A few more tomatoes and a cucumber maybe?

 Warmer today and continuing that trend for the rest of the week. Which means not much happening in the morning for activity on  my part. Not much going on as I've said. 

No one has cut any of the flowers thankfully, that peach one is almost the same color as my hand and smells lovely as usual. The sunflower seems to be progressing into seed production and if it does make seed, I'll be saving them for next summer.

 

Inspecting the cucumbers last night and saw a black beetle climb around a stem and then drop on the damp soil Did more inspecting and discovered this leaf that was at the base of the plant. Saw an earwig and a pill bug, removed them and swept the mulch away from the base of the plants.

It did look like the base of the main stem was being gnawed. Look at all those tomatoes! I will definitely be planting two bushes next time on the trellis. The other bed(s) will be something else.

 

Evening and day shots, those bushes are coming out very soon. Despite the visible red tomatoes these and the ones in the north bed are not performing as they should. Will bring my clippers and a trash bag with me tonight. Or maybe a paintbrush.

 

View from above and a female flower below! I will be bringing a paintbrush or cotton swab with me next time to grab some pollen. I'd like to think that all the activity I've been doing on the bushes made a difference. There's a male flower hiding under that leaf and I think there was another female flower somewhere on the upper stem with more males. Yay!

I don't have any mesh bags like they say to cover the female until the males are ready so just have to hope that flower is open by tonight or tomorrow morning and there's a male available.

One thing about having plants with a good spread of large leaves is they shade the root zone to keep it cool and moist longer. The roots obviously go beyond the leaves a bit but plants grow naturally a certain way for a reason.

So once again, not much else to do this time of year. I was looking for anything on the garden groups that caught my attention to write about but not much there either. People are either reporting bumper crops from their multitude of plants in their larger gardens or problems with plants that others have answered. 

One video I did see was from the Aussie about growing his pumpkins out of season by accident. They have weather similar to ours but get a lot more rain than we do. Right now it's their winter going into spring and showing a huge sprawling green pumpkin vine all over the place. Reminds me of my cucumber and hoping it doesn't do the same thing. Not likely but if I get a few cucumbers off my vine I'll be happy. Will be planning better in the future for my even smaller garden space next year.

Just waiting for the weather to cool down.... in another month.