Mid-Season Garden Report Card

How is your garden faring?

by Sandy Swegel

Here’s the report card for my garden. June had record high temperatures and little rainfall. Lots of extra watering helped, but plants don’t grow as well without natural rainfall.

Lettuces and Spinach. The heat made them bolt early and they are all bitter or simply scorched and gone to seed. Time to pull them out and replant.

Chards and Kales. The chards started to bolt but some judicious removal of seed stalks and they are still growing and yummy. The kales look great. I didn’t know they were so tough under stressful situations.

Peas. Pod peas were done early…they went to seed almost instantly. Sugar peas actually were not too bad. Not as tender as usual, but salvageable….although the season was very short. Like other crops in this heat wave, things just grew really fast and went to seed.

Cilantro. Long since gone to seed.

Dill and Leeks. Leeks have gone to seed but they are beautiful. Dill has started to seed but still usable.

Beans. My beans are OK, but neighbors have had failures from pests. There’s still time to replant and have beans this year.

Peppers. The superheroes in our heat. Lots of irrigation combined with heat have made them flourish. Tomatillos too.

Tomatoes. The verdict is still out. They are growing and strong. Not as many diseases as I feared in a stressful year. But not so many tomatoes either. They quit flowering in extreme conditions. The plants themselves are shorter than other years at this time, but I’m hoping a week of cooler temperatures will inspire them to start cranking out tomatoes.

Broccoli. Little heads early this year, but they are still producing side shoots.

Bugs. Our warm winter enabled too many pests to survive the winter, so there is an abundance of flea beetles and slugs. The greens are ugly and holey….but perfectly good to eat. Aphids and ladybugs balanced out. There appear to be lots of young grasshoppers but I’m pretending not to think about them.

So how is your garden faring? Just like in school, mid-term grades are just an indicator of how things are going…not the final grade. So get out there and yank out the struggling plants and reseed and replant in their places. There’s still plenty of time for producing lots of food

Escaping the Weather

by Sandy Swegel

They’d run for their lives! This week anyway. Extreme weather conditions prevail here in Colorado and throughout the country. Here in Boulder, we’re enduring day after day of record-setting temps over 100. Plants are crisping just from the 4% humidity. And as we learned in our last severe drought in 2002, no matter how much city water you irrigate with, plants don’t do as well with irrigation as they do with natural water from rain. If plants could walk this week, they would mosey on over to the shade next to the irrigation ditch for respite.

While we bake in the heat, my sister took her annual vacation to Florida so she could sit on the beach in the

middle of Tropical Storm Debby. Plants in some areas of the Gulf Coast desperately yearn for legs this week. If only they could walk they would get out of the downpour of hard pelting rain and lift their feet out of the bog and mire that soil has become with excessive rain. How’s a plant supposed to live when its roots are stuck in wet muck putrifying in the heat.

The happiest plants in dire weather can be the ones in containers with a doting human around. My neighbor nudges her containers on wheels into the shade when the western sun is too debilitating. Even her tomato loves the respite from the blazing sun. Unlike my spinach, hers isn’t bolting because now that summer is upon us, she moved her containers of greens under the apple trees where cooling misters cool the greens enough they don’t have to bolt yet…and the apples grow big with the bit of extra water from the misters. One pot of summer greens was fortunate and moved inside into the air conditioning in a sunroom so the family could enjoy sweet lettuce greens a little longer.

Alas, for plants without feet, all you can do is offer some respite from the weather. Shade cloth or row cover judiciously placed now might save some plants facing death from heat exhaustion. If that’s not possible, a judicious mid-day misting sometimes helps. The water mist may help the plant survive desiccation and it certainly helps perk up the gardener.

Plants that really need feet this week are the ones burning to death in the Colorado wildfires. There are eight major wildfires in Colorado and over half of the wild-fire fighting crews in the US are in Colorado now. We are so grateful to the men and women who come from near and far to battle out-of-control wildfires in 100-degree temps in heavy gear. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

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