You're doing OK. You've got me beat by one tomato. LOL I didn't realize I'd have to share them with the birds though. Hopefully they only go after low hanging fruit. I watched one bird yesterday jump up and spear a gold ball sized ripening tomato. They didn't bother it until it got near ripe. Anyway I ran out and picked it. The bird had gotten part of the bottom. I got the rest and it wasn't bad.

For the last three days I've seen one lone honey bee in my garden buzzing all over my cucumber plants flowers. I'm wondering why doesn't he bring some of his friends back with him? He doesn't bother with the tomato plants even though they have lots more flowers. They are much smaller and not as noticeable as the cuke flowers though.

Are the leaves of the cucumber plant edible? Anybody know? I feel like I need to get rid of some of their leaves so I can train them onto a trellis I've put together for them.

I planted a row of those heirloom sweet Italian Chioggia Beets. Gonna put in one little row a week for a while and see if they really do mature in 50 days.

Can I still plant hardy perennial broad leaf sage? If I grow it in pots does it transplant well?

Hank

G.M.,

Yippee! I am so glad you got some ripe tomatoes. I hope you are enjoying eating them. This is just the worst year ever for veggies. I am getting lots of tomatoes, peppers and herbs but not a whole lot of everything else. The deer and raccoons ARE eating really well from the garden, though.

I saw the rain hitting y'all on the radar and couldn't believe what a pounding you guys took. We had much less rain here...and even it is way too much. I don't know how I will ever get the fall garden planted with all the mud, muck and standing water....not to mention the endless rain almost daily.

I think we have had three days in July when no rain fell, but most days we are having a little rain here and a little there....sometimes 3 or 4 times a day. Even the small amounts add up, and nothing is drying out around here. So far, we have had about 5.5" of rain in July. Most years we are lucky to get any rain in July, so I hate to complain....but I would love a few dry days.

Hank,

In general, bees are not very active when it is cool, cloudy and rainy, so that is probably why you are not seeing as many.

Bees tend to mostly ignore tomato plants, which are self-pollinating anyway, and go for plants that offer more readily available pollen.

Really small, tender cucumber leaves and stems are considered edible, but the larger leaves are not. I have never tried them myself.

You can plant perennial broadleaf sage in well-drained soil this late in the season. Sage has always transplanted well for me.

Dawn

I have some tomatoes that are almost ready to pick--I'm gonna give them one more day. Some of them have been on the vine for almost two months. I'm glad I planted only grape tomatoes this year. They seem to be holding in there pretty well.

I have a couple of eggplants on the plants (that sounds weird, huh?). The problem is that the plants never got very big, but the fruits aren't supposed to be very big, so I may get something from them; however, I'm not betting on it.

I had to pull up all my squash plants and the majority of my sunflowers--they were just awful. My squash literally died in front of my eyes, and they were such beautiful plants to begin with. I've started some more--I'm gonna keep trying until I get SOMETHING or drown trying, I swear.

Stay dry, everyone, although I'm beginning to think that's a bit ridiculous to ask.

I too have been finally reaping some harvest --- Once the 20-day rain stopped & we'd gotten 2 days in a row with sunshine, my Sungold cherry plant began ripening tomatoes. I've since been getting around 8 to 12 a day from it. The plant is over 6 ft tall. My Cherokee Purple has also given me 4 ripe ones so far, my Arkansas Traveler 2, First Lady around 6 or 8. My Big Bertha green bell pepper plant so far has given 4 or 5 peppers, my Ace Hybrid Red bell pepper has 4 nice peppers on it & 2 are ripening now! My Valencia orange bell pepper also has a few nice peppers that aren't ripe yet.

Over the last week & a half or so, I've enjoyed salads with home grown tomatoes, peppers, cukes & radishes and I'm lovin it!

Dan,

I am glad you are enjoying your harvest. My favorite meals are always those that have ingredients from the garden.

