Try, Try, Try!

Up until about a week ago the garden was doing okay; kinda limping along due to the lack of rain, even though I was trying to water regularly. We have been getting some regular showers now though and the plants have thrown it into high gear! It seems everything has grown a foot or more just in a week.
Because I am attempting to grow a number of new things this year I thought I'd do a little review of those things, that I have harvested so far, and my results. In the photo above I have Amish Paste tomatoes and Moneymaker. I have never grown either of these before. The Amish Paste is not doing too well. About a third of the plants seem to have come down with some kind of fungus or wilt. Maybe it's just too humid here or maybe I have them planted too close together, although I planted according to the directions. I think next year I'm going to give all my tomatoes a bit more room. The Moneymakers seem to be faring much better. I also have two Black Krim that are doing real well. They are planted slightly away from the others, over near the peppers. I am anxious for them to ripen!

On the far left is the Amish Paste; I may still get a small harvest from them. The okra is doing great but then, it's practically designed to grow here! In the background is the corn, Silver Queen. It is another old Southern classic and one of my favs.

This is the new zuchini I tried; Costata Romanesca. This is just 3 plants and I had even cut it back some because it had completley blocked my pathway. I'll be careful not to plant any squash that close to the path again! It started out very vigorous and healthy but I think just recently was taking a beating from the squash bugs. I do use an organic bug spray, which had helped, but the production had dropped way off (maybe from the heat too?). Since it takes up such an enormous amount of room and produced, even at best, a moderate crop, I pulled it up after it got sickly.

These are the squash it produces, which are tasty. However, it just seemed that for the amount of room this thing covers, the amount of care it needs to keep it bug free and the difficulty in harvesting the squash because the plant is so freakin' big, it just didn't seem worth it for the few squash I got. I don't know, if I had a much bigger garden I might go for it but since I don't have unlimited space I think I might stick with the regular zuchini, which tastes just as good and just doesn't seem as big a pain in the butt. The old crookneck yellow squash grows well here and I have 3 of those planted also.

I dug all my garlic and onions yesterday, so that frees up a fair amount of new space. I recently picked up two regular zuchini plants, thinking Big Boy might not make it, so I think I'll use this new space to get a second crop of squash growing.
Oh, I also planted pepperocini peppers, which are doing realy well and starting to make peppers. Those are the type that are usually pickled for eating with salads etc. That's what I got them for and I'll show ya'll my rsults with that. Peppers of any type usually grow very well here with very little maintenance.

So, that's just some of the garden. I still haven't harvested a lot of stuff so don't really know the end results. I'll do another post on just the fruits and melons this year and how they are doing; which seems to be pretty good at this point.