Some Wins, Some Losses. It's All a Part of Gardening.

It's the second week of August and it's time for SteemIt Community Garden Journal Challenge # 4 #gardenjournal2018 from @simplymike Find out more and come join in at: https://steemit.com/gardenjournal2018/@simplymike/-steemit-community-garden-journal-challenge-4---august-join-or-resteem-and-win

Come tour my gardens...

Just about time for harvesting the apples! My dog Bruno has already been helping himself. See the post where I caught him in action at: https://steemit.com/dogsofsteemit/@porters/my-dog-loves-apples

We're getting some cherries and there are quite a few plums but they are still green now. We have a hard time getting the plums to ripen before the frost. I even cover parts of the trees with row cover to get just a little bit more ripening time.

We're eating some tomatoes and peppers out of the container garden. This is what I call my micro climate garden. We don't have much full sun in our yard being we live in the forest. The spot on the south side of our house provides a good spot for us to grow some of the warm weather plants.

The cucumbers in the covered garden are doing well but the ones outside not so much. They are in an area that is lower, thus cooler and damper. I start them in pots inside to get a head start, but if it is too cool, they will not put out female flowers, thus not much fruit.

The tomatoes are forming in the covered garden but no big ones ripe yet. The tomato plants keep me busy pruning off the extra leaves and new shoots. I take these off so all their energy can go into producing and ripening those tomatoes.

We've eaten most of our broccoli except the sprouting variety that keeps putting out smaller florets all season long. The cabbages are doing well, although the few that I kept under the row cover (to protect from cabbage moths) had some rotting.

Yikes! The moles have been taking out all my bean plants which were just starting to produce. I tried putting in little windmills but we didn't get much wind in there and they were too heavy to produce the vibration the moles dislike.

The kale is coming along nice. I like the young leaves in the salads with the lettuce which is also doing well.

This is the view from my deck. It is an area that gets more sunlight and I keep some potted herbs and a Black Hungarian pepper that has pretty purple flowers and dark purple fruit. It is producing very well there. The patch of self-seeded Himalayan impatience behind the deck is full of bees. It's quite amazing, although the Himalayan impatience are not native here so they may be taking the bees away from pollinating the native plants - not so good.

One of my biggest disappointments is my fig tree which was flourishing inside the sun room, full of figs, then they got invaded with mealy bugs. I didn't want to spray the tree with what I used last fall, Safers Soap, until I had picked the figs. I kept taking leaves off that had lots of bugs on them and squishing a few but they got out of hand. I wanted to do some growing in the sun room this winter so I had to take the fig outside and clean out the sun room.

I must have some pansies in my garden. To me they are the happy plants with their face like flowers. This old duck decoy has found a home amongst the pansies.

Another favorite flower of mine is the fushia and begonias so I like to keep a pot of them on my deck.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of my garden in August and will return for another tour in September.