Early Summer Heat Wave

We are in the middle of an 11 day heat wave, Sunday is expected to reach 101F. There has been very little rain as well, so I've been trying to pay close attention to water needs in the garden.

The tomatoes, peppers and watermelon are loving the heat. I definitely think the plastic and salt hay mulches are helping to keep the ground moist. Below are the Black Krim tomatoes:

Peppers:

I'm still trying to figure out how to tell if the watermelon is ready to pick. I've read that when you tap a ripe fruit it will have more of a solid "thump" sound vs. the hollow sound when you tap an under-ripe fruit. They all sound the same to me right now so I'm waiting to pick the big one.

Squash are also doing well. No sign of Squash vine borers yet... but I fear its only a matter of time. I've been spraying the vine a few inches above ground level with insecticidal soap every 7 days.

So far I've only found squash bugs on the pumpkins. I've been picking off bugs and eggs for weeks now. All of the bugs seem to prefer the pumpkins and so far no fruit has set. If I get no pumpkins this year they will at least have been an effective trap crop.

The runner beans are growing slowly, but the kidney beans already have bean growing on the plants:

I was worried about the eggplants. They had tons of flowers, but the flowers were dropping and not producing fruit. Eggplants require 2" of water a week vs. the 1" that tomatoes require. I increased the how much water they were getting and now there are lots of little baby fruits on all of the plants!

One of my garden neighbors had a bird build it's nest in their plot. This week the baby birds hatched. I saw the mama bird (robin) feeding them yesterday!