After going away for the weekend, I was totally delighted to come home and find some great changes to the gardens.  Namely, I actually find some marked growth on much of my plants.

The pea plant has quite a few peas- unfortunately, it’s also gotten hot and muggy which is the kiss of death for peas.  We’ll enjoy what we can get, I guess.

My butternut squash seems to have exploded!

And right below that, the pole beans are taking off.  Sprinkling them with a soap spray and then cayenne pepper did the trick.  Now I have to figure out what to do with them- they’ve reached the top of the 3-foot canes, where the pot is, and now I’m unsure what to do with them.

I was especially excited to find a blossom on my Scarlet Runner Beans.  I don’t expect much from these this year because the critters have had a field day.  But in the last few weeks, they’ve started to take off- and boy, if they would do what I want to do, we’d have beautiful blossoms followed by delicious beans

The tomatillo that I bought from the garden center has several blossoms.  This concerns me, because the one I started does not have blossoms yet- and I think they both need to be blossoming in order to achieve pollination.  But I can hope.  Next year I already know to start these plants much earlier than I did.

The strawberries are doing fantastic! I have several runners already as well as blossoms and baby fruit.

Abigail’s pie pumpkins are thriving!  We’re going to need to figure out where to send the vines in the next little while here.  All the melons the kids planted are doing well too.

Here’s Zander’s bean patch- four varieties of beans, and they are all doing really well.  Again, that soap spray and cayenne pepper has really made a difference in keeping the plants whole.

I found two of my sweet pepper plants look like they had been sat on or something while we were gone.  A little strange- but I propped them back up and we’ll see how they do.  Most of the sweet and hot pepper plants have the beginning of blossoms on them.  The one hot pepper I bought at the garden center is fruiting already.

And then there’s the tomatoes.  Before we left for the weekend, one tomato plant had generous blossoms- I was very excited about this because I have one variety of tomato I wish to save seed from- my German Red Strawberry, and that was the first to push out blossoms.  With no other blossoms nearby, if they can set fruit shortly, I won’t have to bag any blossoms or worry about cross-pollination.  Make saving the seed very easy if I just remember to save one of the very first tomatoes.

Two other tomatoes are showing blossoms now too.  The Cosmonaut Volkov and Brave General are bearing open blossoms- and it looks like more plants are on the way.  I was a little disappointed that my tomato harvest may be late this year, but I’ve decided it’s actually a great thing, because I won’t have to worry about everything ripening while we’re on our annual camping vacation.

I went out this afternoon and sprinkled the tomato and pepper patch with a general 30-30-30 granular fertilizer.  I just sprinkled it around the plants, and later when it rains the rain will carry the fertilizer to the roots.

I will say that I am impressed with the tomato plants themselves.  They were so scrawny and spindly when I planted them, but now they all have nice and sturdy strong stems.  The winds and breezes we’ve had have really toughened up the plants.  I’m grateful for this- it gives me time to think on my plan for trellising the plants.