Your garden sounds just like mine. Indeed, it's my first garden, too. Blossom end rot everywhere. The few regular-sized tomatoes are all rotted on the ends. In my case, I believe they didn't get watered regularly as my back was out for quite a spell. The lower leaves of all my plants are all crispy. I don't know why, but they're thriving all the same.

Have you considered hand pollinating some of them? I'm guessing and not an expert but it sounds as if you haven't enough pollinators hanging around, but I'm guessing.

Even my squash was as you described but I only received one pretty and delicious zuke from three plants. Several began but then something happened and they began dying.

It sure does take a while to get a garden good and established. You should pat yourself on the back, though. Your plants are growing and trying to produce and that's always good in my book!

This forum just rocks with all the helpful hints and tips and direct advice.

Sounds like you are doing great! In case you don't know, you can "clip" postings that you want to keep on hand in your GW account. Like a virtual Post-It. See the clippings menu directly to the right of the title of the post.

I don't think you should blame yourself or give up on that area with the blossom end rot. It is the terrible weather. That is why the beans aren't forming also. Maybe you normally have 100 weather in summer where you live. But here we are beating last year on 100 days and not enough rain. When you look up BER, it tells you it is uneven watering or calcium deficiency. That may be true but in milder weather you probably wouldn't be having the problem. My Green Zebra is the worst for BER and I really wanted to try those to see if I like them.

BER is common some years and on some varieties it happens almost every year. It is a problem that occurs when the vascular system of the plant is not properly distributing the available calcium. Maintaining even and consistent soil moisture will help reduce BER but in a year this hot and dry, you're going to see some of it anyway. And, in that way in which the solution can become the problem, very heavy rainfall can so clog roots with water that the calcium is not being taken up and distributed properly. Once a lot of the excess moisture is depleted. the BER will stop. I had a lot of BER develop this year when we had 7" of rain in about a 12 day period at the end of May/earliest June. The fruit that were in a certain size range at that time got BER, but since the moisture was depleted pretty quickly, the fruit weren't ruined and the damage was mostly superficial. As those fruit ripen and I pick them, I cut off the damaged part and use the rest. In a lot of cases, the damage doesn't even go 1/8" of an inch into the fruit. There's no easy solution to BER, and millions of dollars in research yields inconsistent explanations. I think many variables interact to cause it to be really bad some years or in some circumstances and not in others. At one time they thought it was purely an issue of insufficient calcium in soil, but research has shown that's not true. Even areas with plenty of available calcium in the soil often have BER when the weather conditions come together in the right (wrong?) way.

Generally, as plants mature and have a larger vascular system, BER is less common as long as you keep the soil evenly moist. The best way to do that is to use drip irrigation lines or soaker hoses and to mulch your growing beds well. I wouldn't judge the soil in any area based on this spring/summer because most of the state has had drought and temperatures well above average. In a better year, the bed beside your house might be a perfect spot for tomatoes. At our house in June, we often were 10-15 degrees above average, and of course you will have challenges during a period like that which you wouldn't have in a more average year.

If your squash plants are healthy and are blooming but no fruit is forming, it likely is a pollination issue. You can hand-pollinate the squash by transferring the pollen (this is more effective in the cool morning hours) from a male blossom to a female blossom using a small paintbrush (like the kind from a child's watercolor set) or a Q-tip. It only takes a second.

If your leaves were crisping up after previously being wet from rain, dew or irrigation, it likely was powdery mildew. Usually plants put out new growth and outgrow the PM once the temperature is drier. You cannot control rainfall, but if you water by hand or soaker hose/drip irrigation, that helps the plants recover because the foliage is staying drier.

The Little Marvel peas are a cool-season crop, which is why they are not doing so well. Plant peas in February and hope to harvest them in May before the real heat arrives (in a normal year, if we ever have a normal year again). Otherwise, you just don't get much of a yield from them. I grow edible podded peas like Sugar Snap and Super Sugar Snap because they produce much heavier yields for me than any green English shelling pea. We just get too hot too early for the shelling cool-season peas 9 years out of 10.

