Coastal & Tropical South: Show me your May progress!!!

Cherry tomatoes are setting fruit. Planted on May 7th and fruit on the 25th.

More golden crookneck squash and first cucumbers...I would've waited, but we're due for a tropical storm any minute, and I wanted to get them off the vines before the storm beat them up.

We harvested 8 good-sized pickler cukes and a straight 8 cuke between yesterday and today. The picklers are growing like gangbusters! The straight 8 was hidden and was a pleasant surprise. I wanted to get the ripe ones off before Beryl hit us with the rains and winds. Took a bunch of pics for before the storm hoping that there's not too much damage afterwards.

Keely, we've only had a few rain bands go by so far, with a couple t-storms in them, but the worst is yet to come. It looks like you'll be hit by the main body of the storm any time now, and we'll see it a few hours later. Stay safe; I hope you don't get flooded!

All Floridians & Georgians stay safe!!!

Michelle, We've had the bands on and off thought the day -bright sun with the rain (and rainbows)! This evening we're seeing 25 mph wind gusts - not too bad yet. It looks like we'll get the center of it around 2am with predicted 60-65 mph sustained winds. I staked a lot of my smaller plants this morning and praying that it's just gusts and not too long sustained. Also praying it's not too heavy of rain that would pound down the plants. I'm sure I'll wake up during the night and see how the garden is doing - it's right outside my bedroom window

Yes, please stay safe everyone!

Quiet here so far ....

We had a 20 minute sprinkle, about an hour ago, but I think it's all dissapating over land before getting to us.

I think I've got all the hurricane force winds here in Colorado today

All kidding aside, hope everyone in the southern regions isn't or doesn't get hit to hard.

Hope everyone is ok this morning. Over here we're expected to hit the triple digits for the first time this week. Nothing below 95 in the forecast for a high and nothing below 76 for a low forecast. Not setting bell peppers or tomatoes anytime soon, lol.

Looks like I'm getting Givvmistamps leftovers about 3pm today ... but just overcast & some sprinkles for now

The big bed:

Bell pepper:

German Queen:

Sweet 100 (plucked off the first one yesterday for hubby to eat):

Jalapenos:

Looks great!

We made it though the storm with some pretty high winds, but did a quick walk-through of the garden in the rain to see if anything was damaged. The only thing I noticed was the pepper plants were somewhat laying down, but okay.

I kept the blinds I my bedroom open all night with the outside light on so I could check on the garden. The tomatoes/trellis strings were whipping around but did well. Now just enjoying lesser winds And some lighter rains

My garden is in a few different phases of growth. I went all out when I set this up this year because I had planned for a full in-ground garden before I read more about SFG. So, while all of the seeds were planted in March (albeit a bit late) things have been planted in their beds as the beds have been finished. With all of our schedules, they weren't done as quickly as I wanted, but that's okay It just means some plants had to wait longer to be put into MM, thus they're much smaller than others. Everything in the garden, however, was planted from seed.

I have six 4x4 beds, one 4x8 bed, and a 2x8 bed. All are set up on an automated watering grid system. We used an unused zone in our sprinkler system and added a valve where we control the flow for that zone. We then built a manifold with 10 ports each equipped with an additional valve that controls the flow to each bed. With the way we have it set up, we can water all beds at the same time. See, my husband doesn't know moderation so when we dug our well For our sprinkler system about 7 years ago and put a pump on it, instead of a normal 1/2hp pump, he put in a 2hp one so we have a lot of pressure

The big bed had my squash & zucchini in it until I had to pull them because of SVBs. I know it's too late, but I replanted seed anyway

The lettuce bed was one of the last finished, so that will be empty for a bit with this heat, but it's all good!

I'm convinced the only way to have squash in the summer is to just keep replanting. Between SVB, Beetles and heat, you just have to keep adding plants, fope for some squash from that plant before they get to it.

Kay

We've had a tremendous amount of rain, a bit of wind, and one brief tornado watch that thankfully came to naught. My husband dragged the tomatoes into the covered porch so they wouldn't be knocked over, but they're back in their accustomed places and enjoying the remnant rains of the storm. We expect a good deal more rain before the storm passes out of our area, which is fine as we desperately need our lakes & waterways replenished. Some brief flooding has occurred, but no major damage happened anywhere around here that we've heard of. We are located at the top of one of few hills in town, so we have little worry of flooding at our house... This is one of the biggest points we considered when looking!

The storm beat me up, physically, but that's to be expected and I will recover shortly.

First, I hope the rain in Florida helped more than it hurt everybody.

May has treated me well thus far. From the starting of the garden, guidance through some issues, and finding a nursery that sells plants at reasonable prices and has more help to give than Lowe's and Home Depot.

The corn is now at 35 inches tall. Ears have not started to appear yet but I don't know when to expect them. The Sunflowers are a similar height. This is my oldest grandson's project. This is what he wanted so it was the first thing to go in the ground. Bush Beans are looking good. There are no open flowers yet but they are trying to outgrow anything near them. I have a few okra plants that are about 6 to 8" tall.