Katyar,

The eggplants may surprise you. Last year I gave up on watering the veggie garden in late June and just focused on the lawn and the shrub beds around so the house....I had to keep the clay soil there well-watered so the house foundation wouldn't shift and crack. Well, even with no irrigation and almost no rainfall for the remainder of the growing season, the eggplants kept right on producing and still had blooms and eggplants on the plants when frost took them out in November. I think that some plants are tougher, perhaps, than we think.

I have a lot of winter squash, pumpkins, and melons in various stages of ripening, even though the plants themselves look pretty bad thanks to all the excess moisture.

I know a lot of you had rain yesterday and today that we have not had in southern Oklahoma, although we had heavy, low-hanging dark clouds and thunder/lightning for most of the day yesterday. I hope you all are relatively dry and, of course, hopefully no one is experiencing any flooding.

Our forecast for today involves a collision of the current cold front with the previous cold front (now making its way back north as a warm front) right over southern Oklahoma, so we have a Flash Flood Watch and are expecting an average of 2" of rain tonight/tomorrow, although 5-10" could fall in scattered areas. What does this really mean? Well, usually when our forecast sounds so ominous, nothing happens....so I am hoping for the best.

Between the heat and the humidity, though, it is just miserable to try to do anything outside and the recent appearance of several very large snakes around the yard has been keeping me on my toes.

I did harvest 6 or 8 tomatoes today and I need to go out this evening when it is cooler and harvest a few dozen more.

Dawn

I'm so happy for you!! The first tomato taste the best!!! I got a bumper crop of tomatoes tonite. Lots of jetstar, they are my best producer, a couple yellow tomatoes and a couple brandywines. This is the first heirloom that I planted and I am disappointed in it. It has small fruit and tastes bland. I have one eggplant that is ready to pick and getting handful or so of okra everyday. The green beans decided to turn loose and now I have to figure out whether to freeze them or give them away. I think since its still early in the season, I'll give them away. I can only eat so many green beans. LOL. However I have discovered I can eat a LOT of tomatoes and cucumbers. Right this very second I am laid up like a beached whale LOL!!

River,

Brandywines are usually quite delicious, and almost everyone to whom I have ever given a fresh Brandywine instantly declares it their new favorite tomato.

However, in our climate, my Brandywines only produce really tasty fruit when the weather is excessively hot and dry. In a wetter than average year, many if not most tomatoes have a 'watered-down' flavor, and in our garden, Brandywine's usual excellent flavor is more affected than many others. I hope the rains will stop and you will get some ripe Brandywines in the late summer or autumn whose flavor has not been adversely affected by excessive moisture.

I love Brandywine in a good year, but never devote a lot of space to them because of their inconsistency. There are many other heirlooms whose flavor is almost equal to Brandywine but which are more consistent in flavor, are much heavier producers and produce ripe fruit earlier.

There are even a few hybrids that produce a flavor almost as good as Brandywine.

This is, overall, a really bad year for tomatoes....even those that manage to pollinate and ripen in our monsoon weather just aren't as full-flavored as normal.

Dawn

I too am getting tomatoes now. I believe so far my favorites are 1884 Yellow Pinkheart and Cherokee Purple. I was disappointed in the one hybrid I grew -- Beefsteak -- kind of ugly, lots of core and a black circular "seam" on the bottom that had to be cut off, so essentially lost the entire middle of the tomato. I have a few that I have not yet gotten an edible sample from -- have lots that rotted while still green.

My yellow squash and zucchini are still producing, but less now because they were spilling out into the walkway and I had to cut them back. I find that usually when zucchini wilts and dies quickly there's a worm imbedded in the stem. I have always lost my zucchini this way, early in the season. This year, when I first saw that little yellow "butterfly" flying around, I ran out and covered my zucchini and yellow squash plants with old curtain sheers I bought at a rummage sale. It apparently did the trick! I did have some squash bugs and I didn't have time to pick them off, but they seem to be gone since I cut the plants back.

