Anyhow, the garden is still intact, mostly.
Lettuces are looking (and tasting) yummy. Here is the Romaine (Winter Density) that was planted. The Butterhead (Sylvesta) has mostly been consumed, and the only remaining specimens don't look all that good (slugs got to them). The Butterhead was great & I will definitely be planting it again.
The beans are growing, nearly ready to pick the first of them, but a bit small still. We should have tons of beans, which will be good for August - I need to look up green bean recipes that don't cook them into oblivion. These are Fortex pole beans, as you can see, they are climbing their trellis nicely.
Peaches are growing exceptionally well, considering all the trouble I had earlier this year with some leaf-curl type disease, and then a nest of tent caterpillars that
required pruning of an entire branch :-( There were probably over a hundred fruits on the tree early in the season, but at least a few dozen have survived. I can't wait to try these, they're nearly full-size peaches like you'd buy in a store, and all that has been done to the tree is spray with an organic orchard treatment every few weeks to keep the disease down. That said, next year the spray gets applied earlier, perhaps prior to blooming, to keep the plant healthier.
The petunias and rhubarb (just for you RFM, photos of the rhubarb!) are surviving in their trial area by the electric meter. Rhubarb will live there permanently, petunias are there for an experiment - next year I'll plant them elsewhere, where they'll be showier and provide a bit of color to the rest of the landscaping. I was more concerned with how they'd take from seed - pretty well, it
turns out. Over the next few weeks, I'll be putting little mesh bags (from a bridal supply aisle at the craft store) over spent bulbs, hoping to collect seeds from the petunias for starting next year. The petunias will be replaced by some light purple irises, and perhaps some daffodils. (Irises are freebies from a gardener who is digging up a bunch - Thank you, N!)The Explorer Blue petunias are every bit as easy to grow as promised - this is a variant similar to the popular Wave series, but I can buy the seeds much cheaper than I can purchase the sprouted petunia plants. Since the seeds require light to germinate, and are extremely tiny, I guess the nurserys can charge a few dollars per plant. Not my taste to spend that much, and if the seed harvest goes well, I won't need to purchase anything besides peat pots next year.
Failures this year - Big Smile dwarf sunflower. They may have sprouted, but the late (JUNE!) frost probably killed all of them, more's the pity. I was looking forward to a dwarf sunflower bed. I haven't seen a single one in the bed that has now become weed-infested, with a few hardy Sunbow zinnias that survived the frost.
