindy takes care of 5 kids, plus family vacations etc, we didn’t get our Fall crops in time…errrrrgh. Well, we shall enjoy what this year has to bring and just try and plant some lettuce crops that don’t take too long for the Fall.

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