I lost my last rhubarb to rot. And all my tomato plants look like they're dying from the roots up. I don't know if they'll pull through or not. I have to pick my tomatoes when they just start to blush with color, because of a couple of mockingbirds that frequent the garden. They are the worst at poking one hole in everything. I watched one trying to get in under the netting that was over my strawberries last month. They don't give up easily.

I can't help but wonder how our Oklahoma pioneers survived, trying to grow their own food for a big farm family, with no irrigation, no raised beds. DH and I are in our 60's and his mother once told me she remembered, as a young girl, standing at the house watching a grass fire consume their pasture and then their corn, their wheat, and their garden. During the Dustbowl, she was a young married woman with five children already -- and her husband was a sharecropper!

I grow cherry tomatoes for my husband and the REAL tomatoes for me. We've been picking cherry tomatoes for about a month now, but I'm at about 5 in the big 'uns camp. BTW the paste tomatoes aren't doing well.

On the local TV news the other night, they were reporting that many farmers in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas have lost 100% of their crops to excessive moisture in the form of rainfall/constantly wet soil/floodwaters. So, I was thinking to myself that a lot of us may be getting less of a veggie harvest, but at least we haven't lost 100%, right?

Ilene,

I have talked to lots of 'old farmers/old ranchers' who live in our area (many of them, sadly, have passed away in recent years ) and many of them have told me over and over that all they had to eat in their early years in Oklahoma were whatever crops they could raise or find via foraging/hunting/gathering and whatever game they could shoot. They said that it was a constant struggle to survive, and of course, none of them had any problems with weight gain or obesity. They also said that if one family or another suffered a crop failure, the other local families tried to share what they had so the family would survive. How very spoiled we are by comparison!

My dad was one of 11 children. His family was, by his own description, 'poor, white sharecroppers' in the Spanish Fort (Montague County, Texas) area in the 1920s/30s. He said they pretty much lived on whatever crops survived. They usually had a good crop of pinto beans and corn, which they dried and stored for winter. He said they often ate corn meal mush for breakfast, cornbread and whatever else was available for lunch, and cornbread and pinto beans for dinner, day after day after day. How many of us would do that and be glad to have even that food?

He did say that they often had good veggies from their own gardens all summer and fall, plus whatever they could put up for winter, and meat was more of a 'treat' or a 'condiment' with veggies and bread being the main portion of the meal, and only small portions of meat available. During the good years that they made a good crop, they would have enough cash to buy salt, flour, baking powder, etc. During bad times they had beans and corn. They usually had their own milk and butter from their own cow, but usually the babies and youngest children got all the milk. Once a year they each got one orange to eat--at Christmas--and that plus a couple of nuts and one or two pieces of Christmas candy was their Christmas gift.

Local folks here who are slightly younger than my dad remember a similar lifestyle up to World War II, which gave many young men a chance to get off the farm and earn some badly needed money to send home to 'the folks'. They say that growing a big garden that produced a lot of food for the family was considered a HUGE mark of achievement, and that the local families were quite competitive with one another to see who could feed their family best with what they raised. Frankly, I don't know how they did it.

I raise a lot of fruit and veggies, and have great success most years, but if we had to live ONLY off what I could grow or find by foraging (wild berries, fruit, etc.), my family would all be stick-thin! Thankfully we don't have to raise all our own food nowadays!

PURPLE CHEROKEE--now that is a great tomato and one of my all time favorites. We just love them. This year they have been HUGE, about twice the size I usually get, and fairly tasty--their flavor isn't quite as good as it is most years, but it is still not as watered-down as many other tomatoes are this year. Black Krim is still our favorite. Brandywine would be our favorite based on flavor alone, but their low productivity keeps them from being our #1 tomato.

I am going to (hopefully--and if the weather works with me and not against me) yank out a lot of the spring-planted tomatoes this week, and replace them with new plants for fall tomatoes. I don't usually take out the cherry, grape or currant types as they produce well all summer anyway.

