The garden is a mess after being neglected while we were on vacation for two weeks. The intense heat and an irrigation malfunction affecting the raised beds did not help matters much. They look pretty sad. The "old" vegetable garden wasn't affected so much as its watering system was on a different line. We picked a bumper crop of tomatoes before we left and have at least that many green ones maturing now. No beans yet but the vines continue to grow up the trellis and look healthy. The volunteer sugar snap peas, not unexpectedly, died from the heat. I also picked a couple of giant Armenian cucumbers.I'm trying to catch up weeding, deadheading, and pulling out spent annuals in the raised beds. The irrigation malfunction caused water to just seep from the sprayers, so I have a nice healthy crop of bermuda grass and a purslane-type weed growing in some spots, while other things are dead. I cut the allyssum way back and most of it is still green underneath, so it will probably come back. If not, it dropped lots of seeds for new plants. I can't find the Japanese eggplant- maybe it will appear once I get all the weeds and grass out, and remove some zinnias that are past their prime. I think we've lost one of the new fruit trees we planted this spring, a peach. We have really had a difficult time with stone fruits- it is hard to get the watering right with our heavy clay soil.
I was accepted to the Master Gardener program and have been to two classes so far. The first was on basic botany and I was surprised how much I remembered about cellular structure and photosynthesis from my college botany classes, which were in 1970. Fortunately the lecture did not include the Krebs citric acid cycle nor having to draw any three-dimensional chemical formulas. The second was on soil and fertilization and reminded me more of my chemistry classes. We have a huge stack of books with reading assignments each week. Some of it is pretty technical, but it's kind of fun for a geek like me. The most practical thing I have learned so far is that it's OK to put oleander and thevetia leaves in the compost bin....the toxins are broken down by the composting process. Considering how messy those are, that is certainly a good thing to know...both in terms of not sending more trash to the landfill than necessary, and in saving money because the more compost we can make, the less we have to buy!
