Hazel, That is hysterical. Are they your ducks and geese or are they wild ones that just showed up?

Our big pond is full for the first time since 2009 and occasionally wild ducks fly in and land and swim there, until the dogs notice them and start barking and then that is the end of that. That pond has been dry for so many years that I didn't think we'd ever see water in it again, much less see it full and overflowing to the overflow pond that sits about 50 yards away. The overflow pond also is overflowing and running into the creek, which runs into a larger creek and then into the Red River. Tim is as excited as a child because the pond is brimming with frog eggs. I guess it is going to be a great frog year anyhow.

Lisa, I am going to spray every inch of my clothing with Deep Woods Off, although I'd like to not spray it on exposed skin. We'll see. I hope to work all morning out there, at least pulling weeds, harvesting and cleaning up deadfall limbs and leaves from the nearby woodland that the storms have blown down into the garden. We have a 90% chance of rain today and they used the dreaded words "Heavy Rain" but I think I ought to be able to work out there for at least a half day. The mosquitoes are awful and may be a problem all summer.

Kim, It looks great and I am so glad that this year is better than last year. Getting away from those crop dusters surely helped.

We're at around 33" of rainfall at our place so far this year. That's almost our annual rainfall for an average year, so it is far too much for the first 5 months, but we get what we get, so we'll just have to deal with it. Just a couple of dry, sunny days would help a lot. Nothing gets to dry out at all when it rains about every other day.

Carol, The rainfall likely is keeping the lilies really happy so at least some good is coming from all this rain. My hollyhocks are the happiest they've been in years, except for a couple of plants in a low spot that have drowned, and some of the other flowers are doing really well. It just depends on which part of the garden they're in and how much they do or don't like tons of moisture.

Just talking about gardening feeds my soul too, but I'm a lot happier when I get to be outdoors playing in the dirt (or mud) and doing something more hands-on than just talking about it. Today I hope to be weeding before it gets to the point that the weeds are outgrowing the plants. The constant rain has turned my garden mulch into slimey, decomposing mush, so I essentially have a mostly un-mulched garden at this point, and the weeds are taking advantage of that.

Dawn

It definitely helped getting away from shade and sprayers and no hail this year!

My garden doesn't have near enough mulch either. Every time we get a chance we push mow the acre area with a bagger we dump it in the paths until it dries which hasn't happened lately. Soon I want to plant the acre in something I can mow besides weeds and wildflowers. Well we don't really mow wildflowers we kinda go around them.
I also have an enormous amount of ground cherries. I am watching closely because I missed harvesting them last year.
From the fling
Four of my 8 blackberries are alive and well. Seven I got at sale down the road from the fling. Thriving are -rhubarb, artichoke, comfrey, sedums, ajugla, iris', tomatoes. I love my new friends garden. when I finish it I will put a picture up. it will be a beautiful view out of my new bedroom window.

I tried the first ripe sun gold earlier this week, and I can honestly say it tasted awful...no better than a grocery store tomato. I have never grown sun gold before, but I am assuming the mealy taste was due to being so wet and not just the variety.

I harvested the rest of the kohlrabi. Only one had split. Also harvested some mustards, lettuce and chard for dinner tonight. Something with a very large mouth is taking bites out of the chard, but overall I'm surprised I'm not seeing more insect problems given that I'm not spending any time out there scouting for bugs.

The bottom leaves of the garlic are starting to brown a little. I don't have any scapes yet. There have been a few garlic plants that have just fallen over, and I've gone ahead and pulled those. The heads were small, but not rotted and perfectly edible (although thin skinned, so I'm sure it wouldn't store well).

The Heidi plants from Dawn are growing well, as are my other tomato plants. I have green tomatoes on all my plants. I feel like fruit set has stalled a little, but that might be my imagination. Some plants have rolled leaves, but they are looking okay.

Shishito and jalepeno peppers are flowering. The Habaneros aren't growing at all, but I expect them to be fine

The garlic is the only thing I have at ground level. Everything else is in 12 inch tall raised beds. We have gotten around 20 inches this month, compared to the 15 inches A YEAR I got while gardening in Albuquerque, so every day is just a learning day.

The garden smells rotten.

Other than planting the zinnias and petunias from the spring fling, I haven't added any annuals to the ornamental beds. The violas from October are still absolutely beautiful. Some of the nurseries are already talking about CLOSING for the summer, when I haven't even thought about planing yet. I also haven't mulched yet, and need to get serious about getting that done.

I had mosquitoes in the garden with me at NOON today. I reminded them that they are supposed to be out from dusk to dawn.

Krista, who is a desert creature at heart and is really working on finding the positive in this weather

Krista, normally the saying is "If you don't like the Oklahoma weather, wait a minute." We seem to be stuck in a Groundhog Day type loop right now. I can almost promise next year will be different.

Krista, With SunGold, it takes a little practice to find exactly the right shade of color that indicates full ripeness with the best flavor, and even then, that stage of ripeness can vary from person to person because some folks like a flavor that is more tart and others like one that is more sweet. It might be you picked them a little early (some people like to do this so that they can eat them while they have more tanginess and less sweetness) but it seems more likely the excess moisture and lack of sunlight/heat are affecting the flavor. I like to pick them when they are a deep rich orange. I also think that the earliest ripe fruits from SunGold, even in a normal year, just don't have the same flavor as the later ones that mature in a lot of heat.

Craig LeHoullier, in his excellent book "Epic Tomatoes" (my all-time favorite book about heirloom tomatoes),, gives the best description of SunGold's flavor variations that I've ever read, describing three stages at which they can be harvested/eaten and the flavor that accompanies each stage: at a pale orange, the flavor is full and complex with what he calls "a snappy bite". He describes their flavor at medium orange as a blend of sweetness and tartness, and says at maximum ripeness, they are like candy "nearly overwhelmingly sweet". I like them in either of the two latter stages, but not so much in the first stage. In the summer the fruit hold on the plant a long time most years and you can harvest them when they are so ripe they're about to fall off the plant and they'll still taste wonderfully sweet, rich and complex. They are prone to splitting when they receive excess moisture, though, so this might end up being a tough year for them, or at least a tough period of time in May and well into June, depending on how long the flooding rains last.