The tomatoes that are removed are sort of removed in the order in which they began fruiting--so those that produced ripe fruit beginning in very late April are already gone, those that produced ripe fruit in May/June will soon be gone, and those late ones that are just now producing ripe fruit will get to live until they stop producing, or until the July-planted tomatoes start producing.

Sagenscotties, My paste tomatoes have only been so-so this year too. In general, paste tomatoes are more prone to both blossom-end rot and foliar disease when it is excessively wet. However, I am getting tons of big 'uns so I have been using a mixture of big 'uns to make spaghetti sauce and other tomato-based meals like chicken-tortilla soup or taco soup. The larger tomatoes take longer to boil down, of course, since they have a higher water content--especially this year--but they make tasty cooked tomatoes.

I'm probably not even going to plant the paste tomatoes I have raised from seed for fall unless we have a sudden drying trend here. I don't see any point in expending the energy to plant them if they aren't going to do any better than the spring-planted paste tomatoes did. There are a couple of exceptions--Orange Banana has produced quite well, and so has Bisignano #2.

Dawn

Dawn, I grew "Cody's Paste" this year for the first time. I bought a plant from "The Tomato Man", they were said to yield larger paste tomatoes than the Amish Paste I usually grow. I did get one nice big one, but the rest have only been about the same size as the Amish Paste were. Now the plant is trying to die. I haven't had many to sample, but I would say that I have noticed they are pretty dry inside, as paste tomatoes should be.

As I take tomatoes that are rotted or partially rotted off the vine, I have been just dropping them on the soil and covering them up with the next layer of grass clippings. It occurred to me that the seeds might germinate, but I suppose this will be too late to yield fall tomatoes?? I have never thought of putting in new plants in July, thinking it would be too hot and dry for a new plant to survive. But you seem to be doing it with success, so I might follow your lead and give it a try next year. I've no time to can during the summer, as I work full time, and just keeping up with the garden takes all my extra time. But I have good luck with coring and cutting up ripe tomatoes and putting them in gallon ice-cream tubs in the freezer. In the fall, when the weather is cooler, and freezer space is getting scarce, I will take some of the tubs out, let them thaw, at which time the skins separate themselves. After removing the skins, I heat up the whole batch, pack in quart jars and can as many as I have time for. I use a lot of canned tomatoes during the fall and winter months.

Yes, my husband's family was the same. With 12 hungry mouths to feed, his parents resorted to hunting for food more often than not. The boys were all given guns for christmas (maybe pellet guns or bee-bee guns, I'm not much of a gun person. They werent' expensive but the boys used them to hunt small game) DH and his brothers tell lots of stories to this day about their squirrel huntin' and fishing days. One story that really grossed me out was that their mom always deep-fried the squirrel's head and she would crack the skull at the dinner table and eat the brains out of the skull with a spoon! EEEEEEEEK! I think I'd have passed out right then and there.

His mom told me one time they moved onto a farm that grew nothing but soybeans. It was too late in the year to plant a garden. She said she learned how to cook soybeans lots of different ways that year. And yes, lots of pancakes, cornbread and biscuits. They got a waffle iron from some place and Mom started using that, the family thought they were really eating fancy then. And she made her own pancake/waffle syrup: two kinds, one called "milk syrup" and the other was "chocolate syrup", which was just "milk syrup" with cocoa powder in it. We all have the recipe, because it's "soul food" now to all her kids.

One of DH's sisters told me that one time they were just about all to starve to death and their dad came bursting through the back door with a stolen hog in the middle of the night. Those were desperate times.

