February Week Two
hazelinok
3 months ago
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slowpoke_gardener
3 months agoRelated Discussions
February 2019, Week 1, Let The Gardening Begin.....
Comments (62)Nancy, I am already beat! Another roughly day and a half of all this activity and I might be dead, but we are having fun. It is good training for the upcoming planting season. Kim, I hope the meeting with the landlady isn't about her having different plans for your house. Enjoy your time with the little man. Jennifer, His name is Frankie and we've been trying for about three years to tame his feral side well enough that we can pick him up, touch him, pet him or exert any sort of control over him. Some feral cats never can acclimate to more domestic behavior, but we are winning him over with canned food. He still looks pretty wild and is incredibly lean and muscular as are many feral to semi-feral cats, but we were able to get him into a crate and take him to be neutered (and to get his shots). He was mad at us yesterday but also at the same time relieved to be back here and no longer at the vet's office, but not so mad he wouldn't let us feed him and pet him. A lot of people say feral cats cannot be tamed, but they can. Sometimes it takes a few years to do it though, and often it is a very slow process where you're forever taking one step forward and two steps back. He and Lucky seem to know each other from their feral journeys. Lucky is fully domesticated now, and I think there is hope for Frankie to someday be as calm and gentle as she is now. Kim, I'm sorry you're ill and hope you recover quickly. Your seeds and planner are a sign, I think, that you'll be gardening somewhere. Bon, The good thing about the cold weather here is that it usually passes through fairly quickly, as least compared to many other states. I hope y'all are toasty warm again soon....without the need for the wood-burning stove to provide that warmth. I think it stays cold here for two more days and the warming trend starts around Monday. If that has changed, I don't want to know it because I'm just hanging on and waiting for the warm weather to come back. Jennifer, Great job, Finbar! He's doing his job as far as he is concerned, and I think dbarron's ID as a shrew is the right one. You have something I've never seen here. I'm not saying we might not have shrews around, just that of all the god-forsaken-wild-things that ours cats and dogs have killed and brought home, there's never been a shrew among them. Nancy, This does feel like a more normal winter although we still haven't been nearly as consistently cold as we were our first few years here. Everything seemed to change around 2005 and since then winters just have gotten warmer and warmer, except for 2010-2011 which was the last really persistently cold winter that I can remember. Rebecca, They really expected more snow and ice flurries in north and central Texas than they received in general, but it isn't because the clouds weren't trying. A lot of snow and ice were falling from the upper levels of the atmosphere but in the very low dewpoints closer to the surface level, the precipitation was evaporating before it could reach the ground. Our dewpoint here was only 12 so I'm not surprised that adjacent areas of north Texas were the same. It was odd to see the Winter Weather Advisory covering the area south of the D-FW metroplex yesterday, but I bet everyone in the DFW area is glad the precip missed them. Nancy, I doubt DFW gets much warmer than we will today, but I think they usually warm up a day earlier than us, so if we are expecting the warmup on Monday, they may get it beginning Sunday. So much flu is running rampant down there now that we are carefully avoiding going south this weekend. Of course, flu is running rampant to our immediate north, so we aren't going far from home at all since Love County seems to have, so far, avoided the widespread flu and strep that now have closed down 8 school districts in the Texoma region. I cannot believe how cold it has been the last couple of days. We are up to 38 degrees and it isn't even noon yet, but I don't think we're expected to get much warmer than what we are right now. The 4 year old is lobbying to go to the playground in Gainesville, but I think it is still too cold for that. Maybe tomorrow will be a touch warmer. Or maybe the sun will come out. Dawn...See MoreFebruary 2020, Week 1
Comments (56)dbarron, The time is flying by, but I think it is because I'm keeping myself busy with other projects since gardening is a dud so far. Tim and I should put all these long-standing water puddles to use and open a fish hatchery, because we're never going to dry up ever again. We have more rain in our forecast for tonight, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. After that, we are supposed to have a few days with no rain. We'll see if that happens. Our soil is squishy and squishy is not good. The only flowers we have blooming here are wildflowers, but they are early. The little Spring Beauty flowers have been in bloom (at least on the occasional sunny day or sunny portion of a day) for about a week, so they are slightly behind the henbit and about six weeks or so later than the dandelions. Normally the Spring Beauties do not bloom this early, but once we had that 83-degree day last week, all the plants here declared that it is Spring and they are rushing headlong into blooming....probably too early and undoubtedly they will suffer from later cold weather. We walk past a big Burford Holly each time we walk in or out of the mudroom's exterior doorway. I only have to take a few steps south of the door to look at that holly up close, and so I did...and there's tiny flower buds all over the stems. They aren't nearly big enough to bloom yet, but their presence this early is a bit shocking. I want to knock them upside the head and remind them it is only early February, but they probably wouldn't listen. Larry, You have a lot going on in the garden considering how wet it has been. We have winter grass (poa annua) dying now, leaving bare patches where the dormant Bermuda grass is visible, because the poa annua cannot handle all the standing water. I wish the Bermuda grass would do the same, but it won't. Nancy, All the plants are so confused, and it alarms me. Most years when we get the really early blooms combined with the erratic temperatures, we get enough cold later on to freeze back the plants that have bloomed really early. It is different when we have a consistently warm winter....the early bloomers sometimes get away with it, but not in the yo-yo winters. Just in the last week our temperatures have gone from the