With yesterday’s high of 84 and today’s forecasted high of 90, which for once looks entirely likely, vigilant watering is the new name of the game.

The cauliflower at the far edge of the plot near the driveway has pretty much totally given up. Not its fault. We knew the dirt in that area is still really poor, but we’d run out of space. The wilted cauliflower has not recovered, but it’s not dead yet, either. Most of the smaller cauliflowers are pretty bug eaten, but the original ones are doing ok. I think they like it a bit cooler than this.

The carrots seem to be doing well, and we have flowers on all of the tomatoes. On this one, a spider is waiting for a smallish pollinator to become lunch.

We’ve decided that we were successful in selecting the yellow squash to go in a container since it’s started blooming before sending a bunch of vines out, and we have a guess on which un-hill is the pumpkins and which is the butternut.

This early, early morning, after Mike showed me a pair of mating earth worms (apparently they ooze for each other), I found and squished nine slugs lazily munching in our garden.  It’s not exactly fulfilling to see their green insides which used to be our corn or squash.  These guys hide during the day, and indeed the largest slug I’ve ever dealt with startled me from my parsley plant when I was picking some sprigs for a midnight dinner.

I don’t think it’s a slug’s fault, but one of our original cauliflower plants has wilted horribly.  It started just doing that during the day, but didn’t seem to be related to water.  We think something got to its roots.

There are a few new spinach and lettuce seedlings coming up.  And the yellow pear in the ground has its first blooms starting.  This round of tomato plants looks much better than our first lanky ones did.

In an unbelievably balmy weekend, actually kissing the average highs for the season with enough sun to burn my whiter than white shoulders (it’s a good sting, sort of), we planted everything but the watermelons in their permanent homes. We have too many cauliflowers. The original ones have grown much bigger leaves that are overlapping each other.

We pulled up the bolting spinach and a few of the lettuce and replanted. Here is a syphid fly (sweat bee) hovering over them before the destruction:

Several tiny pieces of doomed tomato plant that I dug into the garden plot ended up sending out roots. If an inch and a half is all that a tomato needs, I hate to think what a japanese plant can get by on. We also have a volunteer tomato, probably from seeds from rotten tomatoes we left on the ground from last year.

I doubt it will make it so far as to give us fruit so that we actually can identify the variety.

These are the spots on the yellow pear leaves (and more cat deterring purple yarn!). It hasn’t gotten any worse lately. We weren’t able to find any copper sprays at McLendon’s. Perhaps the warmer, dryer weather is helping.

It wasn’t exactly ideal, but here is one of our carrots, now in the ground around the tomatoes. We hope they can push through the stringy pots. I prefer the peat ones, that apparently Bellingham has a monopoly on.

And chives:

I saw my first blackberry flowers on Friday.

We bought two Atris sweet pepper plants at the Olympia Farmer’s Market. The container book of goodness says that peppers are related to tomatoes, and similarly don’t like cold, so they will be ferried inside at night with their containered cousins.

… it’s colder than Siberia!

But then, it’s not flooding like Iowa or boiling like New York. Then there are the standard California wildfires. About the only normal weather can be found in Phoenix, and there’s only so much good dry can do in front of heat before misery takes over.

All of which is reminding me of this blog post about global warming and how it’s about destabilization and not a pleasant two degrees increase all over the planet.

We planted corn and two types of squash in the ground, along with a few more onions last week.  The cauliflower in the ground has grown a bit, despite whatever has been eating tiny holes in the leaves. The spinach is looking close to bolting.  We have a single flower on the peas and the chive flowers have burst into balls of petals.  It’s slow going back in the cold and wet.  Today’s high was 55, missing the average of 70 by a long shot.

There are dark shiny spots on some of the tomato leaves in the large pots.  We think it’s bacterial speck or spot, whose only treatment we’ve read about is copper spray.  We couldn’t find anything useful at Lowe’s, so we’ll try McLendon’s this weekend.

Mike has confirmed Tux’s guilt as garden destroyer.

Here’s one of the happier still to be planted squash from a few days ago: