We finally got some good rain. The groundwater table is still below normal, but the situation is less critical, and the vegetation did get good watering. A few more rains like what we had this week, and the drought might be over. At least now I do not need to spare water even if it does not rain for a month or so again, and I have enough surplus to give my greenhouses a good soak.
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Blue grapes are starting to color, although they still have a long way to go. I do not know what causes the drying of the leaf edges on this plant. It does it every year and does not seem to be weather-related. These grapes are delicious, although they do have seeds. It looks promising so far.
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The white grapes do not show any meaningful damage on the leaves, and they have even more fruit. In addition to that, this vine grows so fast I have trouble keeping it confined to the greenhouse. These grapes are seedless, even more delicious, and usually I also get a bigger harvest. And since this year the vines were not damaged by late frost, I might get a really substantial amount.
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My fig trees got too big and I had to cut them back severely. I might not get any figs this summer, but I might still get some later in the autumn. The summer figs are usually better tasting, but in order to get them, the trees need to be left unpruned in the spring. We shall see if some of the bigger ones start ripening in about a week.
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I am trying to grow ginger this year again. I had not much success so far, and I learned that my mistake might have been putting it in direct sunlight. Ginger allegedly likes it warm but shady. So this year I put it under the grapevine in slight shade, but it does not look very promising so far. The weather is apparently not warm enough for ginger, although it is plenty warm for everything else. The gingers are barely starting to poke out of the ground just now.
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Tomatoes thrive, both inside and outside the greenhouse. And at both locations, they began to bear fruit, with more in the greenhouse. The plants are so far healthy, so I won’t spray them in the greenhouse with fungicide anymore. I might spray those outside once more, though. They are shielded from rain, but not from fog and dew, so they are still more susceptible to blight. The fruits are still reasonably far from ripening for one more round of fungicide to be safe.
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And outside the greenhouse, I counted 12 potential Hokkaido squash. The first one is now fist-sized.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The main Three Sisters patch is now alight with bright red bean and bright yellow pumpkin blossoms. It does look kinda pretty and promising. First corn plants started to show female blossoms too, so that might not be a complete waste of resources in the end. And I am still impatiently waiting for the butternut pumpkins to take off. So far, they still grow very slowly and show no sign of blooming. But as long as the plants grow, there is hope I will get some use out of them, and we still have about 50 days before first frost. When I was a kid, it was not unusual to get the first frost in the second half of September. In later years, though, it usually comes in the second half of October or even later. We shall see how the weather turns out – it is a factor I cannot influence, yet it has a huge impact on the outcome of my labor.
We’ve had a lot of rain too, both this week, and last which was lucky for us as we’d agreed to go away for a few days. If it had been as dry and hot as it was the previous week we’d have had a lot of lost plants, as it was it rained a lot here in Stockport, but was mostly dry at Chirk which is only an hours drive away.
My balcony plants continue to grow mostly poorly, as if there’s something wrong with the ordinary potting soil I’ve bought for them. Recently, the weather has been too warm, too.
However, the sansevieria plant (which I haven’t repotted this year) has grown a whole four big inflorescences simultaneously. They just started blooming, opening some of the flowers each evening and filling the balcony with a thick sweet lily-like smell despite the glass panels being open due to hot weather.
It’s been nearly two weeks since the heatwave began, initially predicted to last for only a few days. Then the forecast kept shifting, day after day, until now the meteorological institute has pretty much given up on trying to predict an end for the heat. It’s been mainly just uncomfortable here in Helsinki, but really anomalous in northern Finland/Sweden. At this rate, we’ll yet have a drought here before the growth season ends, despite the copious rain earlier in the summer. Much of Finland is in drought already.
@lumipuna, I had some plants and some pretty valuable bonsai that died due to the bought potting soil. In my experience, most bought potting soil is not soil at all, it is pure organic compost of various origins and it can contain any number of pathogens. I never use it alone anymore. If I have to use it at all, I disinfect it either in the oven or in the microwave, and I mix it with sand and sieved natural topsoil in a ratio of 1:1:1 (soil, sand, bought soil), or with pearlite and natural topsoil in a ratio of 1:0,5:1 (soil, pearlite, bought soil.
I know that not everyone has easy access to natural topsoil, but in my experience, the best bought bagged soil is never as good as ordinary soil collected from molehills.
We actually transplanted the fig tree out of the greenhouse. It was getting too big and always fought the tomatoes. It’s a winter hard variety, so it should be fine.