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.
Wow! Those tomatoes are gorgeous!
Thanks! They are called Indigo Apple.
I envy you being so organized and keeping the date/progress logs. I really need to do better at that. How wonderful that you are having a successful season, even if it means you may have to harvest while it is still hot!
Bindweed? Is that what that awful stuff is called?
The little white morning glory looking stuff? Yeah, that’s bindweed.
Just curious – do you have any of the same crops planted without the plastic, for comparison? Otherwise it’d be hard to tell if the earlier harvest was due to the plastic, the weather, the cycles of the moon, etc…..
Unfortunately we just don’t have the space to do both. We have done several years without and they’ve all been pretty consistent in terms of timing.
Here in SF, the summer weather came much much earlier than last year, or any year I can remember, really. I have veggie crops that are almost ready to harvest, that normally wouldn’t be ready for at least another month.
Then again, we did a TON of work on improving our soil, and switched to raised beds, so that might also have helped a lot….