my plot on last day of summer

Lucky I have the giant sunflowers and big purple hyacinth beans this year, because right now, there's not much else going on in my garden plot.

Well I do have a big patch of basil, a patch of sweet potatoes that I really have high hopes for, and nice chiles. But not much else. The beans all succumbed to the beetles. It was a terrible year for beans in all plots at our community garden. I have empty pole bean tepees and empty shell bean beds where I had to pull plants before they produced anything.

And the dry hot weather has been brutal for those of us who didn't come down daily to water. I have especially had trouble with fall carrots and lettuce sprouts drying out. I've lost many sowings of these in the past months. I finally have big seedlings from indoor seeding, but its so late now that I will put them into my cold frame soon. Only a couple weeks now until we get a frost. I heard that not far west of here they have already had light frosts.

Cucumbers, tomatoes and chile peppers in my home garden are still doing good. They have the luxury of an automatic sprinkler. I hardly used this at all last year. Today's harvest was a bunch of North Carolina pickling cukes, a couple Cherokee purple tomatoes, and two pretty chiles: numex and poblano.