June was quite the crazy month from all the basil, tomatoes, and peppers I ended up harvesting from the garden. The heat also skyrocketed which some of the plants are not having the best of times with. Thankfully it rained a lot so it has not been too bad at keeping things watered.
Tomatoes
This is just one of six tomato plants and it is just filled with smaller tomatoes. While I did plant all beefsteak and none of them so far have gotten to that size. I’m thinking next month at least one of the plants that are doing well could be producing some monsters in the garden.
Almost every day unless it was raining which we got a lot of. I would take a break from whatever I was working on and enjoy the garden. This usually included harvesting tomatoes and checking in to see how they were doing.
While in past years I’ve struggled to even get a single tomato to harvest. Just in June alone, over 60 tomatoes were harvested. Some of them were harvested a bit early since they were starting to zipper (split in a zipper-looking way). For the most part, they turned out great.
I had so many at one point I ended up using 25 of them for making a basic tomato sauce. It was my first time making some from scratch and I made quite the mess peeling and dicing up that many tomatoes. I then left it simmering on the stove with basil and garlic for three hours.
Bell Peppers
There are ten bell pepper plants and most of them are full of some decent-sized peppers. Since I used mixed seed I was rather pleased to start seeing different colors start showing up. It’s been quite fun seeing more than just green or red in the garden this year.
Early on I thought I had a purple bell pepper but it could be producing chocolate bell peppers instead. It, strangely enough, started turning green this week so I think they are ready to be harvested.
Some yellow bell peppers have also been showing up in the last week of the month. There are possible other colors I could be getting from the mix such as white. Which I think could be quite strange to see.
I had so many to harvest at one point I ended up making stuffed bell peppers. So far that has been the biggest fun of the garden in not knowing exactly what I’m having for dinner and seeing what needs to be harvested or used.
Not everything has been going great. Aphids and some other bugs that were mostly under control in May ended coming back quite strong. Since what was being done to try and control them was not enough neem oil is now being tried. Hopefully next month I’ll have good news on that front.
Basil
The two stacking containers I have with ten or so basil plants have gone crazy. Leading up to June I had been pruning them down decently allowing them to get quite bushy. Pair that with some heavy weeks of rain and not always getting pruning them. I had a mountain of basil on my hands to deal with.
So how much is a mountain of basil you say? It seems the little harvesting backset I have been using is no longer big enough. I ended up filling this three times over. I still left quite a bit to be harvested the following week as well as I was almost lost for words for how much I had.
There was so much I ended up doing two batches of washing them in the sink. I put a little bit of vinegar in there to help kill off anything and let them soak for about 10 mins. After that I allowed them to air dry overnight by hanging them up.
I ended up making six batches of pesto this month. Since I had plans to freeze it all I made it without the cheese in it. Which I’ll be adding back in later when I take them out to use one. They should hopefully last three or more months in the freezer.
Replants And Losses
It was also quite an interesting month as I had a couple of things completely die off. Some of it was replanted to see how It would do in the higher temps we are getting. Some of the other stuff I’ll more than likely get around to dealing with next month.
For anyone that has been following along the green beans have been struggling to the point I was not sure if it would be best to just rip them out and start fresh. June was the month I had enough and one of the planters was replanted with green beans. Something did come and eat some of the fresh beans and I’m on the hunt for it.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been losing a lot of cilantro plants. This last week the last two I had finally died off. They ended up going to flowering. Every time I went to harvest some there was a fresh stock of flowers at the top. A lesson learned perhaps and I’ll be a bit more aggressive with them after I plant some new ones.
Final Thoughts
There is a bunch of other stuff in the garden but I don’t always show everything in these monthly posts. The onions and garlic are still quite small to harvest. Most of the onion toppers have died down since it is now summer. This month was for sure the month of having something
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Photos were taken and content was written by @Enjar.
