Well, my idea to grow and malt my own barley will have to be put off at least another growing season as all my barley has died. I planted two blocks of barley and one block of wheat in my garden this year. The wheat developed fine, but the barley never developed its heads. (If you know anything about barley development, it looks like it got to the "boot" stage and then died.) I suspect it was the Texas heat.

Although I kept the barley watered, the high temperature here has been hovering around 100 °F (38 °C) for weeks now, without any cool days to break up the monotony. (On the other hand, blazing heat plus no rain means that I don't have to worry about any sort of fungus in the garden.) I am going to try to plant this variety again as a winter barley and see how that goes.

My hop plants, in contrast, are doing well. A few weeks ago, most of the plants growing on the side of my house suffered some insect damage. The growing tips of the vines got eaten and this stopped the plants from growing temporarily. However, new tips sprouted from nodes along the vine and now they are climbing again.

The hops I have been growing in containers are doing even better. They have, for the most part, escaped insect damage. I also think they get a more tolerable regimen of sunlight and shade. My older hop bines have cones on them and most of the plants I started this year have flowered. One or two of the older plants will probably yield enough hops for a few 5.0-gallon (19-L) batches of beer.

A long-term "beer gardening" plan of mine is creeping slowly to fruition. A few years ago, I got the idea to grow a large watermelon and ferment a summer beer inside the melon. (Someone in the mag did this in a pumpkin once and thought it was a cool stunt.)

I decided on Black Diamond watermelons because I liked their flavor and they will grow fairly big -- ~70 lbs. (30 kg), given the right conditions. These aren't the monster big melons, like Carolina Cross 183, but I don't have that kind of space to devote to melons. The first few years I tried to grow them, they always ended up with blossom end rot. This year, however, I have been ensuring that they get more even watering and they are doing fine. No end rot and they are getting bigger everyday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I'm also trying to grow some big pumkins (a variety called Big Max). I had two plants that were doing great until they very suddenly went into decline. Turns out they had squash vine borers. I took a knife and a tweezers and excised all the grubs, but one plant died. The other is now healthy, but there's no growing tip to it's vine and it doesn't seem to be sprouting a new one.