El Nino in the Garden 2015

This is turning out to be the driest year we have experienced in the garden and many of the crops are showing stress in spite of all the water that I'm giving them.

Butternut Squash

Many crops are very early.  Strawberries were weeks ahead of time and the crops were pretty good.  The corn is loving the heat, as are the beans.  Other heat-loving plants like peppers and squash are quite happy so far, but they all need water.

Fruit trusses on Health Kick Tomatoes

The tomato plants are huge and early on set a bumper crop of fruit, but now the flower trusses are not setting.  I've had to really keep an eye on this bed because it's one of the beds that cedar roots have managed to creep into.  I hadn't realized what was happening and almost lost one Principe Borghese plant before I discovered how dry the soil was. (Update 5 hours later:  with a temperature of 28C and a strong wind, the tomato plants were losing moisture so quickly that they were starting to wilt and a second deep watering was required.)

Principe Borghese Tomatoes

In checking back, I can see that most years at this time the fruit is just starting to turn on early tomatoes.  We've been snacking on Gold Nugget and Sweet Millions for a couple of weeks now!

Corn is a heavy feeder, too, but this bed is maintaining a good quality of moisture and I think it's the tallest corn we've ever had.  I'd say we're only a couple of weeks off harvest for the corn and the Italian heritage beans haven't even started to flower yet!

Signs of aphids on the kale

Kale is a cool weather lover and it's really struggling in the heat.  I've noticed leaves are starting to curl up and there are signs of aphids starting to make their homes in the leaves.  I'm picking those off, and the kale is getting lots of water, but the heat is telling on their general health.

Harvested garlic sorted into varieties

I just finished harvesting the garlic and am quite disappointed with the size of the bulbs.  This might be because of the heat.  They reached maturity a couple of weeks early and this means that time that might have been spent growing was lost.

Copra Onions starting to fall over

This was also true for the onions.  The yellow onions have already been harvested and I'm seeing signs that the Copra plants are approaching maturity.

And this makes things difficult for the young Brussels Sprouts plants which were just transplanted.  I will probably have to rig up some sort of shade for them to carry them through to fall.

Everything else seems to be coming along well, but each day I'm out there giving the veggies a good drink.  The perennial beds have been ignored.  Water is so precious that only the vegetables and plants in pots are being catered to.  A newsletter from West Coast Seeds addressed this issue and also finished with the sobering thought that the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that there's a 95% chance that these conditions will continue through fall - and an 85% chance that they'll go through the coming winter.  Now that's scary!