Oklahoma weather has earned its reputation for extreme weather over many decades, but this year is extra extreme, even for us, and we can blame it quite a bit on El Nino. Normally I love El Nino years because they tend to bring badly needed rain to my end of the state, but this year we seem stuck in a pattern where it cannot stop raining. Earlier in spring this year was reminding me of 2007, a year in which we had extreme rain in spring and a lot of flooding, but then summer was really nice once the rain stopped. Now I am starting to worry it will be more like 1997, in which we had a very strong El Nino pattern that gave us non-stop rain deeply into summer---maybe all summer long---and cold summer weather. I remember that the Fourth of July was a rainout (we lived in north central TX then) with rain, fog, highs in the 60s and misty, crappy air all day and night that foiled our attempts to let the kids set off fireworks at my brother's place out in the country south of Ft Worth. I hope that this rainy pattern ends and we don't have a repeat of that sort of weather this summer. It was a horrible garden year with plants just drowning and dying in moisture-laden soil, and I remember huge 100-200 year old trees in some areas just crashing to the ground because the heavily moisture-laden soil no longer could support their weight.

In a way, I sort of expected epic rainfall this year. Once the rain started falling here last June, when we were in extreme drought about to go into exceptional drought, it never really stopped falling, except for a brief dry spell at the end of August and early in September, so we were awfully wet as 2014 ended so I expected it would continue into 2015. I was fairly excited about it---after 3 to 5 years of drought, depending on where you live in the state, heavy rainfall was needed to put an end to the drought and refill the lakes.

Then the new year began and , in 2015 we have had above average rainfall in every month at our house, except maybe for one, and in each succeeding month, we've gone more and more above average for that month. This is really making me dread June, which will be a make-it-or-break-it month for a lot of waterlogged gardens. If we can get the usual June heat and sunshine without such excessive rainfall, I think we will see a lot of garden recovery. If, on the other hand, this overwhelming rainfall continues well into June, I think we will have a lot of miserable gardens and even more miserable gardeners.

I cannot believe any nursery owners are already talking about shutting down. Surely they still have plenty of stock to sell? I haven't bought much of anything yet to plant because I do not have any plantable ground, and still have dozens of home-grown plants awaiting a home----some of which I actually have dug up from the ground and put in temporary containers to keep them from drowning and dying. I do remember that in 2004, the rain seemed to stop in early to mid-July. The guys who were building our oversized garage, which is designed to look like a big red barn and has tons of storage and shop space, were finishing it up in early July and there was lots of ugly bare ground around it....making it look like what it was---a construction site. I sowed zinnia and cosmos seeds around July 4th or maybe the week after, they germinated quickly and grew like mad since there was abundant moisture, and were blooming maybe 6 or 7 weeks after I planted them. They bloomed until fall. In 2004, we didn't have the best garden year early in the summer, but by mid-summer the tomato flavor was improving a lot as the rain tapered off to more normal levels and the splitting and cracking largely stopped. So, if this year turns out more like 2004 than 2007 or 1997, I think we still can have some good production from our gardens. The thing that scares me about using 2004 as an analog year for this year is that, in 2004, we had a foot of rain in June. If that happens this year, my garden may not survive, given that we have had almost an entire year's worth of rainfall already.

The mosquitoes here are out and about 24/7 and hang around outside the doors so that when you walk outside there are swarms of mosquitoes just waiting for you. I think we are going to have an epic mosquito year, and there is little we can do to fight them at this point. Even if you are putting mosquito bits or mosquito dunks in standing water, and pouring standing water out of buckets and such, there's so much standing water everywhere for miles around that you're barely going to make a dent in the mosquito population.

One thing that surprises me is that I'm seeing relatively low levels of disease on plants, although the beans have rust, as do the hollyhocks (and I'd be shocked if they didn't at this point), and there's some powdery mildew on the snap peas, which actually appeared and spread quickly when we had a string of 3-4 dry days. The tomatoes will have major foliar disease issues just as soon as we start having high temperatures in the 80s instead of in the 60s and 70s. There's also not nearly as many pests as usual, although maybe they are out there and I just don't know it because I'm inside a lot more than usual since it is raining so much.

I pulled weeds for a while yesterday and scouted for signs of insect damage but didn't find much. I need to harvest green beans, sugar snap peas and tomatoes today. They are producing really well at the moment, but some of the onions are looking increasingly and desperately ill with foliar issues on their leaves. I have resolved to appreciate whatever harvest I get this year because we are having the kind of rain that makes getting a harvest very difficult. Without raised beds, I doubt I'd have much of a garden left at this point.

Amy, I know that most years our weather pattern is highly changeable and that whatever weather is plaguing us at the moment is likely to change soon, but this doesn't seem at all like that kind of year, does it?

I'm worried the weather won't change for a long time yet and we'll see so much worse garden problems than we already have. This ground-hog day movie playing out in our yards and gardens, and indeed in our communities across the state, needs to end. And, while we gardeners are discussing how it impacts our yards and gardens, landscapes and woodlands, pastures and rangeland areas, the impact on various communities is horrendous. There's so much flooding damage to buildings, roadways, homes, etc., and with homes washing off into lakes and rivers.......we have so many problems now in this state related to weather that go above and beyond our usual "gardens drowning in heavy rainfall" problem. The economic impact will be huge, especially for tourism/recreational type businesses near lakes and rivers that usually make almost their entire annual income during the summer months.

I'm beginning to toy with the idea of plugging in the lights on my light shelf and growing greens indoors under lights in the spare bedroom, just so I can play in the dirt a little bit now and then. That is just sad.

Dawn, this is my salad table. It drains too fast and I WAS trying to figure out how to fix that, but I'll leave it awhile. It sits under the eave on the patio, so it is mostly protected.

For some reason that looks like another image has superimposed over it? There are no solo cups in it. Although the dead dill plant is in the back in a white cup. I cannot grow dill. i have killed 4 plants so far this year.

Amy, in a normal year I plant dill and I will get a few plants, but it never all seems to germinate. I have not put a dill seed into my garden in two years now and I noticed that I have lots of dill coming up in an area I haven't planted or even weeded.

