Choko was a new one on me. It looks real interesting,
As far as my garden is concerned it has been a slow production of vegetables. The heat made my large tomato slicers small like cherry tomatoes. My grape tomatoes came out like the size of pearls.
Out of the 30+ tomato plants that I had I lost only a couple of plants. Now that it has cooled off thing are starting to grow like crazy again.
I have a black cherry heirloom tomato plant that just filled out and flowered AND the Caspian Red (Russian) heirloom finally has tomatoes the plant would be over 8 feet tall but the 5 foot cage isn't tall enough, so it flows out over the top of the cage, sweeps near the ground and grows back up again. (It could be about 9-10 feet if supported up that high) Most of everything looks healthy.
All my squash dies, except for one zucchini plant. The leaves changed colors to a sea green color before the plants futzed out.
1 Spaghetti squash, a couple pumpkins that came up on their own, 30 pole beans, 20 snow peas two crook neck squash, 1 zucchini, 1 basil plant most of my sweet pea flowers, 1 green pepper plant... and a couple of cucumber plants didn't make it either.
I have discovered a few things this year;
*The cherry tomato that is indeterminate that is in about a cubic foot of earth has grown close to 8 feet tall. I think as long as your soil depth is at least 12 to 18 inches, most plants will reach their full potential.
*Greenhouse effect (High heat) is bad on crops. Some of the plants grow great, but most stay ratty looking and stunted. Leaves are smaller and tomatoes develop a thick skin. (Ants and pill bugs consume fruit much faster... the good bugs that are in your garden become pests.)
* Three flowers that I grow in my garden this year to attract pollinators are the sunflower, basil, and passion flower. The flowers are more like feed as opposed to feeding a colony of bees nectar. Keeping the bees collecting pollen keeps them pollinating all the flowers they can including the zucchini, and cucumbers... I use sunflowers as billboard advertisements for bees because I have a six foot tall fence the sunflowers grow 8 -10 feet tall and then the passion vine grows anywhere it wants and trellises the fence.... The basil bolts out quick and it is a nice companion plant with tomatoes The bees work this plant like crazy when it bolts.
I ended up with honey bees, bumble bees, parasitic wasps, carpenter bees, sweat bees, some flies, monarch butterflies, and hundreds of light blue and white butterflies that also went crazy over the basil.
*Flowers are very important to a vegetable garden... I had borage for a while but it became long and ratty looking after it matured and the heat killed it off. It is another companion plant for tomatoes and is supposed to confuse the tomato horn worm. (I have not had any of those this year and that is good. I also have marigolds and a lot of them com up on their own. (But I am saving seeds in an envelop in the fall to replant in the spring.)
*Onions are easy to grow, and they seem to grow better on top of the soil instead of in the soil.
*Turnips produce nice spicy salad greens, and make a low carb mashed turnip (like mashed potatoes.)
*Some radishes produce nice salad greens that taste just like the radish.
This year I kept my eyes peeled for old wood framed windows. I have over 120 medium sized windows collected from the free section of craigslist. I am going to build a greenhouse with a roof that shades the plants in the summer time, but lets in full direct sunlight in the winter. I am hunting down wood pallets and old fence planks so that I can glue and bolt and "engineer" wood so that have a greenhouse with a living roof and a water collector. I will drop in concrete footers so I can build everything up on posts to support the weight of a living roof. The Idea is to double the growth of the area. I can grow plants that have shallow roots but will insulate the roof in the winter time... and use large barrels of water in black containers to heat the greenhouse in the winter time. The greenhouse will have raised beds so I don't have to stoop to find vegetables, and it will probably be tiered so that I can grow things vertically in the garden as well as in the beds. So far I have about $10.00 invested in this, but I am debating on buying the posts instead of engineering it out of salvaged materials... maybe. Other than that my most expensive parts will be concrete footers and the steel bolt down parts, and the roofing liner. (Everything sounds great in theory.)
...So far the greenhouse will be over 200 sq ft, and 16" tall on the tall end so that the sun can reach way inside the greenhouse in the winter.
This is a site that gave me the idea for vertical growing...
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/urban ... os/80242/5 I think it is a cool idea for a wall of light stuff like flowers & shallow root plants like lettuce, or parsley... It looks relatively simple to build and keep watered. I think a person could grow their greens on the South side of the building (It would be north for AU) up the wall on the side of their house creating more space in for other stuff on the ground... I've been looking at using pop crates or maybe used gutters to do this with.
I'm also interested in aquaponics, but that is for another thread...