Glenda,
Thanks for the update. Sounds like you are coming along great. I'm running behind also. And have to leave this afternoon for 2 days of schooling in Pueblo, CO. With the heat setting in. I have deep watered well and in my good sandy loam most things should hold till Thursday night.Will get my sister to spray a few plants in cups.

Many have had trouble with onions this year. I've had several bolt. I've pulled a few that bolted that are close to baseball size. So have hopes some of mine will turn out ok. Think I will be eliminating some varieties next year.

Come on tell us how many maters you planted. Dawn and I have already confessed.

Hope your season continues well. Jay

Hi Glenda,

Sounds like you've been really busy. I agree that you might as well go ahead and confess how many tomato plants you have because Jay and I already have confessed. (Jay, I found two more plants in a container I'd forgotten had tomatoes in it, so I think I'm up to 120....but I wasn't hiding them on purpose, I just forgot about them!) I'm already at the 'more tomatoes than we can eat fresh' stage, so have cranked up the dehydrator.

Cabbage worms and loopers were the worst I've ever seen this year, but we got a good enough broccoli and cabbage harvest to satisfy me. With us, the late cold weather that stalled the broccoli and the early onset of heat probably hurt the harvest more than the cabbage worms did. We're still seeing lots of the white butterflies too, but also have lots of swallowtails, skippers, bordered patch, monarchs, etc. and quite a few white-lined sphinx moths.

As Jay said about the onions, lots of folks are having a lot of trouble with them this year, and the reasons vary. Some of us had soil that stayed too wet at planting time and a lot of the plants didn't survive. For others the plants survived, but didn't thrive or enlarge as much as usual. For others, necks started weakening and falling over when the onions were still fairly small. For some, a lot of their onions bolted. The onion problems are just all over the place.

With the dent corn, I see people space it as closely as maybe 6 to 9" or as far apart as 2 or 3'. I imagine you get a better yield with somewhat farther spacing (or at least slightly bigger ears), but it seems like most here plant it 9-12" apart so they must feel like they get a good enough yield from that spacing.

With the peppers, I've had deer eat them down almost to the ground....leaves, stems, flowers, peppers and all....but not since we put up the taller deer fence. Sometimes rabbits nibble the ones I grow in containers outside the fenced garden. So, for me, those are the two big 'eaters' of pepper plants. Your results may vary.

With all southern peas, my spacing varies depending on past experience with any given variety. With pinkeye purplehulls specifically, I space them about 6 to 8" apart most of the time, and have put them a foot part before. My general planting guideline is to space bush types about 4-5" apart and semi-vining types 6-8" apart. With vigorous vining types like Mandy/Big Red Ripper, 12-18" probably is too close but that's what I do, and I trellis them. How high is the trellis? With Big Red Ripper, it doesn't matter...it will climb much taller than any trellis you errect. There's several selections of pinkeye purplehulls out there, and some of them are a little more bushy and quicker to produce than others, but 6-8" is perfectly fine, or up to a foot apart if you don't want quite the usual tangled mess that southern peas can become. Last year, some of my pinkeye purplehulls went crazy and crossed a pathway and climbed tomato cages up to the top of the cages, and cascaded back down again. This year, the pinkeye purplehulls will not have any cages nearby to climb!

For eggplants, I 'hid' mine this year by planting them in the middle of sprawling tomato plants 'Tumbling Tom Red' and 'Tumbling Tom Yellow'. For ages, it looked like the tomato plants, which were bred for hanging baskets so they spread out horizontally and cascade, were going to bury the eggplants under their foliage, but then the eggplants finally got tall enough to emerge above the tomato plants, and the flea beetles didn't seem to bother them. Maybe it was just luck, but I think I'll do it again next year and see if it works two years in a row. Otherwise, I'd cover young eggplant plants with floating row cover material, or sheer window curtains, until they're pretty-good sized and flowering and that will exclude the flea beetles.

I just planted okra on the 4th of this month to fill the space left by recently-harvested broccoli, and it seems to be emerging pretty well so far with 2 of 4 varieties up already, but Paula had trouble with hers...it is emerging but it was kinda slow and she replanted once or twice.

