I would think in your climate it would indeed be difficult to grow vegetables in the summer! I know redloon in Carolina grows most of hers in the other seasons.

We have just about reached the point where all the tomatoes stop flowering. When overnight temps are too hot, they stop completely. But, I have to faithfully go out there and water throughout this difficult time. If I can just keep them alive long enough, they produce like mad crazy once the temps cool off again. It’s like they’ve been bustin’ at the seams, waiting for the chance to fruit.

Kind of on this topic, when I was weeding today before watering, I noticed several new volunteer Tomato plants sprouting here and there. I wonder why they waited till now to volunteer. I left them where they were. Made a note to self to dig out some plant stakes for them. Then to mark them with the stakes the next time I weed to reduce the likelihood that I’d step on them or pull them up instinctively as a weed.

I wonder how they will do in this hot dry weather. Whether they will develop nice roots, etc. in the hot dry soil. Whether they will get big enough to bear fruit late this season. Whether they will rocket past the existing Tomato plants growing (infinitesimally slowly) despite all the mistakes I made growing them from seed, letting them get root-bound, planting them a little late, not digging them big enough holes in the clay with enough compost mixed in, etc. etc. Guess I’ll let them grow without too much special attention and see how they do.

Hang in there Jim! I went thru this same thought the other day while watering our gardens. It is so frustrating to put all the time/effort/resources into a garden and just watch it burn up from the heat/ ate up from varmits. My corn which was looking really nice is now major heat stressed, the watermelons are attacked every day they get to the size of baseballs, and I drip more water from my forehead than I get from the end of my garden hose!

That said… the zucchini is going crazy and tastes oh so good! My carrots are just about ready and we canned our 1st beans the other day. Our tomatoes look the best they ever have and onions the size of grapefuits! This is in NO way trying to brag or make you feel bad! It is only to show that the rewards/harvests make up for the struggles/setbacks! The Good Lord knows what He is doing even when I don’t!!

I love what sheepand wool said above. Seed companies do tend to make it sound easier than it really is! Doesn’t everybody’s veggies look like the seed catalog pictures??? LOL
Sometimes ours get close but the bugs/diseases tend to always show up at picture time!! :o)
The satisfaction comes from the successes you will have over time.
Take it from Hillbilly: There’s no better taster, than a fresh ’mater or ’tater!!!

Well, until 3 years ago when I started helping Gerry on his allotments all the “veg” I ever grew were a couple or 3 tomato plants on the balcony each year! I did try an old compost bag of potatoes one year but found they took up far too much of the valuable space on the balcony for far too little yield! At least the Toms grow vertically & take up little room & give reasonable results. I’ve also had a few Strawberry plants that I brought home from the allotment so our granddaughter could pick the fruit! I have a Strawberry planter but all the Strawberry plants I put in it died! ;-((

At the present moment I have 3 Tomato seedlings that are going NOWHERE, a Lettuce plant & a tomato growing in one of those upside-down planters. That plant is doing the best of the 4 plants on the balcony.

I also have a Cucumber plant (of two I brought home from the plot) that is somehow struggling to hold onto life that I brought home from the allotment greenhouse. I also brought home a couple of plants of Water Melon, both have now given up the ghost!

I therefore have the ingredients for a salad growing on my balcony!!!

Thinking about my Tomatoes today, I decided to let the ones I have in the ground keep on keeping on. And to buy a 4-pack of Better Boy tomatoes for $1.77 at Wal*Mart to plant deeply in 4 existing pots on my patio. By fall, they should grow some and will hopefully bear fruit. They are presumably not stunted like my other tomato plants. We’ll see.

As @anelson mentioned, I’ve discovered that summer is my quiet season in the vegetable garden, since the high temperatures and high humidity and very uneven rainfall that we receive here in South Carolina from mid-June through late August are not conducive to growing most vegetables. Also, the root knot nematodes in my soil are most active when the soil is warm and cause the most damage when plants are heat- and/or drought-stressed — not a good combination.

September-May, however, provides excellent growing conditions for a sequence of cold-weather and warm-weather (as opposed to hot weather) crops. And mixing organic matter into the soil and mulching the soil surface can definitely help somewhat in terms of reducing the frequency with which watering is needed to keep plants healthy.

At the moment my peppers and Thai basil and perennial herbs are thriving, but the tomatoes and pole beans are looking more than a bit sad, and the ground cherry plants are truly pathetic-looking — I’m harvesting a dwindling number of fruit from them each day. I tried growing zucchini again this year, and completely failed for the second year in a row (which is a bit hard to take since my family’s vegetable garden when I was growing up reliably produced a massive excess of zucchini every single year). I had good luck with soy beans (for edamame) last summer, despite the drought and heat (I mulched the soil surface and watered about twice a week), and I’ve read that sweet potatoes can survive summer conditions here too, so I’m planning to give them a try next summer.

