Well, this was not the season for gardening, and I’m calling it early.
If you didn’t read my last garden update, I mentioned a few of the biggest struggles we’ve been facing this summer.
1. Mice.
I thought our rodent problem was under control earlier this summer after our leasing office called professional exterminators.
However… that wasn’t the case. The exterminators set out three large rodent trappers (kind of like this) and then just like… forgot about them. So, we’re still setting out mouse traps. At this point we’ve caught three dozen mice and we still see them scampering around our yard. I’m convinced that we won’t ever actually have the rodent problem taken care of.
The mice completely ate all our radishes and chard.
2. Fire season.
I spent most of early September down in Payson at a fire assignment, so I couldn’t really tend to my garden like I wanted to. While Ryan did incredibly set up a Bluetooth-enabled remote watering system so I can water our raised beds from an app on my phone, that didn’t allow me to water a few of our plants, which were in individual planters. While Ryan’s parents were wonderful enough to stop by and water our plants a few times while Ryan and I were both out of town for fire assignments, our raised bed’s watering system didn’t work out like we’d hoped, and our vegetables suffered quite a bit while we were away from home.
3. And, finally… hail.
I mentioned it in my last post, but we had some mild hail storms through June and July.
And then… we had a massive hail storm at 2 a.m. last weekend that completely took our our entire garden.
It was so loud, Ryan and I both woke up immediately. Ryan later told me he thought someone was throwing rocks at our windows.
So… safe to say that hail storm was the end of our garden.
Our tomato plants didn’t take as much of the damage as the rest of our plants did, but as you can tell from the photos above, everything is in really rough shape.
Our green beans are completely dead, as are both our squash and zucchini plants.
The hail took every single leaf off our green beans and pulverized our zucchini and yellow squash plants.
Our huckleberry plant was decimated, and our poblano peppers were left bruised and punctured.
I don’t think it was just us, either. We went downtown for breakfast the next morning and the sidewalks and streets were littered with greenery.
Ryan even remarked that he doubted we’d have fall colors in Flagstaff this year — everything was just so annihilated.
With that said, we did have a few successes.
Before the hail, I managed to grow a few zucchini.
Our shishito pepper plant — something new for this year — absolutely thrived before the hail storm.
Even though our peas didn’t fare too well (mice dug the seedlings up, so we had to replant late), we ended up with a few cute little pea pods.
Anyway.
I’m feeling pretty disheartened. Like I said – our tomato plants actually seemed to fare OK after the hail storm, but I’m still not super optimistic.
I’m not sure if I’ll attempt again next year or not. I guess we’ll see!
Either way, I’m looking forward to making blistered shishitos!
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