Don Alaska
Well-known member
Yeah, that is usually the way it goes. Here I try to balance things. I grow bush beans and I plant beans that doo better in cool soil but don't yield quite as well, and I plant other seeds that will do well should the summer be warmer. I do the same with cauliflower and broccoli, although this is easiest place to grow good cauliflower of any place I have ever lived. I just figured some people could buy some hot weather seeds, and plant a few plants in case you had another hot summer. From what I read, Phoenix is the most heat-tolerant variety of tomato and will set and hold fruit to 100 F. or even slightly above. I am only going on what I have read, since heat is not a problem we deal with here. I have gardened in very hot places, though, and it gets me when people claim they can't grow anything in the summer. Watermelons grow even if nothing else does in the heat, and we had a fantastic crop of watermelons in Georgia until a gopher tortoise took a bite out of each melon, thus ruining the entire crop.
We are successfully growing watermelons here for the first time this year. We have grown cantaloupes and other melons, but never watermelon; it just doesn't get warm enough here even in the greenhouses. I discovered a variety named Juicebox that is a small watermelon reportedly slightly larger than a softball, and we have a number of them set. We are using the old Covid masks as slings to hold the melon as we are growing them on a trellis.