I have something new: the sun!

Amy, The solution is simple. Just add clay. I have a lot of native red clay if you need some. : )

What sort of mix do you have in it? I would use something with coir added to it to increase its water-holding capacity. You can buy coir alone and add it to any mix, or you can buy a mix specially-formulated to hold water like MG Moisture Control. You probably cannot add anything while the plants are actively growing though. I have, upon occasion, added a layer of compost 1/2" thick on top of the lettuce table's soil-less mix as a mulch and that helped keep it from drying out too fast.

I have a salad table (cattle trough) outdoors, but I need something I can do indoors during the 23.3 hours per day it is raining, foggy, misty or whatever around here. I need to be able to play in the dirt when I am stuck indoors.

Carol, Maybe it is the coolness and the moisture. I have about 100 times as many volunteers (of all kinds) this year as we see most years.

Y'all, my dill reseeds all over the place but it originally was hard to get it started here. I think most years we are too dry for it to germinate well, or maybe we just go from too cold to too hot too fast for it. This year I have had it come up from one end of the garden to another, and that's a good thing. It is drowning in the low, wettest parts of the garden but thriving on the higher ground. Dill is one of those things that wasn't very easy to start from seed (it really must be picky about soil temps or moisture or something), just like Laura Bush petunias and also verbena bonariensis, but now they all come up all over creation. Fennel and bronze fennel have been the same way. Perhaps as they reseed each year, I'm getting strains that are better adapted and happier to grow here each year than they were the year before.

Bon, The sun is here too, and it toyed with us for a while, appearing and disappearing before it decided to stick around a while.

I hope the sun dries up the puddles in the yard. The chickens are getting cranky. When I opened the mudroom door to let the cats come indoors at lunch time, one little Mille Fleur rooster walked right in with them and I had to "escort" him back out to the wading pool formerly known as the yard.

Dawn

I don't know what to think about my flower garden. I went to dig up a plant for a friend and 2 inches down I ran into a puddle of water. I wonder now if many of my flowers will die? and the vegetable garden sits in water. Most of my plants don't seem to mind it, but who knows what will happen in the long run. At least we have water here. And at least my yard is on a slope.

Jess, Many plants really can tolerate wet roots for quite a long time. Our yard is the same as yours. The shrubs are sitting in water that is right on top of the shrub bed, but I chose hollies on purpose specifically because they can tolerate periods of standing water, so I am not worried about them. They are on the higher part of our property so even though they seem really wet now, that water will drain away over the next few days. None of the perennials growing near them are in trouble yet, but they might not make it. It just depends on what sort of plant it is. I have tried to choose plants that tolerate both drought and extreme rainfall, but in both cases, they can eventually can get to a point where they have had too much drought or too much rainfall and then they die. That's just how it goes sometimes.

Very little has actually died within my fenced-in veggie, flower and herb garden---just a few flowers and herbs at the lower end of the garden that were planted at grade level. The corn at that end looks iffy but it is surviving so far. I think the peas and beans have suffered the most, with the peas looking at lot worse than the beans. Despite the fact that they are heavily waterlogged, both the peas and beans have been producing great. I've already got almost a year's worth of snap beans frozen for us to eat in 2015-2016 and we have plenty for fresh eating as well. The snap peas never produce as heavily as the beans, and this isn't the snap peas' best year (we got over 30 lbs. of them in their best year), but it is looking like it will be the second best year ever, so I cannot even complain about them. The bottoms of the plants look bad, but the higher up you go, the better the rest of the plant looks. The vining snap peas are doing better than the bush snap peas. They all are in raised beds, but the Cascadia snap peas are in a raised bed that probably holds moisture better than the raised bed where the vining snap peas are growing.

All the trees, shrubs, vines and ground covers are amazingly green and lush and happy, so I guess we can thank the torrential rainfall this year for that.

I'm just grateful we do not live on or very close to the banks of any large pond, creek, river or lake. Many of those areas are flooding and people are dealing with much worse problems than struggling/dying plants. Even though we are pretty close to the Red River, we are at a significantly higher elevation and don't have to worry that its' flooding will make it to us.

I'm hoping to have a day soon where I can walk outdoors to go to the garden and not have to splash through water to get there.....and not have to scan the skies for storm clouds either. We have rain in our forecast for every day for the next week which is discouraging, but then, every day for the past week,even though it has rained the rainfall has repeatedly been much lower than was forecast, so I feel like the worst of the heavy rain may be behind us.

I put seeds in the ground today. I have had 2 beds covered with plastic for 2 or 3 weeks waiting for the rain to let up. Except for one place it must have leaked it was pretty dry. We uncovered yesterday, and got 1/4" last night so just about right for planting. I planted pole beans, okra, cucumbers, melons and pigeon peas. Also flower and herb companions. I took nearly a whole pack of dill and tossed it in the cucumber bed, I didn't "water in" so Owasso will get no more rain. You're welcome.

Thanks dawn. That is good to know. This year I put in various kinds of Artemisia that I bought from Companion Plants online. Just love that store. They are all looking good. Hard to believe. All my plants look healthy. My ferns in the wooded area are really huge this year.

Amy, I need to put in seeds too. I have some in small pots and they are not growing fast. Got them from a seed company in CA at an herb store and will look for them online as they are plants I have never heard of. kind of Victorian or English. Not sure.

And now I see another storm heading our way.

Jessaka, I have oodles of the common artemisia in the heavily-saturated back garden and so far all the plants are just fine. They've had about 35" of rain so far this year, and I expected they might drown but so far they haven't. They are in sandy soil on a slope. They have been in the ground back there for two years. I raised them from seed and about two weeks after I got them transplanted into the ground in 2013, we had a month with over 13" of rainfall. I thought that they might not survive that, but they did, so even though they need well-drained soil, it appears they tolerate heavily-saturated soil for a fairly long period of time.

I bet the ferns are happy. This is their kind of spring.

Amy, I hope this morning's line of storms isn't dumping tons of rain on your newly-seeded area. It is pouring down here and we are under a Flood Advisory to go with our ever-present Flood Warning for the Red River. Right now our back yard is a lake again. At least the new lake hides all the ugly, muddy tire tracks from Tim's Sunday Lawn Mowing Quest.

