Today, my two kids picked a small haul from our garden. We mostly got cherry tomatoes and black cherry tomatoes, along with a few Shishito peppers—some of which we left on the plant a bit too long. Oh well, they still taste great!
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Our two tomato plants have completely taken over the planter! We had to remove the cover to give them more room to grow. I’ve been keeping a close eye on them, and even though they look like an overgrown mess, the plants are super healthy, so I’ve left them alone. The more healthy leaves they have, the more tomatoes we’ll get! Hopefully, they’ll keep producing throughout the summer. We might already have too many, but both my kids will eat them as is, and we can always make pasta sauce if we end up with even more.
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Our other planter has a few pepper plants that have given us a decent amount of Shishito peppers, though the slugs got to our first batch of Banana peppers. We also made the mistake of planting a butternut squash at the other end of the planter, and as you can see, it has completely taken over! But it’s a great learning experience, and the butternut squash plant currently has at least 12 squash growing quickly and is staying disease-free, which is a nice change from how my squash plants usually get sick!
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Our Dragonfruit plants have produced a lot of flowers this year, but so far only about 7 have set fruit. I’m not sure what variety we have, so it’s possible that many of them are self-sterile. I’ll need to make sure to cross-pollinate them next time. I’m also excited about planting more of them! The great thing about Dragonfruit is that when you grow them from cuttings, you can get them to climb up a trellis (4-5 feet high) within a year and often get fruit in the first year or two. Plus, we can fit 4 plants in each container we use, so we currently have 28 different Dragonfruit plants growing!
My biggest challenge with Dragonfruit is remembering to fertilize them regularly, since I often forget. If you’re like me, be sure to document your fertilizing schedule and, honestly, set an alarm to remind you when it’s time to do it again!
If anyone has any suggestions for any other summer plants, send them my way, my kids and I will be planting some more plants this upcoming weekend!