Mary, Are you talking about maturity to harvest, or seed collection? The harvest stage, you pick them when the outside colors have matured (do a google for what they should look like) and the vegetable is still firm. The seeds will not be viable. You have to let them sit on the vine, (sometimes for many weeks) before the seeds are harvested.

jrslick, I would feel guilty killing the ants... will if I have to but I will wait it out and see if I can find another way... I am Muslim and we aren't supposed to kill ants. We can if they become a nuisance though... I will try to spend time watching the ladybugs and see if the ants are attacking them..... glib, I hope that female ladybug lays her eggs on my plants! I juts looked up the lifecycle of ladybugs and I had no idea they have a larvae, then pupa stage before emerging as adult ladybugs... I wonder what that bug is in my third photo... I wonder if they hibernate here? Maybe during the worst of the summer temperatures? jean001a, thank you, though for a "garden" it really is just veggie plants in containers up on our concrete roof. I never knew about the syrphid/flower fly before! It makes me excited to know I at least have some beneficial bugs starting to visit up on my roof garden :) I am going to leave my plants alone for a few days and hope more beneficial bugs come and can eat up the aphids.

Last year, I let my step garden be my trellis. The vines just grew down the "stairs" of my garden. I didn't have nearly as many vegetables planted so I just let the cucumbers go crazy. They took up a LOT of space, and the chipmunks thought it was great that food was just lying there on the ground for them. They ate half of my cucumbers. Rather, they at half of each cucumber they touched and then moved on to the next one. In the end I may have gotten ten cucumbers from my four or five plants. This year my husband built me a lovely square trellis. (Click on link below to see pictures from two months ago), and somehow the chipmunks haven't figured up how to climb up it. The cucumber vines are still going crazy. The trellis is right next to the side of the house, so the vines grew up the siding and wrapped themselves around the satellite and cable TV wires that are no longer in use. (We use AT&T U-Verse now.) The end result is I have way more cucumbers than I know what to do with. I love all the recipes everyone posted. I will definitely try a few. Even my husband, who doesn't normally eat cucumbers, seems interested in a few of the recipes. This is a good thing because he is a much better cook than me. Here is a link that might be useful: Trellis

Not really. Consider how awful the weather has been and don't be too hard on yourself and don't blame yourself. Mother Nature has been a rather fierce opponent this year. OKRA: With the okra, as long as the plants are a healthy color and are actively blooming, they will set okra sooner or later. I've never heard of heat stopping them because they love heat. One thing that will prevent okra from doing well is if it is planted while nights are still cool. Okra that is exposed to cool nights early in the season often remains somewhat stunted and simply won't bloom or form pods. To 'kick-start' your okra, feed it with a water soluable fertilizer. If it were me, I'd use liquid seaweed or liquid fish emulsion if I thought the plants needed a general feeding. However, if the plants looked perfectly healthy and were growing well but not blooming, I'd use a chemical bloom booster like Miracle Grow Bloom Booster or Green Light Super Bloom or something similar. If their high phosphorus doesn't push your okra plants into blooming, nothing will. BELL PEPPERS: Sometimes this happens. Every plant, and every fruit or veggie on every plant, is not going to be picture-perfect. We are gardening in the real world, in fact, where very little will be picture perfect. Sometimes the rotten spots on bell peppers happen because the pepper literally outgrows the foliage on the plant and part of the pepper is exposed to too much direct sunlight. The sunlight 'sunburns' the fruit and then rot forms in the burnt sections. I just yank those peppers and toss them and plenty more come along and form after them. CUCUMBERS: Without knowing when you planted, it is hard to trouble shoot. If you are letting them sprawl on the ground, there's a chance the pollinators didn't find the blooms and pollinate them. Check carefully, too, because sometimes cucumbers can 'hide' under foliage and get overly ripe. When that happens, the fruit basically sends a chemical message to the plant that says "I'm setting seed!" and the plant slows down and stops producing because, as far as it is concerned, its mission is accomplished because it has already set seed to perpetuate the species. Search carefully for and remove every cucumber that grows while it is at its peak and don't let any get overly ripe. Cucumber production slows down in extreme heat, so planting early enough in spring that they can grow and set cukes before extreme heat arrives is important. This year, the extreme heat arrived very early--we essentially had August heat in June, so that heat has been hard on the cucumbers this year. Cucumbers are extra-sensitive to moisture stress, so if you let them get too dry once or twice, their productivity stops too. It is hard to water cucumbers too much, and you can't say that about many other things, except maybe pumpkins. A lack of cucumbers for weeks on healthy plants that are blooming would signal a lack of pollinators. If you don't have bees and tiny wasps in your garden performing the pollination task, you'll have to hand-pollinate. It these were my cukes, and if they had been in the ground since..oh, let's say, early May, and were this nonproductive, I'd yank them out and replant with seeds for fall cukes. WATERMELONS: These are the hardest to grow well in terms of water management. I like for mine to get heavy watering while the vines are young and growing. Once fruit set occurs, I cut way back and try as much as possible not to water them at all. It may sound impossible to grow them 'dryland' with no irrigation in southern OK's scorching heat, but it is not impossible at all. If you fertilize well at planting time and water heavily and, most importantly, very deeply, the first few weeks, your watermelons will form very deep root systems that can pull in enough moisture to get the melons through the dry parts of the summer with no supplemental watering. You cannot, of course, control the rainfall. Still, if you are careful to avoid overfertilizing and overwatering, the splitting will go away. I plant watermelons, baby them the first month, and then pretend they don't exist for a while. I don't even look at them--they are on the edge of the garden, so easy to ignore. After I've ignored them for a few weeks, I check and usually have nice, half-grown melons. Then, I have to ignore them again or I get the urge to water them. (That's a bad urge.) As you known, the splitting is from too much moisture. If the flesh inside is whitish or off-colored, that's a sign of too much fertilizer. If they are rotting on the vine from the blossom end up, that's blossom end rot caused by uneven moisture levels. MUSKMELON: Hale's Best is not a bad muskmelon (we improperly call them cantaloupes in this country, but they are not true cantaloupes) but too much water will dilute the flavor. Are you sure you let it get fully ripe? Did you harvest before it reached the 'full slip' stage? If it wasn't fully ripe, it would be lacking in flavor too. If you are gardening on clay, the melons (muskmelons and watermelons) will do better in faster-draining raised beds that won't hold water as long as heavier-draining clay soil does. Melons do best in sandier soil that 'cannot' hold excess water because it drains too quickly. I think it would be exceptionally hard to raise watermelons in earthboxes unless you raise Bush Sugar Baby or something very small. For the other plants, raised beds and careful timing of planting (to beat the heat) probably will give you good results and make the expense of Earthboxes unnecessary. You also have to have some luck, too, and this year almost all the gardening luck has been of the 'bad' kind. This was a VERY difficult spring. We had recurring near-freezing nights way too late in the year to plant at our normal or 'recommended' times here in southern OK. We had way too much rain in late April/the first half of May which further delayed planting OR stunted growth of plants in the ground. We had early August heat in June. If you were a plant, how would you do in those conditions? Your plants are performing a lot like everyone else's so I just don't think it is your fault. Everything in my garden has been 4 to 8 weeks late to produce if it produces at all. I haven't changed how I do things, and I usually have a highly productive garden, so I think it is the weather. Luckily, we get a second chance with the fall garden and now is the time to be getting ready for the fall gardening, planting stuff, starting seeds, etc. Hang in there. Every now and then we have a good weather year. It just so happens we haven't had one this year. Next year likely will be much better better, partly because El Nino is returning. Dawn