Mid summer garden check in, how it's growing?

I'm also in CA, but didn't experience the heatwave (I'm near SF). My blueberries, zucchinis, bush bean, pole beans, & peas are doing well. My tomatoes have just started flowering.

No pest/disease issues yet.

I just got home from vacation (in Colorado and California during the heatwave) and my garden did not fare well in my absence. It was extremely hot at home as well. I made arrangements to have everything watered but it was not done frequently enough. I'm not sure the flowers in my flower boxes will recover. I've been moving the sprinkler around all day trying to start the recovery process. My zucchini plant has one tiny zucchini on it - that's unheard of, we're usually overwhelmed with them by this point. The herbs are barely hanging on, the basil is so shriveled that I wanted to cry. I had 3 small ripe tomatoes this morning. The peppers are faring better - it looks like it will be a bumper crop eventually. And the cucumber is doing great, I harvested three this morning. I hate cucumbers.

The hurricane flattened my native pollinator garden. All the potted stuff I brought inside, so it's still doing it's thing.

I just got some collard and kale seeds I'm going to direct-sow as edible ornamentals for the fall.

This is not a good summer. It isn't the heat so much as the drought. No one has gotten much rain here but some communities around us have had more than us. We haven't seen it this dry in years. Since early June we have had just over 1/2 inch rain total. I'm watering to keep the plants alive and hoping we get some rain so my dahlias will bloom again for fall.

I had beautiful hydrangeas and my early glads were nice as it was very rainy in the spring. I still have some glads left to bloom but the ones that are actually producing stalks aren't opening. The dahlias have buds on them but many aren't opening. DH's tomatoes are the only bright spot as they have started producing. A ground hog plowed through one of my relatives garden and ate almost everything. They were going to replant but it's so hot and dry, they have just given up.

The one other bright spot are my potted plants. I'm watering every other day and so far they look good.

There are no water restrictions. We have a huge yard and watering the grass just isn't possible. Almost no one waters their grass here. We water our plants with hoses and buckets but it isn't the same as rain. My plants are also spread out around the property so watering with sprinklers would be very time consuming and wasteful. We aren't used to temperatures in the 90's every day and almost no rain. It's very rare to have it go on this long. If it were a regular thing, I'm sure we would come up with some other arrangement for water. I still have a well though I don't use it. I also would have planted different things had I known. We had a beautiful summer weatherwise last year. It rained frequently all summer.

I’m in Denver. My tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are doing great. I have everything on drip lines in raised beds. Flea beetles decimated all my leafy greens and it is too hot now for them or most herbs. I might grow some inside in my AeroGarden.

Spider mites got to one of my rosebushes and a couple of my native perennials, but I cut everything back and sprayed them with isopropyl alcohol and neem oil so hopefully I arrested that. My two peach trees are producing fruit for the first time, but we had a massive hail storm that knocked off two thirds of the fruit, ugh. In any case I plan on making tons of tomato sauce, salsa, and pesto to freeze.

the zucchini have been mildew free and beetle free so far (knock on wood).  i check for signs everyday and so far so good.

the cucumbers are another story.  no bugs but mildew for sure.  the fruit is very misshapen. it still flowers but now they are mostly male flowers and hardly, if any, female.  ugh.

We are up to our eyeballs in tomatoes! On a lark, I weighed my harvest of about four days.

NINETEEN POUNDS. Yes, nineteen pounds and that did not take into consideration my eating a tomato sandwich everyday, DH taking tomatoes in his lunch, and having tomatoes at supper, either sliced, in a salad, or as part of the main dish.

I sent some to work with DS and gave some to a pal at the gym.

We put in three plants of small tomatoes (Super Sweet 100s, grape tomatoes, and a Husky Cherry) and four slicer plants (Early Girl, Better Boy, and two others). We have put up all kinds of stakes and lattice for the vines of the small plants.

Last year, I stripped all of the vines in late October before the first hard freeze and put tons in the freezer. Just a few weeks ago, I got out all of the tomatoes I still had (about 4 gallons) and cooked them down for sauce, made about a gallon.

I planted three pepper plants this year, and they aren't really producing, which is disappointing since I wanted to try some different flavors of pepper jam.

Our one small cucumber vine has given us a few. DH helped make some refrigerator dill slices, and I made my own bread and butter slices. His are ok, mine are so tasty I have been eating them straight feom the jar.

My hydrangea bushes are big and green and leafy, but mostly bloomless. One bush only produced one bloom, two others gave me about four, and two smaller plants nave me nothing.

I managed to get some cuttings from various hydrangeas to root, so hopefully, they will grow strong enough to survive the winter.

People talk about my green thumb, but my gardening ability is basically digging a hole and putting the plant in and saying "grow." I don't know anything about soil ph or what fertilizer to use, I just water and hope for the best.

Oh, and I would welcome any tomato recipes!

We had tons of cherries this year. The tomatoes are appearing but not close to ripe yet. I'm still waiting on the figs (usually they are ripe at the end of June). The snap peas are hanging on... cucumbers are not doing well, but that's normal.

I'm dealing with squash bugs and am wondering if that's why my zucchini aren't making it to picking size... grrr.

I am watering a community garden I helped set up last spring once a week and it's interesting to see how that is doing compared to my home garden... The tomatoes over there are starting to ripen, the zucchini are a lot bigger and healthier...

I only did cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers this year. These are new raised beds and i wasn't sure how everything would do.

So far, hornworms got my earliest tomatoes. They are gone and I got some tomatoes, but I noticed one yesterday have just ONE bite out of it. Definitely an asshole squirrel.

My peppers keep disappearing off the plant, just baby sweet peppers. I did get one pepper but that's it so far, all the rest disappear.

My cucumbers are not molested but they are making the stupidest shapes, they're squat and pointed on one end and turn yellow super quick. I hate them. I got one normal one so far. I had a tomato and cucumber salad last night--that was pretty thrilling.

My marigolds I planted among them are doing great. My planters with basil, oregano, and flat Italian parsley are doing great.

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These squirrels aren’t looking for water as we have a pond and waterfall that the squirrels have access to. They actually have a den under it and often sit on the rocks.