May was a rather a dry month with only a couple of large downpours to speak of and very few drops in-between. With temps soaring into the mid 90 degrees during the heat of the day the garden sprung up. There are now more tomatoes, bell peppers, and even jalapenos than I want to attempt to account for. Sadly one type of plant I’m growing has taken a turn for the worst after I was gone for a couple of days and it not receiving any water.
Herbs
You might be mistaken for thinking I have a forest of herbs now. During the month some of the cilantro plants took off towards the sky like rockets. While things like the basil provided several harvests worth of leaves. All the other herbs were just as energetic as well.
I have my herbs spread out in a few different areas. One of them gets a fair amount of shade as it’s in a wooded area as seen in the photo above. We get a lot of sun here and I have been testing this year to see how much sun these plants need to thrive. While the packets for these herbs want full sun that here can tend to be too much for the plants themselves.
I was quite dumfounded one afternoon after going out and watering my more shaded herbs with how much growth the cilantro had. This location does not need as much water with how much shade it gets as the rest so I’m only out there a couple of times a week if I’m the one doing the watering.
While you can only see a part of one in the photo it had grown a good four feet total in height out of nowhere. It was also attempting to flower which is a large sign that it was way overdue for needing to be trimmed back a bit. I chopped off well over two feet and air-dried the cilantro to be used later in the year when I no longer have them as plants.
I have two identical setups of these herb stackers that have basil on the top portion and even more cilantro in the bottom layer. The basil seems to rather like its new more shady area I have relocated the plant stackers to. These cilantro, on the other hand, unlike, the other ones I have in a shady area are not so thrilled about their current situation.
The basil has gotten quite bushy and is now to the point when I do go out to trim them down I get more than enough to make a full batch of pesto. This is great as my earlier attempts when I was trimming the plant to encourage growth were not getting enough basil requiring me to freeze it. The frozen basil while still useable I could tell was just not the same.
I have also now gotten to a point where I’m growing more cilantro than I know what to do with. This as mentioned has led to me air drying out the leaves. I then grind them up in a mortar and pestle and store them in an air-tight container. If the cilantro ends up lasting two years I’ll reframe from growing much next year. Perhaps a single plant just to have some fresh cilantro around when I want it. Opening space to try some other herbs.
All the other herbs like the dill, parsley, chives, mint, and thyme are doing just fine. I have not been using much of them. I might for the rest of the season focus on harvesting these to dry them out and store them away. As some of their dried leaves depending on the herb can last for a couple of years.
Tomatoes
It’s crazy how much the tomatoes are starting to blend in with the trees behind them. They are all getting quite tall outgrowing their first cage, sticks, and anything else that is set up to try and hold them up. This year is going to be the year of lots of tomatoes.
In the past couple of years that I attempted to grow tomatoes I never had much success. Last year I had an around the ten-foot tomato plant. It like everything else sadly produced either next to nothing or bugs got in and killed everything.
This year I have eight tomato plants and each one has at least ten tomatoes growing on it. Some of them I swear have double or triple that amount. There are easily over 120 tomatoes growing on the vine. A couple of them have ripped and I officially have eaten more homegrown tomatoes than I have over the past 3 years combined just in this month.
Bell Peppers
With the bell peppers, I was not quite sure what I would be getting this year. I had two unknown bell peppers from last year. A random seed pack of assorted bells and some green peppers. I have started to notice some differences in the bell peppers that are growing on the plants.
I at least know from what has already been picked we have green and red bell peppers. I might even have lucked out and had a yellow one though I’m not quite sure yet. I do however suspect I have a purple bell pepper plant with how dark the fruit on it is compared to the others.
During the hot days as seen in the photo, they do get a bit wilted looking. They are however quite fine. A little water and they perk right up just to be bombarded again by the sun the next day.
With having over ten bell pepper plants I do have them in different size containers as I was not expected that many to have survived. It is quite interesting to see the impact that container size is having on them.
I still had a couple sitting in small starter containers for months while I was waiting on some larger containers to open up. Those have finally been planted as well. I would have thought they would have died off by now. One even grew a tiny pepper telling me it was time to get some of them into actual buckets rather than the starting containers I had for generating seeds.
It has also been interesting to see how they are growing in clusters. So much so to the point next month I’ll need to be going in and harvesting some of them. Each plant also seems to have peppers grow right at the giant Y of the plant. Some peppers are getting big enough to the point they are trying to grow around the plant leaving indentations on the fruit itself if it lacks enough room to grow.
When it comes to having lots of tomatoes I can think of things to do with them as far as canning goes. The 50 or so bell peppers I have grown at the moment? I think a few of them I’m going end up picking early as I’m not quite sure what to do if I get dozens at a time.
Green Beans
While May was mostly full of sunshine and happy times in the garden. The beans are sadly looking quite done. While they have recovered a bit I have not had much to speak of to harvest off them for the past two weeks.
I was gone for a couple of days. They did not get watered and that seems to be that. I have tried just removing any green beans growing on them to help them recover for a week. That did not seem to do much. At this point, I’m just hoping to get a few more green beans before the plants die down for good.
At the very least they were easy and quick to grow. If I had to start one of these types of plants over again for the season the green beans would be the ones I’d pick. I might get almost 200 for the season from the two different containers I have of these plants before they stop doing anything.
Final Thoughts
While there is more to the garden such as these cucumbers which are starting to finally come in. This garden journal is getting a bit long. Perhaps next month I’ll explore some of the other stuff I have growing as well.
Here is hoping for some rain in June. I hope everyone had a great gardening month.
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Photos were taken and content was written by @Enjar.
Plants are nature friendly and the world needs more people like you who value plants and trees, keep sharing such lovely content ❤️
It’s a fun hobby to have. More should try it.
120 tomatoes?! Wow! That's awesome. It really is amazing how small differences in sun and moisture make a world of difference in how well the plants thrive. My cilantro and dill are already getting scorched by the sun, so I could see how they might do better in partial shade during our Georgia summers.
We still haven't had much luck with peppers, but someone told me they tend to do well in containers vs. the garden bed. Perhaps we'll try that next year. You could maybe preserve some roasted red peppers if you get a large crop? Since we've never had an abundance I've never had to worry about thinking of ways to preserve them!
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