As I mentioned in my last garden update, the plants planted in pots located near the house seem to be doing better than a lot of my other plants. There was a story on the local news last week about locally grown produce. In the piece, they had an expert that said that tomatoes won’t set on in temperatures this high. I was experiencing this and everyone I know with a garden is having the same issue. So I was very surprised to see this when watering my potted cherry-tomato plants:
The tomatoes are still very small and if you back away and look at this particular plant, it looks like it’s one-day-of-forgetting-to-water away from shriveling up and dying. But I will continue to baby the plants and wait and see. I may have some homegrown tomatoes after all.
I also harvested my first lettuce of the season from my barrel garden. I am amazed how well this lettuce is doing in this heat.
Here’s the barrel last time:
And here it is today:
As you can see the lettuce (in the front) has grown a lot. The beans plants in the barrel are growing up the trellis but do not have any blooms. The cilantro shriveled up and died. The basil is doing pretty well. I’m considering transplanting into the pot that I started the strawberries in. They didn’t survive the heat. For those of you lucky enough to live somewhere cooler, Oklahoma has so far had 21 days of 100° or above temperatures this summer. Our average is 10 days. We’re currently at twelve days straight; the record is 22. The forecasters are predicting that we could beat the hottest summer (1980) which had 50 days at or above 100°. Considering the weather we’ve had, I’m pretty happy with my garden results.
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