Welcome back to reality!

And congrats on the new sunlit spot. Down with lawns and up with gardens, say I!

Diane

Mia,

Welcome back, and Happy Anniversary too!

I don't know how dry it is at your place or how similar your conditions might be to ours, but I have watered like mad and the garden looks good.....and Tim is likely to have a stroke when the water bill comes. I can't keep watering as much as I did last week, so if rain doesn't come soon in a significant amount, I'll likely stop watering the tomato plants soon, except for the ones that produce bite-sized fruits. So, if I am not going to water them, I'll likely pull them once I harvest the fruit currently on them after it ripens. Then, I'll replant with something that isn't water-hungry, like maybe southern peas or more okra plants.

Between the lack or moisture, the temps over 100 every day, and the almost total lack of rainfall, we'e about to have more to worry about here than keeping a garden watered here in our county. The fields are turning brown as parched plants go dormant, so our fire risk gets higher every day, and it is getting really high really fast. We need some good heavy rainfall....I mean flash flooding type heavy rainfall.....although slow, steady rain would be better though not likely to occur.

It is too bad we don't have a pipeline that could carry the excess water from the flooding parts of the country to the dry, parched states of the south and southwest.

Digging potatoes: dig with the tool of your choice--a shovel, spade, trowel, etc. You find the majority of the potatoes underground near where the plants were. I usualy start about 10-12" out from where the plants are (or in your case "were") and slowly work my way inward. The potatoes are usually clustered pretty close together in a big bunch and you'll normally have some full-sized ones and some medium sized ones and some small ones. In our clay soil, I rarely find any potatoes deeper than maybe 10"below the soil surface. I laugh at the little small ones, but do you know that they bag them up and sell them in stores as "baby potatoes" or "petite potatoes" for about $3.99 per small bag? So they're just as worthy of your attention and time while digging as the bigger ones are. After I dig potatoes, I usually go back a day or two later and dig a bit more and seach for any I might have missed. This year, I was digging in temps at or over 100 degrees and it was miserable. I tried to be thorough even though I was rushing to beat the heat. When I went back for the second dig a couple of days later, I came up with about 20 lbs. of potatoes I'd missed on the days I dug, so the second dig was worth the time I spent doing it. I usually miss some small potatoes and they sprout and give us fall potatoes or sometimes they sprout the following spring. I have potatoes growing in a corn bed this year, and I didn't plant any there, although I grew potatoes in that bed in 2009.

With the onions, avoid getting them wet too after digging them. We have a thread going on how to cure and dry them so they'll store longer and better.

Store the potatoes in a cool, dry, dark location and some of them will store a really long time. For us, they usually store until about December before they start sprouting. Use any of them that you 'sliced' into with your digging tool first as they may go bad. I don't wash them before I store them because getting them wet before storing them isn't good, but just brush off the dirt with my hands or (gently!) with a veggie brush. If you brush newly havested potatoes too vigorously with the brush, it can remove the peel unless you let the potatoes set underground for a week or two after they matured and before you dig them. Doing that lets the skin thicken up some.

It could have been deer or some other hungry animal that got your potato foliage. I lost everything to deer in the mid-2000s before we raised the garden fence from 4' to 7'. I'd like to raise it to 8', and soon, because the deer are hungry and are lurking around my garden and compost pile, even when I am in the garden working.

Keep watering the pepper plants and they should flower and set fruit all summer long. If they get too dry, they won't flower and set fruit as well. Sweet peppers will suffer more blossom drop but even they will set fruit in the heat if you can keep them from feeling too drought-stressed. I guess I wasn't paying much attention to my peppers while I was busy digging potatoes, pulling onions and harvesting lots of beans and tomatoes and they stalled. Once I watered the peppers heavily twice last week, they responded with a big growth spurt and are blooming like crazy now. Apparently all they wanted was some water.

We missed you while you were gone and you probably have a lot to catch up on. I'll summarize the weather for you: hot, hot, hot, hot and hot. Oh, and for some folks wind, rain, hail, damage and destruction. Mostly though, just hot, hot, hot, hot and hot. Forecast? Hotter still. Long-term outlook: hot, hotter and hottest. Who says our weather is not consistent? It sure is being consistently hot!

Have fun filling your bare space! A new sunny spot is a blessing indeed.

Dawn

Thanks, y'all! I'm guessing it's been hotter than heck and dry all week here, too, so I'm going at it with soaker hoses blazing this week. I'm afraid of the water bill, too, but luckily, DH doesn't usually look at the bills and I pay them all, so... veggies here we come!

I only had 12 potato plants so I will clear out a drawer in the kitchen for them. The garage is too hot, the attic even worse, and I don't have any kind of cellar. Even the tiny crawl space feels somewhat oven-like. I dug two good sized potatoes last night, but started to wonder if two potatoes was all one plant put out. Need to scrounge around more, I think.

Dawn, I've added a redneck extension to my deer fence. I am using the deer netting which is 7' tall. After I staple 6" to the ground, I'm back to 6.5 feet. I installed my fence on bamboo poles 9-10 feet about ground. Then I strung the cheap orange caution tape at about 8 feet high. It creates a visual illusion that the fence is taller than it is. It's not attractive at all, but so far no deer have jumped it.

I want to know what beach and how nice the water was.

It was on the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, outside St. Petersburg/Tampa, on a barrier island called Treasure Island. Gorgeous white sand, warm shallow blue-green water, dolphins frolicking (I swear, they were FROLICKING!) nearby while we swam... amazing!

Most awesome was the week's high was about 92, but with that cooling ocean breeze you never would have known it.

Very nice!

