Finally, we have lots of ripening tomatoes. There are Early Girl II, Champion, Lemon Boy, and a surprisingly large number of Cherokee Carbon. I hope to take a batch to the Project Hope Food Pantry early this week. I was able to make pizzas with the garden vegetables for FWG on Friday.

The groundhog or other critters are eating the tomatoes, so I am picking them before they are ripe and letting them ripen on the kitchen counter which only takes a couple of days.

All of the peppers are producing heavily. We have been eating Shishito and Gypsy peppers for about a month. The Cubanelle peppers look identical to Shishitos. Hmmm. I picked a couple of red Jalapenos for the pizza, and they were extremely hot. Even Natalie thought they were extremely hot. I wonder if they are a different variety than last year. I have just started picking the green peppers. The Poblano peppers still need to grow a little. I have a bunch of red Serrano peppers.

The fencing has arrived; I don’t know if it will do any good… I am hoping the narrow gauge will be too unstable and uncomfortable for him to crawl over. Only time will tell. We did have a face-to-face encounter this afternoon. I saw a squirrel descend from the power line and go into the garden. I followed. He ran out, but then I had an encounter with the swine groundhog! He is large and looks very well fed.

I watered the tomatoes and noticed he has significantly trimmed the Tomatillos.

This is the new fencing around the Zucchini bed. I don’t think he can get over it. I ripped the old plants up as they were dead and planted new seeds. I hope I am not too late.

I fenced in the okra and zucchini bed. The plants are alive, but the odds of recovery are not good. I also fenced the pea beds and the cucumber and gypsy pepper bed. I will probably plant beans in the second pea bed where the Celeriac and Kale were. The Swiss chard has been trimmed a little. If this fencing doesn’t work, I’ll put in taller fencing like I did around the zucchini bed.

I picked a couple of nearly ripe Early Girl II tomatoes today. They are extremely late this year. I got them in the ground earlier than usual, but I guess the cold May and June delayed them. There don’t appear to be any others near ripening.

Yesterday, I ordered 8 yards of triple-ground hardwood mulch and had it dumped in the driveway. Noe and his helper arrived around 6:30 this morning and spread the mulch. I trimmed excess growth in the garden for about an hour and filled in Donald’s new burrow. The mulch was completely spread by 10:00, which was good, as we have a predicted high of 95° for this afternoon.

I spent part of the day watering and applying repellent around the beds that the groundhog attacks most frequently. The rain last week and hot weather this week encouraged rapid growth of everything in the garden. I trimmed grapevines and blackberry canes going wild.

Last week, wearing an N95 mask and safety glasses, I used the leaf blower to blow several cups of Cayenne under the barn on either side of the front door. Then I did the same around the front bushes where I believe the Groundhog burrow is. I had hoped that I would encourage him to move on. He did and dug out a new home much closer to the garden plants that he likes.

I went out to pick shishito peppers around 5:00, and found out that Donald, the Groundhog (I have named him after the president, since he destroys anything he gets near) had dug a new burrow around the old pear tree stump next to the barn! I covered it in Cayenne pepper. He had done more trimming on the pole beans and kale and a little on the Japanese eggplant.