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.

We recently purchased and planted our strawberries. We were really excited about this because of the newer varieties that we have learned about. Over the years many new varieties have come out and many more will continue to come out. California is the major producer, so if you are trying to find a good variety, find out what they are growing.

We have learned that for Junebearing strawberries, Chandler or Ventana is the best in terms of size, flavor, yield, etc. As for everbearing/day-neutral strawberries, we have learned that Diamonte is the best, however, recently a newer better berry which surpasses the Diamonte has come out. It is called Albion. So this year we planted both Albion and Ventana. Of course, alot of this is subjective, but it is a good place to start anyway.

There are many things to know about strawberries and so I would refer you to the strawberry fact sheet for many of the specifics.

As for our garden, we use the black plastic method in a row. This means that the strawberries can’t put out their runners to create new strawberry plants. We pinch the runners off and do the initial planting 12″ apart which is pretty close together since we don’t let them runner. The reason for this is that we feel that the plants, at around $.25 a piece are cheap and we want to enjoy them as soon as possible so we don’t let them put their energy into creating new plants, instead we make them put it into the fruit. Another benefit of the black plastic is water conservation, since the berries like the moisture, and the fruit doesn’t tend to rot when touching the ground.

Also, remember that strawberries like a lower pH than most vegetable, therefore, I add extra sulfur when I fertilize to accomplish this. See post on this.

While strawberries do the best in California, the still do well in Utah. One problem we frequently have is iron chlorosis, so you will need to watch for this.

You can see this problem in the leaves noted be green veins with a yellow leaf.

This is due to improper fertilization or irrigation. If you have this problem read here.