I am writing today to make you feel better. Yup, it’s a pretty depressing morning here, so I hope that will make you feel better about your bad start to the day. If you had a good start, yay for you. If you are having gardening troubles, you are not alone.
Here in the jungle, summer is the pits. It is too hot to be outside for long, and if I venture out, it’s either loaded with bug repellent, or covered in long sleeves and pants.
On top of that, there is very little in the way of food growing. All my Seminole pumpkins start to grow, then turn yellow and fall off the vine.
Finally, I have one that looks like it will continue to grow. And today I see that raccoons (my best guess) have scratched it all up!
The Dahlia is wilting. We just had a little tropical system swirling over our area of the state and it dropped 4 inches of rain. We had minor flooding, which went away quickly. But maybe the dahlia did not like all that water. Maybe it doesn’t like July in Florida. I can’t blame it.
The weeds, or should I say, grass has gone nuts. This is all getting away from me because of all the vines that are sprawling all over the yard. The squash vine is done, and I should pull it up. But it’s too hot and buggy.
The watermelon vines have 1 watermelon. The pumpkin vines – well, I mentioned that above. Those vines have nearly made it from the back of the house to the front. They’ve dropped about 10 pumpkins at this point.
Speaking of vines. That mound in the distance in my photo above is an Elm tree next to a Beautyberry bush. Below is a photo of the two trees with most of the vines pulled off. I used to work at this, even though this is not part of my yard. I’d love to see both grow and do well. As you can see it’s a losing battle.
These are trying to grow under that mound of vines in the photo above.
A banana pepper plant has died, and the other peppers don’t look so good. So it’s a depressing start to the day for me. I think I’ll stay inside.
Thank you for sharing!
Hydrangeas Blue 
Oh dear, Pam.
How depressing. Maybe you could put your dahlia in the shade? It would probably grow in a pot.
And maybe you need to plan for several summer months to not grow anything outside…. and just focus on growing stuff in the winter.
Here in NZ – when I grow squash – pumpkins or butternuts (acorn squash) I notice that a lot of the little squash go yellow and fall off and I have no idea why they do that. However, once there is one fruit on a vine-stem, that has got past a certain size, often all the rest go yellow. Maybe the vine needs to put all its energy into the bigger fruit.
And I have to pick the ones that are fully sized and ripe enough as soon as possible – this year I got another crop of small butternuts after I did that.
X
Justine
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Hello Justine, I’m considering planting only good-growing summer things, like mostly flowers! These vines are making me nuts. You could be right about the vine only being able to handle one big fruit at a time. Seems that way.
About my dahlia – I see that there is new growth coming up from the ground. So I have cut it back and will watch the new stems. Not sure what’s going on there.
Everything just hit me negatively and I had to share. Probably I should have had some wine instead. Haha…
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