Mid-At July 2014 - How Goes the Garden?

Sorry I'm late this month, but we had to have one of our dogs put down on June 24 and a few days later my mom went into the hospital and passed away on July 1.

The garden has been going absolutely NUTS!  The SFG is doing well even with a lot of neglect. Here's a panorama of my 2' x 23" SFG.

In addition the SFG this year I've started at small (3' x 8' x 2'H) Hügelkultur:


SMALL H-KUL GARDEN

AND a squash arch:

SQUASH ARCH



And a small (9' x 12') Back to Eden garden. (no photo)

Kim,
Sorry for both of your losses.
It does look like this will be a good year for Maryland gardens in spite of that late spring. I am fighting off Japanese Beatles and slugs in my garden, and some diseases, but I have had some good harvests of strawberries, grape tomatoes, herbs, chard, and lettuce. I recommend Jericho lettuce highly. It is very heat tolerant. I just pulled them out today as they just got bitter, but that is the latest I have ever had lettuce here in Md. Good luck with your garden.

First I like to  say that I am sorry to hear of both passing's. 
As for the garden I have picked half dozen zucchinis. I have been picking around 2 cucumbers per day. My peppers do not seem up to par only have picked a few. I finally got a red Rugters tomato! YaY! The tomato plants have loads of green tomato's just trying to be patient for them to ripen. Have frozen some basil and the sage is doing well. Here is a few pictures.

I'm very pleased with how my garden is going this year, especially since it's my first time gardening on this scale, and I got a little bit of a late start (because I was finishing and filling my raised bed!). 

I seem to finally have my tomato fungus under control, and the tomatoes are really starting to turn red.  I picked a few last week already, and need to pick a bunch more.  Next year I will start staking my tomatoes much earlier, and start spraying fungicide sooner.  HEAVY pruning of anything with spots or yellow, and spraying fungicide a few times a weeks seems to have taken care of most of the fungus.

Peppers are very slow, but I'm hearing this is not a good year for peppers.  My eggplant are doing better than ever before.  We pulled the first two carrots last weekend.  Lettuce and arugula are going like gangbusters, and just keep coming back for more!

My snow peas are finally turning brown, and I'm planning to pull them out this weekend and plant another round for fall.  Any opinions on whether this is a good time to start the seeds, or should I wait a few more weeks?

I did a major harvesting last night in advance of the significant rainfall that arrived overnight.  It truly was a rainbow of goodness!

Red - tomatoes
Orange - carrots
Yellow - frying peppers (starting to turn red, so a little bit of orange too!)
Green - green zebra tomatoes, cucumbers
Blue/Purple - carrot, two kinds of eggplant