Welcome to the Jungle?: July Garden Update

"The Heart of Darkness." aka, my tomato plants. All that rain we had seems to have treated them well, as it's just now July and they're as tall as the fence. The Romas are fruiting nicely, as are the Early Girls, but the heirloom Willis Plum I picked up in Clintonville is the slow kid of the bunch. Maybe he's just a late bloomer...

The cukes produced their first batch of veggies, allowing me to make a batch of sweet & spicy pickles:

I used this recipe, and since I didn't have 24 dried Cayenne peppers on hand, I used some of the peppers from the jungle:

We'll give them a couple of weeks to marinate and see how they turn out.

Finally, the onion and garlic seem to be lying down on the job:
My garlics never produced any scapes (oh, the horror!), got about a foot tall and not all that thick, then decided to give up the ghost. I dug up a test garlic the other day, the bulb was about the size of bounce-ball--definitely not the nice, plump head I was hoping for. Likewise, the onions seem to have decided that it's just too much work to carry on, and are attempting their growth from a horizontal position....not really sure what that's all about.

With luck, this crazy-hot heat wave we're now enjoying will push some of the green tomatoes to red. I'm dying to pull out last summer's tomato and corn pie recipe...