Monday, July 09, 2007

How does your garden grow?

Pretty darn well, thank you.

Not much going on of note right now. I'm taking Liguistics 390 over the summer and so far I'm enjoying it very much. But exciting reading it ain't.

Actually, neither is an update on how the back garden is doing, but at least I can offer some nice before and after pictures:








The corn is waist high by the 4th of July, and the tomatoes are going gangbusters. The peppers are bringing up the rear right now, but since tomorrow will begin a series of days near 100 degrees (which, I understand, pepper plants thrive on), we'll see how it goes. As for how me and Argotnaut and the boys bear up under triple-digit high temps with no AC, well, I think it'll be time to organize the basement.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm very proud of you and your garden. How often is it (like yesterday) that Phoenix and Portland had the same high temperature? I have pictures of my flowers but they are in my camera -- some day I'll get a digital camera and enter the modern epoch. . .

Andrew said...

It probably doesn't happen very often that Portland and Phoenix have the same high temperature, at least in the summer. We set a record on 7/10 with a high of 102. It's much easier to deal with than hot weather in the Midwest, though, and the humidity at the hottest part of the day was about 16 percent.

I should take another picture of the garden, as our gardener dude dropped by and informed me that the tomatoes had to be trimmed so you got "20 good tomatoes instead of 50 so-so ones." So they've been thinned a bit. He also said to only water them once a week, which surprised me, since Portland usually gets only about an inch of rain in July normally, and the tomatoes are in full sun, which they are supposed to like. I thought they'd be irradiated to a crispy brown, but apparently that's not the case. They must be hardier than I thought.

Anonymous said...

Low humidity is the key, alright. When it's really hot here the humidity is about 7%. I've tried to grow tomatoes here in Colorado. But we're a lot closer to the sun (at a mile-high 5,280 feet). I'm not very skilled at it and the tomatoes just bake. Nobody appreciates a home-grown tomato like I do - I've rarely had a decent one since Grandma Fern died.