I tried to prepare for the expected heavy rainfall by harvesting the garden heavily yesterday. Now I'm wishing I'd picked more of the cherry tomatoes. Maybe I can run outside and pick them after the rain stops in an effort to keep them from splitting. SunGold splits so fast in rainy weather that we are jokingly calling it RainGold lately. By the time I stopped harvesting yesterday I had harvested about 5 gallons of beans and peas and only took the time to pick a handful of big tomatoes. I was going to harvest all the little tomatoes and the cabbage, and maybe the corn, today. I didn't know we'd wake up to a strong thunderstorm.

My yellow straightneck squash plants are blooming and producing squash, but we aren't getting any harvest because each squash starts rotting almost as soon as it forms....and they are in a raised bed, which just doesn't help enough this year.

I think the NWS has messed up next Tuesday's forecast because right now it shows partly cloudy weather and no rain. That cannot be right, can it?

Dawn

UNCLE, I didn't mean it, I will not make any more statements tempting fate. 2 1/4 inches in the rain gauge and still raining. It came in about half an hour. All those stupid dill seeds will be washed to the edge of the bed. Probabably be a bumper crop , huh. This is the drainage ditch next to the house. Normally you can't see water from the house.

It's raining again. It hasn't rained here in about 8 hours so I guess that's new. I hate to say I wish it would stop raining when I look at where we've been, but seriously, stop raining already. Not for the year, just for like a week. And then rain once or twice a week after that and we'll be good.

Flooding aside, this has really been wonderful. Lake Altus was about 10% full and Tom Steed I think 15% full when this all started and now they're both at or over 100%. The rain has caused a lot of flooding and I feel bad for the people who've had damage but we needed this so badly.

My garden is looking a little empty. I got my tomato plants in early and a few peppers and then the rains started and I haven't been able to get much else in the ground. My tomato plants are covered in both fruit and blooms and I harvested my first ripe tomato a few days ago. My peppers have also been covered in blooms but they're all dropping. This week we had a couple days in the 80s and sunny but that's about all the sun we've had. There's no rain in next week's forecast so maybe my peppers will be happier.

I can't wait for the sun to stay out a little more! I went to the Will Rogers Garden Festival today. Disappointed in how few vendors were there, but I bought feverfew and a pink clumping shamrock. So now I I have these to plant and the Grand Mum Monarda and Indigofera Ambylantha I bought last week! I can hardly contain the excitement! Oops! I forgot. I also have a guara I need to get in the ground.

Amy, If all the dill pops up in thick clumps because the rain washed the seed into little piles, you can dig them and transplant them while they are small. I do it all the time to spread them out since a bunch of them inevitably spring up together in very close quarters.

Leslie, I wondered how you were doing out west. It has been wonderful to watch all the rain falling in western OK, at least until Lawton started flooding the other day----it didn't seem so wonderful then.

I imagine the sunshine will make the peppers straighten up and set fruit. My pepper plants have been acting about the same as yours. We are harvesting tons of tomatoes and I have been scolding the peppers and telling them to hurry up and catch up so I can make salsa. Usually the jalapenos and serranos are not too far behind the tomatoes in producing a harvest, but this year they are way behind. I'll probably either have to chop up the tomatoes for salsa and then freeze them for salsa-making later on when the peppers are ready, or just buy enough peppers to make the salsa while the tomatoes are fresh.

After all the rainfall, I'm just relieved to have tomato plants and pepper plants that are still alive at his point. Hopefully with sunnier, warmer weather the garden will kick it up a notch and start producing more of the warm-season crops.

There's no rain in our forecast for the next week either and I wouldn't mind it if the next week had no rain as well. We've had a year's worth of rain in less than 5 months and a couple of weeks off would let everything dry up a bit at least.

nowyousedum, I think you are about to get your wish for sunshine. I need to go do some plant shopping too. Instead of buying things all along like you have been, I've been waiting for a sunny day to go to the plant nurseries. I think that sunny day is about to arrive.

Our native gaura in the fields started blooming about a week ago. At least the wildflowers are doing great this year. It doesn't seem like the excess moisture has held them back too much, although I think the lack of sunshine might have slowed down some of them. We have had an hour or two of sunlight here and there the last few days and the plants all did seem to perk up quite a bit. I imagine a few full days of sun will make all the plants grow and bloom like crazy.

The only thing new in my garden the last couple of days is the rough green tree snake who's been hanging out in the asparagus plants. Occasionally it moves over to the cannas, wrapping itself around the leaves and lying in wait for some yummy insect to come along. I'm okay with the green tree snakes being in the garden (as if I could keep them out of it anyhow) but I still try to avoid getting too close to them----even a bite from a non-venomous snake can hurt and can become infected.

Dawn

we have had a lot of rainy days here this week. The mosquitos are horrible and I can hardly get in the garden. But everything is growing and because of the slope we don't have too many waterlog problems. Most people here don't even have a garden in yet.
I harvested my very first ever broccoli yesterday, 2 heads so that was exciting. I figured it would be a race to see if I got any and it was. this week is going to get hot so I am sure it is getting ready to shut down. We dug our first potatoes last night. We were going to dig one plant but littleman was having so much fun he dug 4 and got 8 pounds of baby reds. I had to have one taste and they were good. One of them was rusty inside. is that from too much water? Pulled a baby carrot and he thought that was the best carrot ever.

Well, I hope it was tasty! Something ate one of my feverfew down to a nub. Haven't even gotten it planted yet!

i found tomatoes! I actually walked the garden/yarden today. Every single tomato plant is thriving and multiple varieties are forming. I'm so emotional. Much sadness for the upcoming loss (we're moving) mixed with pride of accomplishment. I am astonished they are not starving for nutrients at the bottom of the slope, but I diligently planted them with nutrients and they are extremely healthy. They'll probably start fading the minute I lock the gates and leave. lol

Kim, That sort of discoloration can have different causes. It might be hollow heart, or it might be one of the rot diseases. I'll link some info on hollow heart as a starting place for figuring out what happened.

