It’s been a bit since I posted about our 2024 summer vegetable garden plans, so I wanted to give an update now that everything has been planted.
Spoiler alert: It’s not going well!
So, our garden got off to a really rough start this year.
Not because of fire season, surprisingly! But rather, because… mice.
Long story short, we’ve known we had maybe one or two mice living in our side yard for the past year and a half. We’ve mostly ignored them… until we couldn’t.
I planted my snap peas and radishes in early April since they’re both frost-tolerant, and as soon as both started sprouting… trouble.
The mice absolutely decimated my radish and pea sprouts. They nibbled, tunneled and dug, pulled up seeds, ate sprouts and knocked over our entire irrigation system.
So… rodent control it was. Ryan and I started trapping mice left-and-right. After we caught TWO DOZEN MICE, we ended up calling our leasing office for professional pest control.
Turns out our pest problem was a little more severe than we thought it was.
After we finally got our rodent problem under control in June, I replanted my peas and radishes, and planted our chard, zucchini and yellow squash.
We’d already had our tomato and pepper plants growing indoors under a grow light, and come early June, we repotted those seedlings. We transplanted four tomato plants into grow bags, and transplanted two pepper seedlings into our raised garden bed. We had an extra pepper seedling, so we decided to toss that into an old plastic potter we had laying around because we didn’t want to let it go to waste.
Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, our late June planting meant that nothing really worked out. By the time I was able to replant my peas and radishes, it was too hot, so they began wilting and dying. Ryan’s spinach immediately bolted.
Everything else started growing very, very slowly.
Then, of course…
Hail.
As soon as I got back from my work assignment on the Pius Fire earlier this week, I was treated to back-to-back monsoonal rains and hail storms Monday and Tuesday.
The hail decimated the few radish and chard plants that had survived the mouse infestation, broke one of my pepper plants in half, and significantly damaged pretty much everything else.
Our garden huckleberry plant — a birthday gift for Ryan that I grabbed from a booth at our local plant and garden sale earlier this spring — took the worst of it. It was partially uprooted and snapped in half.
So overall… this gardening season is not going well.
But, I do have a few successes (so far).
My green beans and squash plants look like they might fare OK in the raised garden bed, despite the hail.
I mentioned it earlier this year, but I made the decision this year to plant my tomatoes (Roma and bush beefsteak) in buckets (I snagged these from Amazon) rather than our raised garden bed so I could haul them inside once our fall weather turns to freeze.
And, that shishito pepper plant — the one I last-minute just tossed into a spare plastic potter — has started flowering.
It’s actually doing better than either of the pepper plants in the raised garden bed.
So, at this point, I’m counting on my lone pepper plant and my tomato plants to salvage this summer gardening season.
Stay tuned to see how things turn out!
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