Our fruit is only slightly ahead of yours. Our blackberries are done, and the strawberries are producing well....we've been picking strawberries since late April and they keep making more. The plums are ripening slowly, which is nice because we can pick and eat a day's worth every day so we're not overwhelmed with too many all at once. The three plum trees have hundreds of plums per tree (and I bet I removed 20 plums for every one I left on the tree when I thinned) so at some point we'll have too many and I'll make plum jam. The peaches are coloring up and should be ripe enough to pick soon...ours are usually ripe right around Father's Day or even the week before. The tree is heavily loaded too, but I'll freeze and can a lot of them.

We don't have pears or apples because of fire blight and cedar apple rust. I'd love to have both, but fought the diseases so much in Texas and decided I just wouldn't do it here.

We need rain badly in our part of Oklahoma too, having had our last good rainfall in mid-May and temps in the upper 90s this week. I think slightly cooler weather is coming tomorrow, but hayfield and wheatfield fires are already happening here. This weekend, the same combine caught fire twice while harvesting wheat, but the operator managed to keep it from spreading to the wheatfield itself. The local firefighters have been busy with those kinds of fires and with lots of vehicle fires. It is a little early for those kinds of fires, but the heat has been so bad and the field are getting so dry. I've watered the veggie garden about once every 3 or 4 days but the containers have to be watered morning and evening. Our small pond near the veggie garden is dry, so the frogs have moved into the garden and I've put a pan of water there for them. The big pond is very low....I tried to take the dogs swimming in it a couple of weeks ago but they had to wade in it instead because it was so shallow. I haven't looked at it this week, and am afraid it will be dry or very close to it.

My flower beds have been neglected like yours, Glenda, but I'll get busy on them after our granddaughter, who's visiting this week, goes home. There's never enough time, and it has been so hot that my time outside has been very restricted.

I love hearing your updates so keep writing them!

Dawn

OK, here is a rough count and I haven't counted the volunteers in the strawberry patch and garden fence where the Black Cherries were, 56. It is just the two of us!

Hi Glenda,

I didn't know you posted on here. It has been awhile since I have though.

In response to your topic:
Last year caterpillars ate all the leaves off my Red Bell Peppers plants in one location only. I left them alone and continued watering as needed, and within a week or so they began putting on new leaves. I got a bumper crop of big red peppers. In fact, I still have some in the freezer, and I use them a lot in cooking. I never knew caterpillars ate pepper leaves before that. They were large green caterplllars with metallic gold dots and a horned tail - beautiful things.

~Annie

Glenda,

Yum, yum! I bet you'll have a lot of tomatoes to put up in late summer and fall....kind of like your pumpkin mega-harvest last year.

Annie,

Hi! I'd been wondering where you were. It is good to see you here.

I bet Susan could identify your caterpillar with the gold dots, but she became a grandma again yesterday, so she might be too busy grandmothering for a while to post much.

If it had a horn, I assume it was a hornworm, but I've never seen one with gold spots. There are tons of hornworms though. Some folks in Texas have seen the caterpillar of the Snowberry Sphinx and it has gold dots, but I don't know it if feeds on pepper plants.

Dawn

Hi, Annie. I found this forum last year and felt right at home. They tend more to vegetable gardening and harvest which is a real love of mine and have been wonderfully nice to me, foreigner that I am! They are a very knowledgeable bunch of people and are happy to share.

Glad to see you here.

I hope my peppers do come back. I am watching them. I bought some new orange ones from SSE and really wanted to try them.

Gardening has its ups and downs. We went out this morning to pick cherries and found a huge limb broken and laying on the ground. The tree is loaded this year and we have been getting some wind, but no rain. Made picking very easy. You have to look on the bright side!

Glenda, Sorry about your tree. On the street I travel to get downtown there is a big apple tree that is covered with apples every year. A month or so ago we had higher than normal winds for a couple of days and part of that tree split off at the trunk and just fell across the yard but stayed connected to the trunk at ground level. They have just left it there and as far as I can tell the apples on that part look as good as on the part that is standing. It does have an interesting look tho.