Shaker Garden Thread: Solstice Edition

Hey Garden Shakers! It's Summer Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere (and Winter in the Southern), and that seemed like a good time to catch up on gardening. If you're celebrating a holiday now or around now (Litha? La Fête nationale du Québec? Midsommardagen?) I hope you have fun. Me, I'm mainly marking it by spending the weekend in the garden (what else?)

The word for this garden edition is RAIN. We've had tons of rain, so much that it's been kind of a mixed blessing. It's fantastic not to have to water, and I'm very grateful that our temperatures have been cooler than usual for June (which means the days are hot and humid, but not so much that you need a portable air conditioner and snorkel gear to walk down the street). Plus, it seems to really have encouraged our flowers, and my herbs look totally fantastic. On the other hand, our conventional zucchini (c. pepo) are rotting on the vine, and some of our our still-green tomatoes are getting blossom end rot, and our corn stalks have developed very shallow roots. The latter is especially problematic, since the storms bring high wind that's knocked over a lot of corn. Our sunflowers have made it, but most of them need some support. The ones in the cucumber patch I just let lean on the cages we're using for trellises.

Speaking of trellises, I'm using a lot of them this year. In part, this is due to an accidental surfeit of tomato plants. I had seeds started and starts ordered when a colleague gifted me with a nice packet of heirloom seeds, including this mix of heirloom cherry tomatoes in a wide variety of colors (brown! green! Orange! white! pink bicolour!). So add in the bell pepper, eggplant, and ground cherry plants and our tomato bed is looking....full. In addition, I'm using them for some of our squash crops, our loofahs, and our cucumbers. The cucumbers really seem to like being trellised, and they develop nice and straight when they hang.

The squash I'm trellising are both c. moschata varieties, like Seminole pumpkins, a traditional crop of pre-colonial Floridians. It's supposed to handle heat and humidity well, be bug resistant, and can be grown up tree trunks. So far, they are thriving, despite ants and squash bugs, but no fruits yet. On the other hand, my tromboncino zucchini already has several fruits on it, one about ready to pick.

It doesn't seem to be bothered at all by squash vine borers, which were the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE last year. (It probably helps that I've been much more diligent about my spinosad/Bt/neem spray rotations this year.) The same goes for my other non-trellised squash crops, including the Long Island Cheese Pumpkins, and the Cushaw Squash. Cushaw aren't c. moschata, but c. argyosperma, another warm-climate cultivar that is supposed to do well against Southern bugs. I'm not trellising either of these, as their fruits are too big, so they're starting to sprawl over their bed. The cushaw has tons of blooms and they are beautiful. They look like your average squash or pumpkin blossoms, except they are HUGE. They're bigger than the leaves, and the leaves are not small.

So that's how things look here at Midsummer. How does your garden grow, Shakers? Are you harvesting anything yummy, or growing something beautiful? Or if it's winter where you are, are you planning next year's garden or growing winter/indoor plants? Whether it's a bunch of herbs in a windowsill, pots on the apartment balcony, or outdoor beds, feel free to share your garden projects in this thread.

[Commenting note] Please respect that everyone gardens differently, and everyone may have different priorities, ranging from going organic to using small spaces to using less water to gardening on the cheap and many more.]