Dang it. I purposely avoided asking for details on the beach. Now I'm overwhelmed by jealousy.

Diane

Seedmama,

I did that one year with the caution tape, also for the purpose of giving the illusion that the fence was taller. It worked at first, and then birds began sitting on the caution tape and it began to stretch and sag. I hope the birds stay away from yours.

Another favorite redneck remedy I like is to tie white bags (I use Wal-Mart bags) to the fence at about the same level that a white-tail deer's tail would be. As the bags flutter in the breeze, the way it is supposed to work is that deer who are scoping out your garden will see the fluttering white bag, think it is another deer signaling 'danger' by flicking its tail, and then they'll all turn and flee. It is hard to say if it works, but no deer have gotten into the big garden since I started doing that except on the night I left the gate open.

I usually have to add new bags in spring because the birds, and in particular the blue jays, like to tear shreds of bags off the garden fence bags and use them in nest-building. They'll keep shredding the bags and taking them until there is nothing left. Could we consider those nests to be redneck bird nests?

I feel compelled to add that both the bunnies and deer are especially thin and hungry here and are coming to our yard in large numbers every evening and every morning. Nothing on my compost pile gets to decompose because the wild critters find it and eat it first. I feed the bunnies, and feed the deer a little though not clearly enough (livestock feed prices are high and going higher, higher, higher every week it seems). I'm afraid that if significant rain doesn't fall, the wildlife here will really suffer.

I really need a vacation! Of course, I'd never leave the garden at this time of year, but it is an appealing prospect nonetheless.

Dawn

To avoid the sagging construction tape, string fishing line and then just tie bits of construction tape to it to flap in the wind. It works for keeping eagles from our chicken run (knock on wood), might have the same effect on deer since they'd at least perceive it as a barrier?

Diane

Dawn, I don't have birds sitting on my tape, but have sagging nonetheless. So does the tape. At my age, it's just a part of life! It did anticipate it by stringing individual sections between the posts. I've been through once and tightened everything up.

Diane that sounds like a good idea. I have fishing line.

Mia, I'm glad you were able to fit in a vacation before harvest season is in full swing. Happy Anniversary!

While working in the new garden space I met the neighbor's nephew. He informed me that the neighbors raise deer for a living. Nice. And that nothing less than 8 feet will do. He also asked why didn't I just use 10' T-posts instead of bamboo. Because I need 45 of them at $10 a pop.

Dawn, I can't remember if you were the one who turned me on to William Alexander's website, but the whole time I was on vacation I couldn't stop thinking about his op-ed on the subject. Hilarious!

Here is a link that might be useful: The Garden Ate My Vacation

Seedmama,

I forgot to mention that we also used white nylon cord instead of surveyor's tape one year, and it stretched and sagged too. I like Diane's idea about using fishing line.

And I need to add that sometimes our garden 'contraptions' baffle people. lol My scarecrow is made out of sheet metal and is welded to a sturdy pole stuck deeply in the ground. The guy who made it for me cut the scarecrows arms and legs sticking out at "jaunty" angles, sort of like the scarecrow is dancing. I've never given the scarecrow much thought other than (a) feeling deeply appreciative to have a talented metalworker friend who made me such a lovely and useful object for my garden, and (b) observing over time that the scarecrow scares no one (except, apparently, folks who are driving by and think someone's body is hanging from the pecan tree) and, in fact, the mockingbirds perch on it and sing. Surely this embarrasses the scarecrow and he would blush were his skin not painted a flesh color that has no hint of blush in it.

One day a local sherriff's deputy pulled up into our driveway and stopped at the end of the garden to look at the scarecrow. I said to a neighbor later "I wonder what that was about" and he told me it likely was because when you're driving by our house, the scarecrow sort of looks like a body hanging from the pecan tree. Uggh!

Mia, It wasn't me. But that's pretty hysterical. His story of the groundhog trapped in the garden by the electric fence reminds me of the night I left the garden gate open and 4 deer strolled in. I walked outside early in the a.m. and there they were--4 deer standing in the garden. I stopped in my tracks and quietly began backing away from the gate. Unfortunately, they went insane running wildly all over the garden, trying to jump the fence, etc. but making no effort to exit through the open gate even though I was, by then, back inside the house and no threat to them whatsoever.

Being nice, friendly deer, they had delicately picked their way along the garden path (you could see the light indentations of their hooves in the garden pathways) and hadn't even nibbled much of anything yet. Once they saw me, they overreacted and ran around madly trampling everything. Everything. They kept jumping repeatedly into fencing they couldn't leap over and even bent the fence posts. These tracks were made by wild running and jumping so left deeper, wider hoof marks. Finally they left the garden. I learned an important lesson about always double-checking the gate to make sure it is closed and secured. Hopefully the deer learned a lesson about remembering to leave through the same gate you enter through, because if you can't jump the fence to get into the garden, you likely can't jump the fence to get out of the garden either.

As far as I know the deer haven't been back in the garden since then, and I generally do remember to close the gate.

Anyway, I generally bribe the deer to stay out of the garden by putting out hen scratch or deer corn for them by the compost pile, and by filling up a small watering hole (it is about the size of a large sink) with the hose so they always have water. I usually feed in winter, and sometimes in summer if a tired doe brings her baby or babies to eat. They are showing up here 3 or 4 nights a week now, undoubtedly because of the drought, and if I don't have food out there for them, they patiently stand by the compost pile waiting. Tim will say "your deer are waiting out there". Then, I go out, they run away, I put out food and go back inside, and they come back and eat. My garden lives on, unmolested by deer. Come to think of it, we have mafia deer here, because they are shaking me down in a typical mafia protection racket, only they just want corn and not cash.

Dawn