Marigolds are doing great and have tripled or quadrupled in size. They are covered with flowers and help make the garden look good. I don't know what kind of insect they are supposed to repell but I have yet to see my first aphid. I am doing some preventive spraying though.

Pepper plants: Acadian BP has 3 medium size peppers and is flowering very well. The Chocolate BP, King Arthur BP, and Mandarin BP's are now putting out a lot of flowers and setting small fruit. The Lafayette BP (Yellow) has just started to show white on the blossoms even though it is about two weeks behind the rest. The Banana Peppers are shortly behind the Lafayette BP. Tobasco and Thai HP have small buds on them but the plants are growing very well. I expect that these will be setting a lot of fruit as the summer heats up. The "Fooled You" Jalapenos are flowering and the Goliath Jalapeno has set small fruit.

The White Star eggplant and the 3 Black Beauty eggplants are growing very well. They are starting to cover the hot peppers so I cut off the bottom leaves to allow more sun in. I hope I didn't do any harm. There is one large bud on one of the BB eggplants, not quite ready to open.

One of my strawberry plants is sending off a runner. I have been pulling off the fruit as soon as the flower opens to direct the growth toward producing new plants. My intention is to work toward having at the very least 8 squares dedicated to strawberries.

The cherry tomatoes are setting fruit on just about every blossom and there are a lot of blossoms. The Sweet 100 tomatoes have set the first tomato. They are behind the cherries by about a week in planting but the bushes have caught up in size.

The green onions are back where I can harvest some for cooking when I want.

Oh! and I have female cucumber flowers. I pollinated one today just incase the bees haven't found the garden yet.

I am having a blast with this garden and am so happy I found this forum with friendly people who share the same interest.

Thanks guys,
Don

Seems like everyone is doing well...besides a few problems here & there, mostly attributable to unwanted visitors or the occasional disease. I'd love to see some updated photos. If your garden is like mine, it's changed a lot in the past few weeks! I will try to get more photos of mine tomorrow.

We keep getting more squash every few days, have more cucumbers growing quickly on the vine, and my first handful of cherry tomatoes has begun to ripen. The tomatoes ripen one at a time, though, and seem to split before they're fully ripe. Not sure why they'd split??? :scratch:

I also have something, or rather two different somethings, eating the leaves on my peppers. One eats little holes in the leaves, and the other eats entire leaves except the stems at the top of the plant only. The little holes are similar to those I find in my Swiss chard and lettuce, but I can't find any caterpillar-like critters on the pepper plants like I've found on my chard & lettuce. My husband thinks the stemless leaves were munched on by deer. (We have 3 deer in the neighborhood; I'm starting to wish they'd go down and get eaten by the alligators!) I guess I need to go out and look with a flashlight at night and see if I can find the pepper culprit and hang some of my son's stinky socks on the pepper supports to try keeping the deer away.

Now that Beryl has passed away from us, I can get back to replanting things that never sprouted, like herbs, okra and sunflowers. Not sure if I want to try putting in some melons or not...I'm still debating that one.

Edit: The good news is I got some peppers off the bell pepper plant! I just harvested these three babies today, but didn't get a shot after they came off the plant:

Tomatoes split from too much rain/watering. I had that happen last week when I forgot about the drip system for a few hours. Beryl could be responsible.

I'm getting eggplant constantly, even though the plants aren't looking so great. I've got some sort of rusty thing going through my garden on my beans, cukes, and now eggplant. I'm still getting cuke pretty regularly and the beans care about as much as Honey Badger and are giving 5x as much as I've ever gotten from beans before. Okra is coming along and starting to do more than one at a time now, so I sent DH for some cornmeal last night.

I went out to snip some cilantro for my rice last night and found that they had all flowered (not surprising considering the triple digits). Then I saw one tucked away in the shade of a pepper plant, reached in and snipped some, then realized I didn't smell anything. It wasn't cilantro, but a that had been missed when I harvested those a couple of months ago!

Have another Tromboncino in the making and my first Tatume baby growing well. Replacement zucchini look like they'll start producing within a week or two and I got my first baby butternut this morning. Watermelon just not doing well. I know I planted them too late for this area, so I'm not surprised. I've gotten a few babies and hand pollinated them, but they just shrivel up and fall off.

Sweet banana peppers and Anaheims are going absolutely crazy. I've already pickled 2 jars of banana peppers and need to find some pretty little jars to do some more for Christmas presents. Going to put up some roasted Anaheims in the freezer and maybe even try pickling some like jalapenos.

Having my very best year for bell peppers ever, by far. And I'm afraid the reason is that I'm not all organic this year. Aphids have always taken over and stressed out my peppers despite constant organic concoctions. Last year I even tried sheet mulching with mylar. But this year I've had to spray the yard with chemicals because of a HUGE tick problem...well, this stuff takes out aphids as well. I've got up to 10 bell peppers on one plant. The first of them are just about reaching full size now and I'm planning to wait for them to start to blush red before harvesting.