Little Man is right. EVERYTHING you grow yourself is the best thing ever at the moment you are harvesting it, showing it off and eating it. See there, he already has learned the most important lesson about gardening: homegrown is best!

Oh, and ditto on the mosquitoes. They follow me around like a gang of hired assassins.

Nowyousedum, That is just terrible. You might be able to prevent whatever ate the feverfew by spraying it with hot pepper tea or garlic-pepper tea. Many recipes for this type of home-made pest repellent can be found by Googling, or you can buy a product called Garlic Barrier or a different one called Hot Pepper Wax. I've never had anything eat feverfew, but rodents in general do seem very fond of many herbs.

Bon, Congrats on the tomatoes. We already had tomatoes setting (albeit slowly) throughout the rainy period, but I noticed much heavier fruitset this past week. I expect it will get even better with this nice long run of dry, sunny days. The temperatures are almost perfect for fruitset right now, finally. The ripe SunGolds are still RainGolds, splitting and bursting like mad, but now that the excessive rainfall has stopped, maybe that problem will go away.

Can you leave the gate unlocked and sneak back and harvest your own tomatoes?

There's not much new in my garden, except that today I harvested about 65 or 70 ears of early sweet corn. It is likely to be the only corn we get. It was grown in raised beds near the top of the garden so handled the May rainfall just fine. The mid-season corn is at the wettest, lowest end of the garden and I doubt it will live long enough to make ears. I never planted the late corn because of the rainfall.

Tomorrow I'm hoping I'll find time to harvest the cabbage, yellow squash and maybe some of the potatoes, but we have a pretty full schedule tomorrow and gardening may not fit into it.

It really is too wet to even venture into the garden, but I did it anyway, taking great care to stay only on the already-compacted pathways and to not walk into areas without raised beds. Actually, it was a whole lot of slipping and sliding on wet, slimey mulch in pathways more so than walking.

My garden is full of lady bugs and spined soldier beetle nymphs. There's also tons of little frogs about the size of a dime. I'm not sure what kind they are or where they came from. I've never seen so many little frogs inside the actual garden. I had to close the gate to keep the cats out of the garden so that they wouldn't prey upon the little tiny frogs. So far, not an asparagus beetle or Colorado potato beetle in sight, but I spotted the first harlequin bug from a distance today and it disappeared before I could get around the raised bed that separated me from it. I bet I find it tomorrow while harvesting cabbage.

Hooray, hooray, hooray for the first sunny day. It was a grand and wonderful thing, wasn't it?

Dawn

Hollow Heart and Internal Brown Spots in Potatoes

I will be thrilled if the sun shines since we have had very little sun. I couldn't sleep so decided to get back up tonight. Just checked the temp and it is 53 here....yeh, Jun 1st and it's 53 degrees.

Our low temp dropped to 55, but I'm not complaining. The cool nights probably won't last much longer and I'd rather wake up to lows in the 50s than to lows in the 70s. This is supposed to be our last unseasonably cool morning down here, so I want to make the most of it by getting out early and harvesting while it is mild and pleasant. I'm dreading the inevitable high heat indexes that are looming ahead of us with all this moisture that we've got.

I had to work today but I am going to the garden now. it is a gorgeous cool day and I want to mow as much as possible. I need mulch.
We lost one tomato plant with all the rain we have had out of 70ish so that good.
I lost a bunch of cucumbers, or they never came up. I finally got that bed 13 rows completely weeded yesterday and there are some gaps in my rows. My Armenian rows seemed to have the least plants.
Some of the cucumbers look like they have mildew but I am going to wait and see.

thanks for the link Dawn. it is likely brown spot. only one had it so far. I was trying to convince my son to dig all the reds I was afraid they would rot before the ground dries out. He thinks they will be fine

I love it -- this is my sole motivation to mow, also. I need mulch!
Tomato plants are okay, some are big and healthy and some are the same 2' they were three weeks ago with little change. Peppers hopefully will be fine, the bell peppers were bigger plants than the hot peppers and I'm feeling good that these fruits will grow.
Pulled out my first big batch of lettuce gone to seed this morning, because I loved the tall yellow flowers but the stalks went powdery-white so they are quarantined in a pile on the other side of the shed.
The cool artichoke I picked up from Dawn at the fling seems very happy!
Marigold, basil, more lettuce, radishes all coming in. Pinched back the volunteer basil for the first time today... I'm hoping to be on top of it this year and not constantly deadheading. I don't know why I tried doing broccoli and brussels in the spring, I think that is a fall-only for me now. I have about a 2" broccoli head and that's all.
Onions, swiss chard still maintaining. Kale is just feeding the cabbage worms followed by the rabbit. Spinach gave up the ghost weeks ago and last week I pulled out the last remaining snow pea plant. I have to remember how these tomatoes are going to literally take over and not to try and put more things in between them besides some marigolds and basil. In the mostly-mulch border, dusty miller is happy, coleus is alright, snap dragons all died and one neon-yellow one just grew back for a final flowering, the new paperwhites and iris courtesy of fling are settling in, and the foxglove was probably a mistake. Coneflower is not blooming yet.
Oh! And I got my second batch of worm castings from the vermiculture tubs we set up at Christmas. Very cool.

Kim, I doubt I have enough experience with potatoes in wet soil (since mine is usually dry) to advise you on how wet is too wet once potatoes have matured.

Normally, once the potato plants have died back naturally, you leave the potato tubers in the ground for at least 2 weeks to allow the skin to thicken up and toughen up. This helps ensure the potatoes store better.

When soil is excessively wet, you aren't supposed to dig the potatoes until the soil dries out substantially. The main reason for this is that many potato diseases thrive in wet soil. If you cut or nick a potato while harvesting in wet soil, that open wound allows disease to make entry, and you may find your potatoes rotting while in storage.

Once the hot temperatures arrive, though, potatoes can rot very easily in the ground, whether the ground is very wet or very dry. It is a matter of excessive heat. The problem is that excessive heat with moisture is even worse for your potatoes than excessive heat with dry soil.

