I was able to mostly water the garden adequately, and most plants now appear to have deep enough roots to thrive. Except for a few fails, about which I will write another time. And when the plants get their roots deep enough, the leaves get nice dark green color and they start to bloom.

Though the first picture today is not a bloom, it is my first bell pepper ever. It was tiny (just 70 g), but according to my father, it was delicious.

The bell peppers continue to bear fruit, and the tomatoes just started to blossom last week when I took this picture. They are much bigger now, and the first berries are starting to show up. So far, so good. Due to the heat wave, I did put a shading net over the greenhouse, tomatoes do thrive best in temperatures up to 35°C and with direct sunlight, the greenhouse could easily overheat in this weather.

The humble pea had lots of white blossoms everywhere I planted it. The pods are now in their flat stage, and I expect them to bulk up within two weeks or so. After that, I can harvest the peas and plant a second round of the same. Or I can try for spinach again. At least this supply of pea seeds had very good germination rate, and I should get at least my money’s worth and some of the time too.

I already harvested the first variety of pea that I planted, the one with a poor germination rate. I got just about what the packet cost out of that,too.

The three sisters patches are doing OK-ish. The beans finally started to climb the poles. Normally, once they do that, the growth accelerates significantly.

The purple blossoms of the runner bean are beloved by pollinators of all kinds – bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. I like them too, they ad color to the garden. Some of the other beans started to blossom too, but most did not, and there are still some that did not catch onto the support.

The marrow pumpkins started with female flowers this year, which is unusual. Normally, pumpkins start with male flowers to attract pollinators and only later add female flowers. This way does not make much sense, because female flowers are a bigger investment, and without any male flowers around, they simply dry and fall off uselessly. But after about a week, male flowers started to show up too, so from now on, I should be getting some pumpkins.

This week, the first Hokkaido pumpkin started to bloom, with male flowers as is proper. Pumpkins and beans are the OK part of my three sisters experiment. The -ish part is corn.

So far, most of the corn is still stunted. And those plants that looked big and healthy started to bloom now, but only male flowers. I suspect this is corn’s reaction to the wonky weather. I might still get some harvest out of some of the large number of plants that I planted, but it just appears corn is not worth the effort in my garden. It is too unreliable. Out of the four years I am trying to grow it, only the first year I had a definitive success; every following year, it was a lot of work and a lot of failure.

Potatoes are not doing well; the weather is too dry and hot for them, even with watering. I will get some, but it won’t be spectacular. They started to bloom last week, and in about two months, they will be ready for harvest.

And last, some weed that sprouts every year in my gladiolas. I never bothered to identify the species, and I am generally leaving it be. It does not spread, and it has nice, big white blossoms.

Next time, I will unfortunately have to write about some of the fails I had this year.