That experience convinced me to try something non-organic on my squash as well. I've tried everything you can imagine for Powdery Mildew, including preventative sprays from the time the first true leaves appear. This year I've staked and removed tons of leaves. Nothing seemed to help. So I got some chemical stuff last week and I am cautiously optimistic as I've only had to removed 2 leaves a couple of days later (with just a smidge of PM on each) and haven't seen anything since!

I will still use organic controls as much as I can, but 3 years of struggle has taught me that there is a time and a place for chemicals, especially if you are attemping "extreme gardening" in a place where not much thrives naturally.

elliephant wrote:...I went out to snip some cilantro for my rice last night and found that they had all flowered (not surprising considering the triple digits). Then I saw one tucked away in the shade of a pepper plant, reached in and snipped some, then realized I didn't smell anything. It wasn't cilantro, but a that had been missed when I harvested those a couple of months ago!

So how did the carrot look when you pulled it?

When I went out to examine the garden I didn't get a chance to snap photos due to a rain event chasing me in. No way I'm gonna risk my iPhone just for some pics, so maybe tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I can't blame Beryl for the splitting tomatoes. They all got put on the covered porch for the storm because I was afraid they'd get knocked over in the wind.

I found a lot of mushrooms growing in the soil under my squash...that's definitely Beryl's fault...as well as a lot of soggy, rotting flowers on my squash plants. Some of the flowers had black mold growing heavily on them, so now I'm concerned about the plants getting mold problems, especially since we've had more rain today. We also found a round little hole in one of the squash today, and are at a loss as to what could cause that. Clearly something had bored into it, as we found bits of squash piled up outside the hole. Could this be the squash vine borers that everyone keeps talking about? It's my first year with squash, so I have no idea. At least that particular squash was ready to harvest, so we just cut off the end with the hole and stuck the good part in the fridge to fry this weekend.

"Splitsville" here too ...which is particularly fustrating, because the rain lowered the temps enough for my Cherokee's to set fruit

Dang rain .....

Bummer Must be a split week

Since building the garden I have been spending a lot more time out on the patio. I decided to decorate it and make it a little more of a nice place to sit. Even my wife comes outside more now.
The top picture shows a new pot that we transplanted my wife's red banana tree into. It also shows how the water diversions work during the hard rain we got yesterday.



Of course I had to ad my touch to the decorations...



Yesterday's storm blew my corn sideways. After ther rain stopped I stood it back up the the wind blew from the other direction twisting it all up. It would not stand back up after this. I built a PVC grid that helped the situation with strings running through to hold the stalks in place until they regain a footing.
This is the first time it laid down:


The grid I built to hold the corn up:

Love the grid, Don!

I found a very long rattlesnake bean today:

Thought I'd give you a reference too; I have large hands (for a woman) so keep that in mind. There are a LOT of beans growing, some this large, some tiny, and I only planted 4 seeds. Sure am glad I didn't have room for more...Because...It occurred to me that I have no idea what to do with these beans once they've finished growing. I know from the site where I found them that they make good dried beans for storage, and I read elsewhere on the site that letting them dry on the vine, then drying them a bit more once shelled works well. But cooking them? I don't know, never had this type of bean before. I wondered if they'd make a good chili bean, to replace the red kidney beans my husband uses. I think I'll make him try it.

Had another cucumber reach maturity today, and gave some cukes and golden crookneck squash to my housekeeper. I had too many mature all at once.

Then I found a very squishy spot near the soil line of my poor round zucchini plant. I have no idea what caused this, but I suspect that the vine will die any day now. Just when it was getting ready to flower again, too!

It's possible that the "squishy" spot near the soil line is from the SVB. Do you see anything else around that area that resembles the damage from a SVB? I had to pull all of mine out because they all "rotted" in the same place. I looked closer and saw some bore holes and could see the inside of the stems whittled away. I know it's too late, but I said what the heck and replanted.

I started seeing some signs of Downy Mildew on my cukes before Beryl hit. With all that rain we got and the high winds, I don't know if I can stop it now. I've been getting a lot of picklers and a few straight and lots of little ones that are steadily growing - I don't want to pull them, but if I can't get a hold on it, I might have to to keep it from spreading to other parts of the garden. Trying a few different things and will see if they work.

But in good news, my boxes that have my tomatoes and peppers and my herb box all seem to be doing great.

Well, it's June now, but I just had to report that I have my first baby watermelon that actually set and is growing! I was beginning to give up on them because I'd planted them late for this area.

Congrats on the baby watermelon, elliephant. Two years ago I stuck some seeds in the ground on my land in Tunica, La. No care given to them but I wound up with some nice medium size melons. I think I picked mine to soon because they weren't very sweet. I was just trying to get them out before the wild hogs found them.