Hello Gardeners - - - 

Our summer garden is producing an abundance of delicious veggies - tomatoes, squash, lettuces, corn, strawberries, etc. The weather is getting hot again so please adjust your watering. Here are some tips:

Tomatoes like an even moisture during the fruiting season. Try not to wet the leaves. Also, pinch the lower leaves to avoid disease from creeping up the plants due to soil moisture. Tomatoes love having either hay or straw or pine needles strewn over the soil around the plants. It helps keep the moisture in the soil, esp during the hot afternoons. Pine needles, especially, provide an acid environment which they love.

Corn needs and loves water. Planting corn in many rows helps with wind-pollination to produce ripe ears. Since we typically don't have the room in our plots for sufficient rows, we can help it along by hand-pollinating. As the silk starts forming along the stalks, just grab some pollen seeds hanging from the top and sprinkle it on each silk. This helps to ripen the ears.

Don't forget to pick your squash often. Your plants will continue to produce past the summer months. And check your squash often. When they start growing, you can blink and they will be inches longer !!!

Finally, I hope you had a chance to try our peaches (all gone now), and the apricots (first year production was minimal). There was one on the tree this morning and I couldn't resist. It fell off into my hands and it popped into my mouth. There was nothing I could do about it - really :-)