What I usually do when the ground is pretty wet is just dig a few potatoes (kinda like robbing new potatoes from plants without disrupting the entire plant) and check them to see how they are faring in the wet ground. If there is any sign of disease, I hurry up and dig them up before I lose the whole crop.

Sometimes in a rainy year it is hard to tell if the potato foliage is dying back naturally because the tubers are mature or if it is dying back due to disease from the constant moisture. However, if you're waiting that minimum of 2 weeks to dig them, that will help-----if the foliage died back prematurely due to excessive moisture or disease, it usually will start regrowing before that 2 weeks is up.

Y'all could compromise----dig some and leave some, but don't leave them too long. I try to have all my potatoes out of the ground before July because usually by July my soil is hot enough that the potatoes just collapse into a gummy mess when you're digging them that late. You might get very hot there before I get very hot here. The last time I had the hot, gummy potato mess was in a hot rainy summer.

Dawn

The ones we dug so far are being eaten fast so they wont have a chance to spoil lol. Not by me I cant eat the nightshades. : (
That's good to know to let them sit for 2 weeks. I did not know that. The white potato plants show no sign of slowing. but we have no rain for the next week so the ground will begin to dry.

My potatoes look confused also. The Yukon Gold are turning yellow and I think they are finishing up, but I had blooms on the red potato row last week. I think the DTM on the reds is longer though.

My potatoes are a mixed bag as well. I think some of them just flat died in the excessive May rainfall (about 2' at our house in May, and we were overly wet before May even began). Others look a little sick. Others look like they are dying back naturally, and still others look perfectly fine. I did plant something like 8 or 10 varieties, so it could be each and every one is fine and dying back in order of their DTM, but I don't really think so. I think some just didn't make it, but I've been too busy harvesting (tomatoes, plums, beans, cabbage, straightneck yellow squash) to pay any real attention to the potatoes.

It is odd. May was so cloudy, wet, misty, foggy, stormy and rainy and seemed to drag on forever and forever. It almost feels like we didn't even have May, because I am so used to May being a generally beautiful month and this May was anything but that. Than, BAM! The rain stops falling every day, the sun comes out, and all of a sudden it is June and we're hitting the 90s. I wasn't ready for it to get this hot this fast.

I agree, the plants are all confused. I am not ready for these hot days. Everything I planted on Monday is wilting in the heat. I was surprised at how dry it was, I think the last several inches just ran off. I was stuck in the house all day, we were replacing our patio doors and I am so stressed just wanted out side.( I didnot think the door guys would ever leave but the doors are beautiful).I will mow the pasture tomorrow, around the low wet spots. Mowed Monday for several hours the ground is surprisingly firm and dry, on top only I am sure.

One of the door guys has a place on Texoma and said the snakes were bad last weekend, huge water moccasins. He said the lake was way up and several of the homes on the lake had flood damage, his is on higher ground. I guess this lake year will not be a good one.

I have been holding some flowers to plant and I am going to try to plant them tomorrow and I'm sure they will wilt. It is just so hot. Today I mostly weeded, removed diseased leaves from tomato plants, and mulched. On Sunday I harvested all the early corn, but I'm waiting for the area where I grew it to dry up before I plant a succession crop of southern peas there.

There's some horrible water levels in some lakeside neighborhoods around Lake Texoma. I read a news article today about a family that has 35' of water on their property (which sounds like a place with a steep slope), and at least 10' of water in their house. That would be a stressful experience, but to some extent if you chose to build close to water, I guess you always know that flooding is a possibility.

The lake has crested (at 645.71", I think, unless I lost track somewhere along the way) and now is falling. At the present time it is dropping about 9" a day, but that will increase as inflow continues to fall. Still, if a person has many feet of their land and home underwater, 9" a day surely is to slow to please them.

One little lake/river community built earthen dikes and did a lot of sandbagging to try to protect their neighborhood and homes. I think the home I mentioned above likely was in one of those neighborhoods. For a while, it seemed like they had won the war, but the rain kept coming and the water kept rising, and now those homes are flooded too.

The Sand Point community, where home/property values approach a million bucks, is flooded and lots of homes are underwater. A lot of those homes are vacation homes or summertime or weekend homes, but still....what a mess to have to deal with! I hope they had flood insurance (but bet some of them do not).

Today our last lake-sized puddle in the yard dried up, but it is still really muddy. We call it swamp mud---dark brownish-black soil with green, scummy moss growing on it and it is very soft---you can sink down 3 or 4" if you step into it, so clearly we avoid walking in that area. We still have a driveway puddle the size of a pond, but it should begin shrinking in size. We have frogs everywhere. It is hard to walk in the garden without stepping on a frog. I hope they are eating lots of pest insects.

We saw a dead snake in the road while walking the dog yesterday, but I haven't seen too many in the yard, for which I am grateful. There's a few green tree snakes around, but their cool green color makes them acceptable to me for some reason. They are in my garden all the time and I hardly notice them because they blend in so well with the green plants. They're the only snakes that don't make me flee from the garden. I have heard lots of stories of venomous snakes in yards and porches and such, but since we have them all the time here, I don't get really wound up about them being in other people's yards. I just think that it is their turn to have some snakes, since we always have them.

On a few of the higher elevations of our property, the soil surface if fairly dry, but it is very wet beneath the surface. Turtles are trying to dig holes so they can lay eggs, and they dig a hole and then it is instantly filled with water that just seeps in.

The birds, butterflies, hummingbirds and bees are really happy because virtually everything is flowering now. Since it has been so cool, there's still cool-season flowers in bloom, but there's also lots of warm-season flowers blooming too. I felt kinda starved for wildflowers in April and May, but there's tons and tons of them now.

I'm dreading the arrival of the heat, but I suppose we need it to help dry up everything.

I am really enjoying this time off from work. I go to the garden early come home during the heat and go back in the evening. its the perfect schedule.

I have been cutting greens every 3-4 days and I get 20-25 pounds every time. it is amazing and no one around here grows anything like I am/do. Its funny when they first look at the garden. If I would have done this last year it would have cost me 200 a month for water. I have 5 beautiful cabbage my favorite breakfast food in the frig. this fall I want to put in at least 40 cabbage plants.