Most beans do not like heat and drop their blossoms without forming pods when the air temperatures are hot. I planted bush beans in March with succession bush and half-runner beans planted 3 weeks later in April and pole beans in April. The bush beans produced incredibly well in April and May and even into June. The succession plantings of bush beans are flowering and producing and so are the half-runners. No, they are not producing heavily, but I picked enough beans this morning for 3 or 4 meals. The pole beans began producing in late May and still are producing though it is spotty. What happens with the beans is that heat impacts fertilization like it does with tomatoes. However, if you keep them well-watered and happy, the flowers will keep forming and when a cool spell arrives, like the one in the forecast for next week, you'll get beans from those blooms during the time the heat isn't negatively impacting fertilization. If you can keep your bean plants happy until fall, you'll be harvesting tons of beans. We call the fall beans "October beans" here, because that's when the big fall harvest occurs--in October--even if the seeds were planted in April or May or June.

Without seeing the bean plants, it is hard to know what's wrong with the lower leaves. Sometimes as the plants age, the old leaves yellow and fall. As long as they have good soil moisture, new leaves will take their place.

Your beans that were started inside likely had a bit of transplant shock that set them back. When I start beans inside in cups, I try to get them into the ground as soon as the seed leaves appear, or no later than right after the first true leaf opens. Otherwise, they will stall and set there without growing for a couple of weeks after being transplanted. Likely that's when your direct-sown beans caught up with the transplanted ones. It happens.

Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers. I usually grow a lot of them but haven't the last couple of years. I do have a bunch of seeds and am contemplating planting them in the current tomato beds when I yank out the tired tomato plants in a couple of weeks. They also make a great trap crop for stink bugs which plague my garden like mad in August of some years but arrive in May this year and suddenly have reached epidemic numbers this week. If you plant the sunflowers some distance away from your veggies, the stinkbugs will flock to them. Then you can spray the sunflower plants with a pesticide you'd never spray on edible crops and kill those little stinkers! My favorite sunflowers are the red ones. I stopped planting sunflowers a couple of years ago for the most part because the caterpillars of the Bordered Patch caterpillar were showing up every year and eating every bit of every leaf, which killed the plants. After a few years of that I decided to stop planting them. I haven't seen a lot of border patch butterflies lately, so may try sunflowers again.

Every year is all about learning and doing. I think of my garden as a big experiment every year. There's a lot of guesswork involved because you learn to expect certain things in certain types of weather conditions, but you never really know what kind of weather we'll have here. I try to anticipate the weather and plan and plant accordingly, but we all know that Mother Nature throws us tons of curveballs all season long. Some garden experiments work. Others don't. Some years the tomatoes do great but the pumpkins don't or vice versa, and that's just part of the whole experience. Luckily for us all, there's usually something that does well every year so we never feel like we're experiencing total failure.

Thank you for your kind words. If you were living in my garden this week, you'd be crawling with spider mites, grasshoppers,fire ant and blister beetles, so you might want to rethink that idea. : ) However, there also are butterflies, lady bugs, wheel bugs, dragonflies (I have a little pond for them), damselflies, lightning bugs, lizards, frogs, toads, skinks and, unfortunately, snakes. Usually in the evening there's hummingbirds, cardinals, mourning doves and a few other birds. Oh, and it is 102 out there right now. I was way behind on harvesting so was trying to catch up this morning. I picked all I could but it already was 97 degrees when I can in at 11:30 a.m. I intended to go back out after I cooled down, but then I just couldn't force myself back out into that heat. I did manage to pick green beans, yardlong beans, cucumbers, okra and (of course) lots of tomatoes. I should be in the kitchen blanching beans and okra to freeze, and soon I will be. Maybe I can work my way through enough of the harvest that, between fixing some of it for dinner and processing the rest, I'll then have empty bowls to fill up with an evening harvest period after the temperatures drop a little big again. I often go back out around 7 p.m. and can stay out until almost 9 p.m. I really need to pick squash, peppers and tomatoes this evening. I simply lose my garden 'ambition' when the temperature is regularly going over 100 degrees.

I enjoy the entire process of gardening so much that I'd do it anyway, even if the garden never produced a single thing to eat. At the northern corner of the garden, I have hardy hibiscus, four o'clocks, morning glories and cleome in bloom. I was looking at all of them this morning and thinking that at least we have the flowers to enjoy even if the heat burns up all the veggies.