I think that it’s worth trying to grow a few things when conditions are challenging, but it’s important to be selective in terms of matching crops to growing conditions and your appreciation quotient, and not over-committing yourself to the point where you’re no longer getting enjoyment and satisfaction from your gardening. Balance is key!

I sympathise with you also, here in the UK we are having a similar but opposite problem..

Since April we have had nothing but torrential rain nearly ever day, temperatures have been too low, cold nights, cool days, and around 300% more than average rainfall for the period.

Most of the people on the allotments this year have just given up, but you have to ask yourself…

Do you garden for the food, or do you garden for the enjoyment?

I know which i garden for, hang in there, the weather cant stay bad forever.

The weather has certainly been very, very, *VERY WET * for the last 3-4 months! But as for giving up on the allotment, NO WAY! Yet we have had blight on all our potatoes & it has killed off all our Tomato plants this year – so NO Tomatoes from the allotment this year!

Everything has grown 300% more than the previous years! The allotments really resemble a jungle!

The Petunias in clay pots on my balcony railing have got so wet that I started taking them off the railings to move them further into the balcony where they would be protected from the rain! This is the first time I’ve ever had to do this in the 11 years we have lived in this flat!

I was talking to my sister who lives in Texas earlier today & she was telling me about the heat they were experimenting there, about 12pm over there & already they were in the 90s!

It is again a wonder of Folia, to allow all of us from such different areas to share our locations situations! Every day I am fascinated, even despite my chaotic life at the moment, I try to make time to keep reading these wonderful threads. I am amazed by the variety (and all too noticeable changes in the climate world-wide…) of temperature and climate changes there are going on! 300% more rain in some areas?! Droughts elsewhere? Wow, well I figure I should add for the general public knowledge, our plight here in Hope Valley, RI (USA, E. Coast). This is only our second year owning any useful amount of outdoor gardening space and we too, have seen drastic changes already.

For example, we are currently going through a month of every other week we have high winds and a few hours of torrential downpours that rip off top soil and flood roads, and the other weeks in between are solid hot, humid high 80-90s all day, with evenings of around 70-75 (F). Most full sun areas of our grass has either died or gone dormant, weeds are rampant but some are having problems too. We tried watering in the evenings and mornings before it got too hot, and managed to get a chunk back. We learned a day or so ago that to keep a good lawn, the best method is water 2 hours at a time, twice a to promote deep roots. This (in our area at least) I am told, does not cause issues with wells or water systems, however you should verify in your town any water usage laws.

My plants are doing surprisingly well I think… The ones I started indoors this late winter/early spring have been doing splendid and most have even bloomed this year! The only things I have that do better currently in planters outside, as opposed to when I tried to plant them, were my Sweet Basil, Lettuce and Parsley. These due to probably many reasons, simply didn’t like moving to natural ground.

As far as our happy veggies, with 2 times a day waters with a few gallons of water, we’ve managed to keep a mostly happy crop of carrots, corn, tomatoes, sweet peas, pumpkins and cucumbers! I’m not 100% sure how our harvest really adds up to a true “good harvest” from the plants, but for a gardener of enjoyment (me), I found it all the worth while of lugging jugs of water for an hour or two each day to our different gardens.

Things NOT happy with this crazy weather here, are our grapes vines, apple, pear and sour cherry trees (which were sooo bountiful last year). Actually, all of our trees, fruit and non-fruit alike, look like we are in the middle of fall…It’s really sad. Anyway, Jim, Keep your head up!! Slow down, take a look at what is doing well and focus on those :) If you garden for pleasure, try to keep the positive thoughts of whatever your plant produces is a new treasure and experience, and take any failures into stride and learn to do it better the next time! Best of luck and again, that you for fueling a wonderful discussion.

I just wanted to drop a post to say I have been there with ya during summer heat waves. This is the first year I really took an offensive approach to it though. I started indoor plantings of several things in hopes to see a boom during the cooler weather of fall. I just got these transplanted into the garden and since we actually got a small reprieve from the dead heat for a week it was amazing to see everything spring to life in the garden again. Tomatoes flowered and set fruit. Peppers, which I have never had much success with, are setting a ton of fruit now.

Yes, there were casualties (cucumbers didn’t survive and an entire 4×4 raised bed died off (I still don’t know what happened with it)), but I had so many things going on inside that I was able to really backfill the empty spots. I actually ran out of seeds for some things!

So I guess my lesson is this: just keep on planting! (oh and install drop irrigation and rain barrels to save on the water bill).