I think I have monarch babies. they are all over my one dill bed. I have seen several monarchs in the area and glad they came here they are so pretty. but those cabbage moths.....I look like a crazy woman running through the garden trying to kill it. Thank goodness the horse cant talk.

Some of the residents along the highway avoided mowing large areas that are filled wild flowers. It's beautiful.

I mow around my wildflowers. it makes for an interesting pattern but I also mow around the ground cherries that are everywhere. I need a mower that is only a foot wide LOL

Kim, That is my summer schedule too. I go outside pretty early and stay outdoors until I cannot take the heat any more and then I come back indoors. Usually, from June through August, I spend the afternoons and sometimes the evenings canning, dehydrating or freezing the part of the day's harvest that we aren't going to be able to eat fresh. If it isn't a big food processing day, I go back out in the evenings. I've only canned a couple of batches of jelly so far, and have frozen tons of sweet corn and green beans. The plums are ripening though, and the tomato harvest is getting bigger every day, so my canning activity is about to increase. We are about to have a big cabbage harvest. Luckily it will store for many weeks in the extra refrigerator out in the garage, but I'm also planning to make some of the cabbage into cole slaw and freezer slaw as well.

I spent a lot of time in the garden yesterday, and went to the grocery store during the heat of the day. The car's thermometer showed 91 but at our house it only got up to 89. The forecast high was 85, so our weather was over-achieving a little bit. When I go to the grocery store after a hot morning in the garden, I always feel compelled to bring home ice cream. Having Blue Bell unavailable on the store shelves is making me crazy. I can't wait for it to return to the stores. A summer without Blue Bell is unthinkable.

Isn't it amazing what a difference rainfall makes? I haven't had to water the garden at all this year, except for the small amount of water needed to water-in plants that are newly transplanted into the garden. Soon I will have to start watering the plants growing in large containers as their soil-less mix drains well and they'll dry out long before the ground does.

When I grow a lot of cabbage for fall, I plant several varieties with different DTMs so it all isn't maturing at once. Usually in springtime I just plant a couple of varieties---at least one green variety and one purple one, and I'll plant varieties with shorter DTMs so they can mature before we get too hot. For fall, I can plant varieties with longer DTMs and I usually plant many different kinds.

It is summertime here now. Know how I know? My crinum lilies started blooming and the Fall/Winter Catalog from Territorial Seed company arrived. Both of those events made me stop and say "Oh, crap, it is summertime already!" Then it got hot in the afternoon and confirmed that fact.

We mow around wildflowers when there's only a few in the fields. Once there's a lot, we try to leave them alone and let them grow and bloom and set seed. We just cut a wide path (about 8' wide so you can see snakes in the path before you step on them) through the pastures for safety's sake once there are lots of wildflowers in bloom. In dry years, we eventually reach a point where there's too many grass fires and wild fires in dry fields and Tim feels like he has to mow down the fields for safety reasons. It makes me less than happy but I grudgingly go along with the mowing at that point because it is necessary. This year, I'm hoping we won't have to mow the fields for a long, long time because all the flowers are so pretty. Tim would mow them every week if he didn't have a wife who loves the flowers! I overseeded the front pasture with a wildflower seed mix back in winter and that area, in particular, is especially lovely right now and the butterflies are extremely happy. Overseeding helps restore a pasture after too many drought years back to back to back have led to flowers drying up or dying before they can live long enough to set seed. It also helps me talk Tim out of mowing the overseeded field because I'll say "you don't want to mow that now after all the money I spent overseeding it with wildflowers" and that stops my Thrifty Yankee-raised husband from feeling compelled to cut down the field so that it looks like a lawn. I was worried all the winter and early spring rain would wash away the flower seeds, but based on how many flowers there are, I can tell the rain didn't.

Some years Tim has tried to mow around the wildflowers later in the season when there's lots of them, and it looks so crazy that he finally has conceded defeat on this issue and now just clear-cuts one path.

Everything does change for me if large numbers of snakes start popping up close to the house, but since most of the snakes we encounter come from the woodland, there's no good reason to arbitrarily cut down all the open meadow land. We just cut the strip of land beside the driveway and between the woodland and the garden when too much snakey-ness is occurring.

Heavy rainfall does one of two things with the snakes. It either sends a lot of them fleeing to higher ground, in which case we see lots more of them or, if a lot of flash-flooding is occurring, it causes us to see significantly fewer snakes. After the 2007 flooding along the Red River (and everywhere else), we barely saw a snake on our property for over a year. It was so wonderful! So far this year we are actually seeing fewer snakes than usual, though that might be a function of the weather staying cooler longer as much as it is a function of flooding. We did have the big flash flooding around May 10 after 6+" of rain fell in one day. Some people had a lot of snakes that day and for a few days thereafter, mostly in town where the only higher ground in general is people's porches and decks, but I've only seen a mere handful of snakes since then, so it may have washed away some of our rural snakes, or sent them to the higher ground across the road from us.

A garden without venomous snakes in it is a happy garden with a very happy gardener.

Kim, if you have babies in your dill bed, they are probably black swallowtails. Super fun to raise inside if you want to with your little man. Monarchs use milkweed for their host plant. Black Swallowtails will use fennel, dill or parsley. I try to add more fennel each year. Well, and milkweed too ;) Right now I am raising pipevine swallowtails.

Pipevine Swallowtails

Black Swallowtail

Lisa, Our swallowtails raise themselves just fine out in the garden. Do you raise them indoors to keep them safe? We have house cats, so caterpillers/butterflies are probably safer out in the garden than inside our house. Sometimes a feline goes into the garden with me but I don't let them into it when there's lot of butterfly cats on the dill, fennel and parsley. That is one advantage of having a fully-fenced garden---I can exclude the felines during a period of lots of butterfly activity. Our garden and yard are full and overflowing this week with swallowtails of all types, and I am worried there won't be enough dill, parsley and fennel for them....and I have a lot of all three plants. It is just a terrific butterfly summer, apparently.

Dawn

Oh that is good to know. I brought a sprig of dill home and it was full of tiny babies. I should have put it on the fennel in my backyard. I love butterflies always have. I will show littleman so he knows its not a bad bug

Dawn, mostly I raise them for fun, to watch them. But, if I don't bring them in, I never see them live. I apparently have a very caterpillar predator friendly garden!