Helen, I think your drought this year is much worse than most of Oklahoma's, and Joplin surely doesn't deserve such a rough weather year after all that the folks there have been through during and since the tornado. I was hoping y'all would have a nice, mild growing season there so that folks could re-establish their landscaping after rebuilding their homes and outbuildings.

The weather has been so unseasonably hot so early the last few years, and it makes me yearn for a year when the heat arrives late instead of early.

It looks like the tremendous heat and drought so common in our region is spreading across most of the USA this year. That's not good to see. Misery may love company, but I wouldn't wish our typical heat and drought on anyone else.

Last week, my sister-in-law, who lives in NE Pennsylvania (where a really hot day might hit 85 degrees) called Tim and told him it was 100 degrees at her house. She was just astonished and said "I don't know how you guys can stand this sort of weather". Sometimes I wonder that myself. Every year I think to myself that I cannot tolerate another hot, dry summer....but what is the alternative?

Dawn

This year I planted 4 tomato plants in what was last year's compost bed with all but 2-3 inches of the compost removed. I thought that would be a good place for tomatoes. And the plants are beautiful, lush, green and spilling over the top of a 6 foot cage. But I've had a lot of BER in that bed, even though I'm watering as well as I am in beds without any BER--and with at least one of the varieties. I think the problem there is calcium deficit. Or more specifically, a too low pH for the calcium to be used well--lots of sawdust went into the compost. So the other day, DH brought down a 1/2 gallon of wood ashes and we sprinkled them through the bed and watered them in well. The other problem in the bed is that the sweet million tomatoes growing there, while not having BER simply don't taste the way I remember SM tasting, too sour, not sweet enough. I am hoping the wood ashes will rememdy that problem too.

I had some BER on my larger tomato varieties (Beefsteak and Cherokee Purple) when they first started breaking color, but since we've heated up and dried out the BER has cleared up. I'm thinking that if a lot of us are having problems with it then it's likely a moisture issue rather than a calcium issue, though I suppose that might not be true for everyone.

This was my garden's first year as well, and I've learned a lot of lessons, too! The biggest one is to never again plant 'Straight 8' cucumbers. Almost all of them that I have tried to eat have been bitter and inedible. I planted 'Marketmore' too, and at least those are good so that my cuke efforts haven't been a total waste.

I'm also learning what kinds of tomatoes I like. I figured I'd love Black Cherry since everyone always raves about it, but I'm honestly not a big fan of the flavor. The Chadwick red cherry toms I planted have a sweeter and slightly more acidic flavor, which I like better. I guess everyone's different when it comes to tomato tastes!

I learned what a PITA squash bugs and squash vine borers can be and that picking them off by hand will only get you so far. My summer squash was completely overrun by them to the point that I couldn't keep up, and stomping on a million stink bugs was not how I imagined spending the most time in my garden. Next year I will try barrier cloth and hand pollinating.

The last big thing I think I learned was that there are different kinds of green beans and that I don't like the flag, stringy ones that come from the Kentucky Wonder pole bean plants. The Provider bush beans I planted had the tender, round pods that I prefer, so I need to find a pole bean now that has that type. Any suggestions for me to try next year?

Also, if you don't mulch and mulch well, weeds will take over the world...especially if you're pregnant and too tired/nauseous to go out and pull weeds on a regular basis. I spent so much time laying down cardboard and cedar mulch in the pathways to keep the weeds out, and the bermuda just laughed in my face and grew through it anyway. Ugh.

I usually have a few tomatoes with BER, but this year I had three times as many. All of the BER was on container plants so I feel sure it was a moisture issue.

I had one raised bed with squash. I had a patty pan, a yellow straight, and several zucchini plants. The zucchini was the only thing that produced, but probably only 20 percent of the female blossoms were pollinated and the rest died on the vine. I had one patty pan squash before the vines started to look sickly. I finally just removed them. I had honey bees, bumble bees, wasps, and 20 million of those little white butterflies that were all over everything.

I have had an excellent year for cucumbers, both slicing and pickling. I only did one planting of each in early Spring and they are still producing daily and are still blooming. They have not been treated with anything and nothing has bothered them.

