Happy Saturday! Happy weekend! Come on in for some chilled refreshments unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, then you might be in need of something warm. The temperature has been in the upper 90’s-degree-Fahrenheit to the low 100’s since the end of June and I’m starting to get a little sick of the heat, especially when it’s not doing my garden much good.

If we were having coffee, I would first tell you I published my 4000th post this week. I celebrated this milestone with iced latte. I thought it was worth celebrating because it takes commitment to hit that “publish” button 4000 times. And trust me when I say I am the type of person who has a difficult time committing to anything. So 4000 blog posts is saying something.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you I finalized my travels plans this week – booked all the hotels and transportation. I’m still doing research on the places I want to visit on the trip. I’m trying to narrow down to just a few places and try not to give myself too much expectations because, in my mind, traveling is about truly seeing a place and remembering it, not rushing from one place to the next in the least time possible. It is worth to spend an hour or two to visit the place and to create a memory than to spend 5 minutes taking a picture and not remembering the place at all.

If we were having coffee, I think it’s fitting to provide a garden update. After all, it’s been about a month since my last update.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to harvest much in the last month – just some beans, a few cherry tomatoes, a tiny cucumber, and a few blueberries. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the hot weather hasn’t done my garden much good. I also have a severe insect problem in my garden this year from loopers to aphids to spider mites to earwigs. I replanted my squashes and cucumbers multiple times because something kept eating the seedlings.

I also had to replant a few rounds of beans and I’m planning to pull out the beans in the upper left photo if they continue to produce these tiny curly bean pods.

I think it might have something to do with me using old bean seeds. Those seeds were purchased back in 2015. I planted those seeds last year and barely got any beans. I thought it might had been my black thumb and soil. So I decided to try again this year. Nope, it might be the variety because I tried another variety and got some beautiful beans.

Do you see those gigantic leaves in the upper right photo? You would not believe how many cucumber seeds I’ve put into those pockets. I tried at least 4 times before something germinated but now, seeing those large leaves, I’m not convinced it’s cucumbers because I might had put cantaloupe seeds in there as well and I have the same cantaloupe growing elsewhere with similar size leaves. That tier is filled with large-leaf plants. I sure hope they’re cucumbers and not cantaloupes.

If you see those tomatoes, they are huge, right? Most definitely some of the largest I’ve ever grown. These are Big Beef Hybrid tomatoes and they are supposed to be between 12-16 ounces per fruit. This is the only large tomato plant in this what was supposed to be my cherry-tomato bed. I have another bed dedicated to heirloom large tomatoes. Now I just have to wonder what was going through my head when I set out to plant so many large tomato varieties and what I should do when it come time to harvest these large beastly delicious things.

I bet you wonder what that last picture is. That’s pole beans, another thing I’m growing for the first time this year. I have 3 plants in there and they’ve been climbing up 4 5-feet poles. You can barely see the poles, right? I planted them in the 100-gallon fabric pot so it should be like planting them in the ground.

This isn’t the only spot with pole beans. I have a bed dedicated to beans and it looks like they’re flowering. So hopefully (crossing my fingers), I will have a significant bean harvest soon.

#weekendcoffeeshare is hosted by Natalie of Natalie the Explorer. I appreciate you stopping by and hope to chat again same time next week.