I guess I never appreciated how well off my family was. We owned our own farm in KS, and my parents only had 5 kids, I was the youngest and my oldest sister was 16 when I was born, so we were spaced apart more than DH's siblings were. Dad supplemented our farm income by working on an oil well. He was a driller. When the drilling company went to Oklahoma, my dad went with it and we soon sold the farm and moved into a small house in a little town named "Copan", which is pretty close to the KS/OK border. By then my oldest sister was married, my brother was in the Army and my next oldest married a boyfriend from "back home" soon after we moved. The house in Copan was on two lots and mom grew a garden every year. I remember being little on the farm and we lived well, with cows, chickens, pigs, geese running around... mom made her own cottage cheese... She was a true farm wife. All my growing up years, I never knew hunger. Even so, I remember my dad coming home just dog-tired and covered in drilling mud from head to toe, and one Christmas when mom made everything because there was no money to buy. But I wasn't born till 1947, so I missed the really hard years. DH, being a little older than me, and having older sisters who were having children before he was even born, got in on the tail end of it with his family.

Nowadays, I think there are a lot of people who are in the same shape financially as in those days. The difference now is that it's possible to borrow money if you can show you have a job. People now aren't learning how to live on a shoestring, how to "make do" till they can afford otherwise, like they did back then. It scares me sometimes to think about how many people there are who are hopelessly in debt.

Many of my tomatoes(the fruits, not the plants) are browning and cracking from too much rain:-(. And even the breeds that aren't cherry tomatoes are ripening when they're no more than an inch in diameter! Do you know if this has anything to do with the all of the rain? I harvest peppers, herbs, and teensy tomatoes daily, but it has only been that way since a few weeks ago.

I have probably picked 15 tomatoes in the last week, and I am very grateful, but so far this has been my experience:
the beefsteak and homely homer were the best tasting, brandywine the least tasty. So hopefully, the Brandywine for the fall will be alot better. The sweet cluster was really good, the Rutgers, Mortgage Lifter, Box Car Willie have been fair. Most of the Green Zebra's had BER. I picked one Black Krim, it still had alot of green, but it felt really soft, so I thought it must be ripe, but it didn't have that much taste, so probably wasn't ripe. The Rutgers have been kind of overly soft too, before reaching ripe color. Still waiting on the Cherokee Purple, Caspian Pink, ARGG, Mr. Stripey, and Orange Oxheart.

Ilene,

I agree than many Americans aren't much better off now than my dad's family was back in the 1930s, and the difference is that now people can buy homes, cars, etc. on credit. My dad's family didn't have much, but they also didn't have any debt.

My maternal grandmother used to tell me stories of her younger years--she was born in 1898. She lived by the philosophy many people lived by back then: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without".

Fall tomatoes are so easy....the hardest part is remembering to water them once or twice a day for their first few weeks in the ground. After that, though, they are fine and my fall tomatoes have less problems caused by the weather and less pests. Depending on when the first fall freeze occurs, they can be incredibly productive.

You MIGHT get tomatoes this fall from seed from fruit that falls to the ground, but more than likely you'll get fruit the following year, if any at all.

Jalapenogirl11,

The problems you are encountering probably do relate to the excessive rainfall. I have never seen tomatoes remain too small because of rain, though. In general, excessive rain gives you larger tomatoes with a watered-down flavor. It is possible your plants suffered severe root damage so the fruits are not being fed enough to grow, but I've never seen that happen. It also is possible that the heavy rains have leached all the nutrition out of the soil and you might be able to correct some of the problems you are seeing with an application of a tomato fertilizer. On the plants that are ripening small tomatoes that are NOT supposed to be cherries, have you had any large fruit at all? If not, the plant or seed might have been mislabeled.

Sheri,

None of my tomatoes taste as good as they normally do, but now that the rains have stopped, I expect that to improve rapidly

Black Krim still does have fairly green shoulders when it is ripe. I had a lot of trouble harvesting it at the right time the first year I grew it...I kept leaving it on the plant too long. Fruit softness is a better indicator of ripeness with Black Krim than 'redness' since it doesn't turn red, but is more of a greenish, maroonish, brownish, reddish color. My friends always think I am giving them rotten or overripe tomatoes the first time I give them a Black Krim.

