Our garden at the plots we rent from the park district is doing well. Hubby has been doing most of the work for the past couple of years, as I've been watching my grandson during the day and have to spend evenings and weekends getting my own chores done! We do need rain. Got an inch of rain a week or 2 ago, which helped, but we really need more, especially for the corn and pumpkins. Hubby has been watering the tomatoes, beans, and squash, but hard to haul enough for the corn/pumpkin section too. Getting lots of tomatoes now, so far just the Black from Tula and Big Rainbow ones have ripened.

cherie8525 wrote: »

@Nipchkin
The weather this year is so weird.. I live in Vermont, most are saying were in a drought, I have been getting rain almost daily.. I needed SUN so veg would grow.. our harvest is sad, 6 cherry tomatoes and finally zucchini is coming it. I made some keto zucchini bread.. it was edible and cured my craving Yet it is missing something LOL I will work on it and tweak recipe. Grand kids are priceless. I wish mine still came around daily.. I miss them.. they can be exhausting too. I haven't heard of either of those tomatoes, do you save seeds?

They are both heirloom tomatoes. I don't save seeds, usually order them from Totally Tomatoes (www.totallytomato.com). They have so many varieties, especially heirlooms, from all over the world and which grow in all sorts of growing zones. Black from Tula is a Russian heirloom.

When you save seeds, is there anythig special you have to do to them before you plant them. I mean like the tomato seeds. The lady at church that grows the benevolence garden said there was some type of preparation that the tomato seeds needed. If not, maybe I can use the Cherokee seeds I saved last year. What other kinds of seeds do you save?

We really need rain. Of course, it's like that every August. We did get a bit last week, which helped. Now the grass is green instead of grayish. Still need to water everything today. May get rain tomorrow, but that could change too and no more rain expected for another week after that. Garden is going well. Gramdson helped pick a couple pumpkins that were turning orange. We do usually get the first pumpkins turning orange in August every year. We just keep them in a cool place and they finish turning completely orange before long, but will still keep fine for most of the Winter, or until we are ready to use them for Halloween or process them into pumpkin puree.

We picked at least a couple bushels of green tomatoes before we had to get out of the rented garden plots. Many of them have now ripened and I am cooking them into sauce or tomato juice. First possible frost (32F) is forecast for November 2nd and 3rd. Previously it had said a low of 30F overnight, but it's now changed. We'll see when it gets here. I finally planted my rose of sharon bush out front, and planted 4 knock out rose bushes around it, with hardy amaryllis bulbs in between. Hopefully they will do well. All that's left is to spread some soil that I have in a couple large planters over that area and smooth it, then mulch. I know that they usually recommend mulching after the ground freezes, to help prevent freezing and thawing from heaving up the ground, but I'm hoping that mulching now will delay having the ground freeze, in order to allow the roots of the bushes to get more established. All I did was loosen the roots at the bottom and sides to prevent them from getting too compacted (they were not root bound, so I probably could have skipped that step) before placing them in the hole and watering well after each layer of soil was added, so that the roots would be surrounded by mud and make it easier for them to start growing.
I cleared off the back beds and started spreading mulch there already. I'm at least 1/4 done (it's a large bed), but we had at least 4" of rain Sunday, which delayed getting any more mulch and spreading it. Hopefully that project will be done by this weekend too.