low 80s here to the low 20s and back up into the low 60s. Most nights have been pretty darn cold, in the 20s, and with frost, so it doesn't matter if you have a lovely 60-degree afternoon as you're still likely to have a 20-something degree morning. It drives me crazy, and I'm guessing the plants don't love it either. I noticed poppy plants popping up in the front wildflower meadow. They must have been in the wildflower seed mix I sowed back in November...or October....or whenever it was. Normally the poppies don't pop up here until late March or early April, so it is odd to see them sprouting in early February. Everything is odd this year. I still have no veggie seeds sown indoors. Maybe Monday. I won't get it done any earlier because the grandkids are here and they are keeping me busy. I'm totally not in the mood to grow veggies this year---I wanted to focus almost 100% on renovating the landscape and just let the front veggie garden be mostly all wildflowers, but the rain is ruining those plans. You cannot rent a sod cutter and cut up remove sod that has saturated soil (and standing water), so we cannot start on that most important part of redoing the landscape and it is making me crazy. I'm wondering if it will stay too wet all Spring to work on the landscape. That really would drive me crazy. I may have to revise my plans and postpone the landscaping (and I am not happy about that prospect) until we dry out this summer, and just plant more veggies than intended in order to keep myself busy and out of trouble. I hate this rainy year already. Larry, I am planting tomatoes and peppers in containers this year, and will fill the bottom half of the containers with old half-rotted wood, chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs and compost....hügelkultur style. I'll then fill the top half of the containers with a good soil-less mix. I've been "consulting" with our son on his gardening all week...starting seeds, building raised beds, etc. I even picked up some supplies for him today while I was out grocery shopping because he was at work. It is fun watching him getting heavily into gardening. They have a new worm bin and are really getting into vermicomposting so the girls can learn how that works. He knows more than he thinks he knows because he always helped me with the garden when he was a kid, right up until the time he got his driver's license and decided he had better stuff to do. I think he fears he has forgotten everything he ever knew about gardening, but I can tell that he has not. The apple does not fall far from the tree.... It is late, I am awake and everyone else is asleep, so I'm going to go start next week's thread before I go to bed myself. Dawn...See MoreFebruary 2022, Week 2 Where is everyone?
Comments (62)Amy ,here's a Dawn thread about keeping early tomatoes warm: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/3587435/tomato-varieties-dawn It's further down in the thread: "In addition to using floating row cover, you can use Walls O Water, homemade devices similar to WOWs, or even two-liter bottles or cat litter buckets filled with water to help keep the plants warm on a late cold night. In a year when the spring weather stedfastly refuses to warm up as quickly as I like, I put a cat litter bucket filled with water on the north side of each tomato plant. The water in the bucket heats up during the day as the water absorbs heat from the sunlight and the buckets keep the plants warm at night by releasing heat as the water cools. Using a combination of the buckets of water and heavy-duty frost blankets, I haven't lost a tomato plant to frost or freezing temperatures in the springtime since probably 2008 (the years are starting to run together in my memory, lol). It might have been 2007. Either way, the forecast low that year on the night my plants froze was 50 and the actual low at our house hit 32 on an early May night and I hadn't done anything to cover up the plants or protect them because, honestly, by early May, who thinks that a freezing night is still possible, especially when the forecast says "50"? That was the last time I flat out trusted the forecast low and the last time I lost plants. Now I watch my weather carefully and cover up the plants if I think they will need it, no matter what the forecast says. In the years when I set up the cat litter buckets of water (I didn't use them last year, but some years I just know that I need to set them up at planting time and so I do), I leave them in place until around May 5th -7th (because we've never frozen after May 5th-7th). For me, whatever work I have to do to get the tomatoes planted early is worth it because my yields can be 2 to 4 times higher from an early March planting than from a mid- to late-April planting. It is all about getting the most fruit set possible before the heat arrives. I cannot tell you when the heat arrives" Here's another one: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2065568/possible-frost-save-tomatoes Here's what we did last April late freeze. with 5 gal buckets over the tomato plants inside the tunnels Don't remember what the temps were then but the tomatoes survived. Here's what we did spring 2020 for another late freeze in the spring: And another: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2100369/fiber-row-cover-really-work-in-ok-tomato from the " Book of Dawn" Rick....See MoreAlmost February 2023 week one
Comments (45)I tilled the garden yesterday and the tiller bucked and bounced through those rye grass clumps. It was a tough slow go. I had to muscle it a whole lot more than I wanted to. There was a point I didn't think I'd was gonna get it done. And I'm either way out of phyiscal condition or just feeling my 70 years. But its done and I'm ready to get going with 2023 gardening season. I usually plant my tomato seed in the next week. But this year I'm putting it off a couple more weeks cuz I don't like dealing with the tall plants. However, I normally get my first eating tomato around Memorial Day. If I put off the seed planting two more weeks, will that put off my first harvest till mid June ? I've never understood this " days to maturity " on the seed packets. Is that from when the seed is planted or when the plants go into the ground ? I've never noticed any diff between my plants started from seed and the plants I bought at a nursery. They all seem to produce an eating tomato at the same time. If I don't get my first tomato till mid June, then my window for the plants producing is greatly reduced. July heat and early blight will kill production in the first week or two of July....See MoreKim Reiss
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