I have picked a lot of tomatoes today. I'll report later on the flavor of some of the newer varieties, after I have a chance to taste them!

Dawn

Couldn't sleep last nite so I got up about 4 AM. Heard some noise at my back door and when I turned the backyard light on and to my surprise spied a big fat old opossum scurrying away from under my tomato plants. Guess it hasn't been the birds but the opossum that's been chewin at the bottoms of my ripening tomatos.

What's an organic non-lethal solution to getting the thing to let my tomatos alone?

Hank

Hank,

Once a possum has found a food source, it is hard to get it to go away. We have had the best luck with trapping them using a live trap and then driving miles and miles away from anyone and releasing the possum near a creek.

Most possums will climb a fence or tomato cage, so that doesn't usually deter them. Some people put out predator urine but is has to be reapplied after you water or after it rains. Predator urine is available in many formulations, such as Critter Ridder or Shake Away.

You might have luck setting some rat traps and placing them around the tomato plants so that the possum will walk on them, and then will be scared away by the traps snapping at their toes.

Some people have had luck by spraying the ground around their plants with vinear, but I have never tried that. Others have had success with soaking cottonballs in peppermint oil and laying those on the ground near the plants. I haven't tried that one either.

An electric fence around the garden with several strands of wire is probably a good long-term solution.

Dawn

It's funny. You don't know you have a possum then it shows itself once then it starts showing itself all the time. I woke up around 11 this morning and when I looked out in the yard dang if I don't see that possum scurrying along the back fence again. LOL

I like the mouse trap idea but won't that maybe injure the birds? I'd hate to do that. What about a possums sense of smell? Might ground black or cayenne pepper scattered on the surface of the ground under and near the tomato plants cause the possum to go elsewhere?

I've got a small live trap I used for squirrels in my attic long ago but think it's not big enough for a possum. Maybe the OKC animal control folks will lend me one of theirs again? I had a problem with wild cats a while back and they left a trap for me. I was catching 2 to 3 cats a day for a while. Maybe they'll let me borrow one again. If I catch it I could take it out to the woods around Lake Hefner.

Hank

Hank,

Well, we always have posssums, so for us it is just a matter of how many we are seeing or how often we are seeing them. I LIKE possums, but don't like the damage they do to the garden.

Some people have luck with sprinkling cayenne pepper around, but others say the pepper does not deter their possums at all.

I suppose the mouse traps might hurt the birds, if the birds are landing on the ground. Oops. Well, then maybe you can borrow a trap and then trap and release them.

Is your yard fenced and, if so, are they coming over or under the fence?

Our first year here we had a trash can that sat beside the side porch on the north side of the house. Every morning we would find possums in that trash can. I think they were jumping down into it from the porch railing. It was an easy way to trap and release them elsewhere.....just toss the covered trash can into the back of the truck and take the critter out to the middle of the country and release it. Once skunks started getting in the trash can, though, we had to find a new strategy.....and moved the trash can inside the garage.

OK, the thunder and lightning are getting close so I need to get off the computer and turn it off. Talk to you later.

Dawn

Hank,
We had a possum up in our attic once. We would sit in the LR and be reading and here this patter, patter, patter across the ceiling. My husband had left the ladder down in the garage and garage door open one afternoon, and the critter climbed the ladder.

I called an animal trapper, and he told me he would charge a lot of money to catch that possum, or I could take care of it myself. He told me to use tuna fish and make a trail to where I wanted that possum to go.

I did take a can of tuna up in the attic and made the trail. I sat down on an old stool and waited to see what would happen. It didn't take long for the possum to smell the tuna and follow my trail. The problem was, I still had the can of tuna in my hand, and instead of going out of the attic, the possum started heading for me! When I moved my foot up to keep him from touching me, I scared the thing and he took off, and didn't stop until he was out of the garage! And, then he moved into the unfinished house next door!!.

The moral of this story is if you get that trap, tuna works as a good bait.

Sandy