The Summer Heat is just killing everything

The garden is starting to look grim lately due to the Texas summer heat.  I have now changed my watering time to 4am instead of 7am, just so that the plants can absorb more of it before the sun comes out to suck it back out.  After cutting the zucchini off, the plant has more or less just withered away, along with my two cucumber vines.  My tomatoes this year are just on producing much and its probably because I waited to long to plant them.  If I had planted them around mid-march, things might have been a lot different.  The one thing that still seems to survive are my jalapeno plants.  I'm sure those hot little dudes just love the summer heat!  My onions are currently the size of golf balls, but they still require another two months to reach their full potential... I can't wait.


As an experiment, I hung up two Topsy Turvies outside, one with a tomato plant and the other with some strawberries and mint.  The only problem is that the only place to hang them only gets a few hours of sunlight.  So we will see how well they do.

This past weekend, my wife and I made a trip up to the Fort Worth area for our nephew's 2nd birthday, which also gave me the opportunity to check out their little urban homestead.   They have a nice sized backyard garden with many tomato plant varieties from grape to Big Boy to new ones that I had never heard of before like a Golden Zebra tomato.  They had enough onions, Swiss chard, and ground cherries to share with everyone there.  What they are still waiting on though are the strawberries, watermelon, cucumbers, and zucchini.  To add flavor to all their produce, they have a pretty good herb garden filled with mint, dill, basil, and other herbs I can't remember.   Along with the gardens, they have, I think, 5-6 chickens that average out about collectively 2 eggs a day.  For a family of 4, it's enough for them.  They also have a rabbit, which with the help from the chickens, provides a good source for their compost piles.
 I will say that he has better conditions for gardening than we do down here.  The soil is not as rocky and they have actually had rain in the past few months.   Plants just do better with natural rain water than with city municipal water.

Get dirty and keep on gardening!