I have had lots of beans. The pole beans starting producing very early this year. I planted Blue Lake bush beans and picked them for about a month then took them out. The bean was very productive, but was hard to pick because the beans grow low on the plant. The pill bugs did some damage to the low growing beans and I should have used Sluggo there, but didn't. This long stretch of hot, hot days has slowed the beans for now, and that's a good thing, because all of the tomatoes are finishing at once.

I have never seen it this dry in the 11 years that I have been here. We drove to Joplin today and noted that the grass was brown along the road. This is green country and we rarely see that. It got a little better as we got closer to Joplin, but nothing looked like it normally does.

My tomato plants are only still in the garden because they are still producing tomatoes. Very soon, I plan to yank them out and plant something else. They are drying and looking dead and I plan to put them out of their misery. LOL

At the end of most days, the pepper plants looks so droopy that I wonder if they will make another day, but the next day they are fine. If cooler weather doesn't happen as promised then I will probably give them shade next week.

I finally pulled the last of my onions this week. That was an experiment that worked and I know now that I can grow long day onions. Although not all of them were large, some were quite large.

I see great wisdom in 'putting by' two years worth of food, because in Oklahoma it seems like very few things produce a good crop every year. I would love to get a nice gentle Fall that would provide some lovely days in the garden. Yeh, right, I'm awake now!

miraje, if you like Provider bush beans you will probably like Blue Lake polebeans. They are tender, stringless, and round, plus they don't attract Japanese Beetles like KW--although they might if they didn't have the KW. In my garden I grew both. I'm about ready to give up on KW for that reason and because of the strings, even though I do like the flavor.

Carol, have you tried Topcrop bush beans, so named because the beans are grown on top of the plant?

I learned this year that I don't care for the Red Noodle Oriental beans that I got from Baker's Creek. I let them go and won't plant them again. I didn't plant any southern peas this year because of the weather. I usually plant them in June and it was just too dry. I really like the Kentucky Red that George gave me the seed of last year and will grow them again if next year's weather is better. For this winter I have some left in the freezer.

That's great, you have such a great garden in the first year itself! If you know how was my first year's garden experience, you will lough at me, even I did not know how to install tomato cages,installed upside down, planted many things in just 8x8. including two seeds of sweet peas, think they will produce enough to feed us. Learning while gardening is never ending...

I not noticed any BER this year, that is big surprise to me. Our large to medium fruit tomato plants are still lush green with all stages of fruits and new blooms. However some of the cherry types infested by spider mites.

We have tons of the cucumbers. Lemon is top of all cucumbers, each vine has at least 10-15 fruits, I don't what do with those produce. My friends and office colleagues already fed up with lemon cucumbers. Any better idea to store, dry or recipes to make use of them?

Had good harvest of bush beans, still no luck with pole types. Some of the pole beans leaves seems to curled and blooms keep dropping. I hope to harvest some at in the fall.

All all cucurbits family doing wonderful this year including bird house gourds, bitten melon, ridge gourds, ash gourds, etc.

Chandra, when I was asking what to do with extra cucumbers my aunt told me that they can make great fillers for smoothies if you add in some kiwi or other fruits. That would be a refreshing use of them during these hot summer days. There are lots of recipes online.

Thanks for the pole bean tip! I'll have to try Blue Lake next year.

Cucumber smoothies. As bland as they are, I'm sure they would be good with a stronger fruit such as strawberry or blueberry or even peach. I'm going to try it. I always make my smoothies with frozen banana and one of those fruits and some protein powder. I wonder how it would work to freeze the cucumber? I'm going to try that too. I always add a cucumber or two to my fresh salsa as long as I have cucumbers.

I'm not much of a smoothie fan, but we have sure eaten a lot of cucumbers, given some away, and made 32 jars of pickles. I made mostly Kosher Dill because that was the Mrs Wages that I could find locally, but the 10 jars I made this morning are Bread and Butter. I'm caught up for now, but have a pack of regular dill to make later, then after that I hope someone wants to make a few pickles.

I plan to mix it up next year and plant some pickling cukes instead of just all slicers. I love sweet pickles, and from the recipes I've seen online they don't look that difficult to make.

Pickles are not hard to make, but this year I have really been taking the easy way out and using Mrs. Wages mixes. My Walmart only has a few types at one time, so I have to keep checking back. I found a couple more at Food 4 Less in Joplin, but I probably should have just placed an on-line like Dawn did so I could have gotten anything I wanted.