Living the Gray Life

A Fitness & Lifestyle Blog

| Posted in: Gardening, Plants

Garden Update – June 22nd

Hello and welcome back to my garden!

Now that it is officially summer (TBH where has 2020 gone??), I’m going to start sharing weekly garden updates with y’all. This is also for me to be able to document what’s going on outside in my garden and keep track of all the successes, struggles, and failures.

To see more about how the garden got started and where it came from, check out my last post An Introduction to My Garden. I started all of the plants pictured from seed except for 10 pepper plants. This is my first experience growing an in-ground garden, and I garden in Columbia, SC, Zone 8a.

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Successes:

  • The pepper plants are finally producing! I have a total of 21 pepper plants and about 15 different varieties of peppers. I’m excited to see how much they’re going to take off now that the summer heat has set in.
  • My marigolds are absolutely exploding with growth, and I’m so surprised by how big they are. Usually, when I think of marigolds, I picture the small pots you can buy at Lowe’s or Home Depot. The tall marigolds are about 3.5 feet tall, and that blows my mind.
  • I harvest enough pickles to make TEN PINT JARS full of fresh dill pickles. So excited to eat those! And to my Columbia, SC, friends, you’ll probably be receiving pickles very soon LOL

Struggles:

  • Vine bores. Vine bores. Vine bores. Vine bore attacked all of my zucchini plants this year. I managed to perform some “surgery” and save three of them, but the rest had to be pulled. In addition to larvae removal surgery, I heavily sprayed each infected stem with Bonide’s Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew. I wrapped each stem in tin foil and mounded dirt on top of it. So far so good. I started a new batch of zucchini seeds to succession plant just in case the remaining three plants die.

Failures:

  • I had to pull all of my spaghetti squash plants due to vine bores. Those annoying little moths easily destroy my whole batch of squash plants each year… Sad to see the spaghetti squash go, but I learned my lesson. I cleaned off the spaghetti squash trellis and direct-seeded more bean plants. Green beans are my favorite food so I’ll never say no to more beans!

Produce Amounts:

  • Prior Total: 23 lb. 5 oz.
    • Zucchini: 17 lb. 12 oz.
    • Green Beans: 1 lb. 15 oz.
    • Cucumber: 3 lb. 10 oz.
  • Last Week’s Total: (approx. b/c forgot to weigh) 12 lb.
    • Zucchini: 5 lb.
    • Green Beans: 1 lb.
    • Cucumber: 6 lb.
  • Current Total: 35 lb. 5 oz.
    • Zucchini: 22 lb. 12 oz.
    • Green Beans: 2 lb. 15 oz.
    • Cucumber: 9 lb. 10 oz.

Well, that’s all I have for this week’s garden update. Can’t wait to share how the garden progresses over the summer!

~abigail gray