Update on the Black Plastic

Last year I decided to give black plastic a try in the garden for all of our heat-loving plants. The main purpose of the plastic though was to help beat back the bindweed and Bermuda grass in our garden. We just finished up the first half of the year and the report is pretty good so far.

I keep our past harvest logs that show what we harvested on what day and how much. We are seeing our warm season crops ripening earlier than last year even though we planted later by at least 2 weeks. We’re two weeks ahead on the zucchini and a full month ahead on eggplant. While not ripe yet we’re about 2 weeks ahead on the tomatoes.

What I’m most excited about is our watermelon which we’re well over a month ahead on, which is a huge deal. It’s hard to grow watermelon because it wants a long, hot season. We have a long season but it’s not hot. The watermelon in the photo is almost the size of a football already and usually it’s not until August that we start seeing fruit growing on the vine.

Our melons are also doing really well. I’ve never had such large, lush melon plants before (here they are mixed in with the watermelons). They also have a plethora of small fruits developing.

The peppers are doing really well too. Again, we usually can’t start harvesting peppers until August but here we are at the beginning of July able to harvest them already. The real test will be to see how much heat the hot peppers have.

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