I filled the wheelbarrow full yesterday. I have never grown these before but they like it here!

Lisa, I'm sure predators get some of mine, but we still have plenty left. It definitely is a dog-eat-dog world in the garden, and I try not to interfere too much. I think it probably is more important to protect them in the city like you do, because a lot of yards are not butterfly-friendly. No one around me sprays chemical insecticides, though plenty of folks heredo spray herbicides.

Kim, They like it here this year. They won't be as happy in a hotter, drier spring, and I know that from experience. Enjoy them while they last, and you can plant them again in the fall garden too. They even grow in my unimproved clay, and are a great way to improve clay if you grow them, and don't harvest them---leaving them there to rot. As they rot and decompose, they improve the soil. To me, that's a whole lot easier than hauling organic matter into the garden and then working it into the soil.

When I'm not working in the summer garden or harvesting the produce from it, I've been working on my fall garden grow list. It is going to be a long one because it has been a while since we've had enough deep soil moisture that I could happily plant a fall garden without worrying about having to water it every day just to keep it alive in horrendous drought conditions.

The newest things in my garden this week is that crinum lilies are blooming, red day lilies have joined the yellow ones in blooming, and there's a lot of lantana in bloom. On the negative side, cool-season flowers are fading fast in this heat. Plums are ripening rapidly and very soon now I will be canning plum jelly every day. Salsa-making and canning will be a little late this year as the green tomatoes are not yet ripening a lot more quickly than we can eat them, but that may work out since the plums are ripening a couple of weeks early.

I did notice this week at the grocery store that the half-pint canning jars and powdered pectin are positively flying off the store shelves, so obviously lots of folks down here are having a great fruit harvest now.

Dawn

I just got out of the car in the driveway and a rabbit practically ran right into me. I hurried out to the garden with a dog, who was oblivious to the rabbit digging in the garlic bed. My old dog wouldn't even come close, she thought she was in trouble. The young male dog went to live with my son 2 days ago and apparently that was long enough for the bunny to move in. Nature can just knock it off, I am already too far behind, can't feed a bunny family, too.

I had to break out the hoses today. GRR. Didn't it just flood like yesterday? All the new plants that I put in were dying. My backyard hose has a broken sprinkler attached to it. I am going to have to remove it...that'll be fun!

Yeah, Lisa, I've got a lot of pots to water, and hay bales. I showered the herb bed yesterday, because it has good drainage and huge plants (the only thing thriving right now. Wishing I had rain barrels that had caught all that rain.

So yesterday afternoon I go to detach the hose from my completely full 250 gallon rain barrel (that catches all the gutter water from my barn's metal roof) yesterday and the drain comes off. Watch out below! Watering above required the pump and hose for pressure, but I am consoled by the fact that it only takes a couple of inches rain to refill.

Corn not doing good.

I think I finally got all the dead limbs trimmed off my crape myrtles last weekend. Phew! I hope we don't have a hard winter dieback again like that anytime soon. I guess with this heat I'll need to find the time to get our sprinkler system up and running again. I can't believe that it's early June now and we haven't watered even once this year. I'm not complaining!

Amy, I know they are hard on gardens, but I love the rabbits. I go out and feed them hen scratch at dinner time. I put it in the exact same spot every night, and usually the bunnies are out there waiting for me when I come out. If I don't look directly at them (direct eye contact is what a predator does before it pounces on them, lol), they sit and wait for me to scatter the hen scratch on the ground and then they eat after I've turned around and am walking back to the house. I do the same thing every morning, but it is cracked corn for the mourning doves, and the rabbits just horn in on their feast and help eat it up. That might sound like folly, but what I have found over the years is that as long as I feed them something, they become habituated to eating that and leave my garden completely alone. I can grow beans or anything else on the garden fence and the rabbits don't even touch the portion of the plants that is sticking out on their side of the fence.

Lisa, I had to drag out the hoses and water all the containers. It was annoying. I've gotten so spoiled by having all that rain from January through May. I haven't even set up my irrigation driplines yet, and was hoping I could skip that this year, but maybe I'll have to put them out after all. So far, with anything new I'm putting in the ground, I just hand-water with a watering can, but that won't be adequate once the soil is dry deeper down. Right now the top inch of soil is kinda dry but everything below that remains moist.

cochise, That sounds like the kind of thing that happens to me. Maybe you'll get some rain next week to help refill the barrel.

My early corn produced just fine, and we've been eating and enjoying it and have plenty put up in the freezer. The mid-season corn does not look good at all. The plants are on the small side and are an off color. I think they just stayed too wet too long. Yet, they are tasseling and silking. I'm not sure if they'll produce ears big enough to eat though.

Heather, I'd like to have more years with lots of rain in spring, though maybe not as much as we had in the month of May. This is probably the latest in the year I've been able to go without watering the yard or garden, but the containers do need watering now that we are in the 90s. Still, hand-watering a few containers isn't too bad. My crape myrtles look relatively happy but aren't blooming yet....they don't even look like they are thinking about blooming.

I'm trying to remember if there is anything new in the garden today. Hmmm. The veronica just started blooming today, so that is new. While not in the garden, but just outside the garage, this happened: Humans 1, Copperhead 0. That copperhead was less than a foot away from our son's head when he spotted it. Luckily for him (our son, not the copperhead), the snake had gotten caught in some bird netting and tried to strike but couldn't reach our son because the bird netting had him all wrapped up. DS called me and I came up from the garden and brought him a gun. That's one less snake we all have to worry about this summer.

Today in the garden I yanked out the browning remains of the poppies and larkspur. They looked good before they began drowning in excessively wet soil. Now that they are gone, the zinnias, tall verbena and Laura Bush petunias will spread into their space and fill in the area where I removed the spent remains of the cool-season flowers.

Dawn

My poppies are almost finished setting seed. I am ready to yank them just as soon as those little windows open. I loved these poppies, white, lavender and purple. I'm pretty sure they were the poppies I bought at Natural Foods Grocers and sprinkled everywhere. They loved my old compost heap grounds. Super cheap too!