Garden Update, July 22nd

It's HOT.  The garden is confused a little bit. Feels like August. The good news... we finally have some tomatoes!!! Still green, but they are there!!  I'm ready for something red. Everything we've brought in so far has been green. It's getting a little boring.  We'll regret complaining about these tomatoes taking so long though... we're going to get TONS at one time.

Just to update on our red mulch & silver mulch experiment... it was a bust! The picture is a little small, but hopefully you can see how scrawny the plants on the left are (on the mulch) and how full and healthy the ones on the right are (without the mulch). We lost three of our four zucchini plants on the silver mulch this year. The tomato plants over there look awful, but are finally producing a little. The grass is growing  through the sides, up through the buckets, through the holes around the plants. We will say that the silver mulch did help control the bugs as promised. We still had some, but not as many as last year.

 We've also been preserving lots of food, too.  We've blanched & froze lots of zucchini, cabbage (yup, we  froze cabbage!), bell peppers and  jalapenos... lots & lots of jalapenos!!

Hoping to make some pepper jelly this weekend... one of our favorite ways to use all of our peppers. We have about 10 more bell peppers growing out there right now and lots of jalapenos!