Oh look, this long and awful day is almost over!

And at nearly midnight, it’s still 90 degrees on my front porch. I can’t even sit on my porch comfortably in the middle of the night. That’s just wrong.

I did spend a little while poking around at my garden today. It was so hot out there. I ended up hosing myself down with the garden hose in order to buy myself a little more time to finish what I was doing.

What was I doing? Deciding what plants are going to go tomorrow.

The last batch of cucumbers I picked were all too bitter to eat, even though I picked them as soon as they were large enough to be called a cucumber. Those plants are so seriously stressed by the heat and the various infestations that are now attacking them. I can’t stay on top of it all, and the heat is really what’s causing the biggest problems. Half the cucumbers are getting thinned out. Sorry to see them go, but it’s not doing me or the somewhat healthy plants any good to have them around. Maybe with the ones doing poorly gone the others might put out a few more cucumbers.

I started cutting back the large tomatoes the other day. I’m going to check for any viable baby tomatoes on the branches again tomorrow, and I’ll be cutting them back a little more. What I have done to date on that front seems to have helped with the development of the few tomatoes trying to grow on them right now. They really only have a few more weeks before I pull them up and give up on them. They both grew so nicely, but combined they have only produced one edible tomato thus far. I’m amazed I let them live this long.

The two jalapeños in pots are about to hear a death knell. They look nice and green, but they haven’t given me anything. Three plants total of that kind, and only one pepper all summer? I thought getting the pepper developed at Texas A&M specifically for growing in Texas was the wise thing to do, but alas, didn’t work out that way. At the moment, those post are sitting right out in the hot sun from sun up to sun down. Let’s call it an experiment. I want to see how hardy they really are by trying to kill them.

The other large tomato that is still in a pot is going, going, gone. It’s not even blooming anymore. Not wasting my time on it.

The Sugar Snack cherry tomatoes continue to grow and bloom, but they aren’t producing like they were at first. I’m going to start cutting them back from the top down. The lower branches are where all the tomatoes are, so no sense supporting the whole plant with food and water. I’m going to wait to see if we get any cooler weather and rain out of that tropical storm before I do that though. After that one little batch of rain we got, they produced like crazy for a week. Maybe it’ll happen again.

The Super 100 cherry tomato is on the death list. I’ve gotten one microscopic and very sour tomato off of it, and there’s only one more on it right now. It’s a hybrid, so saving seed won’t do me any good, and it never did grow enough to even need support. That’s sad for a vining plant.

The only plants I am at all happy with at the moment are the pepper plants I transplanted into the front flower bed when I gave up on them, and the banana peppers that is still in a pot. All of them have peppers all over them. Well, at least Lin will be happy. It’s sort of ironic that the very things I don’t especially like to eat are the very things that are going to end up being the best producers this summer. Ugh.

So what have I learned about gardening this year? It was absolutely the worst year to start gardening. It’s not really possible to tell these things in advance though, and at least I did get started with it, worked it into my life again, and I did learn a lot about organic gardening. I’m ready to expand next spring. I am ready to do a whole garden in the back. We are going to work on building the raised beds over winter to be ready for early planting in the spring. I’m kind of excited. It’ll be a lot of hard work, both building it and then growing the garden and tending it, but it’s also going to be fun — provided we don’t have another summer like this one. Surely we can’t have two in a row like this?

In other gardening news, I currently have some heirloom tomato seeds and cantaloupe seeds fermenting in the kitchen window to add to my seed stash. I’ll be getting some of the tomato seeds started very soon, because I am hoping to squeeze in a short growing season from the end of August until the first frost. At the rate the temperatures keep climbing, that first frost may not happen until December. With my luck this year though, it’ll probably freeze at the end of September. But … it’s easier to keep plants warm than it is to keep them cool. I already have a plan to wrap the porch in plastic sheeting if necessary to create an impromptu greenhouse, and since they are in pots, I could always move them into the house. Oh, wouldn’t the kitties just love that?! Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but dammit … I want some homegrown large tomatoes this year! Just a few!

And that’s the state of my garden … pretty dismal. I did my best. It wasn’t a complete failure. Sure, I did not end up with much of anything edible, but I learned a bunch of new things and I relearned a bunch of things I had forgotten. The best thing to come of it though is reminding myself I am really good with plants and how much I love doing it. Just as I hope tomorrow will be a better and cooler day, I will continue to hope that next summer is a better and cooler summer. I will have fresh produce I grew with the sweat of my own brow!

Now … bed. I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow, and I have to do it early. If I wait even a little in the morning, it will be too hot and I won’t want to do it. Then we’ll be out of milk, Dr Pepper, and toilet paper, and we can’t have that.