February 2017 Planting/Conversation Thread
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
7 years ago
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hazelinok
7 years agoRebecca (7a)
7 years agoRelated Discussions
Blooming in February 2017
Comments (34)Tom, I keep saying that I will post pic but I will finally get to do that possibly later today....Yes, I just hope my new plant actually survived the mail..It looks ok. I left it in the same moss it cam in and stuck it in a clay container hanging fro the roof of greenhouse where it is warmest...Every time I water it gets hit so i hope that the moist moss does not rot it...I am thinking with a nice fan breeze hitting it while warm days it should dry rather quickly each day! Yes, I was told to give it a very dry period during winter months when it goes dormant or rest, meaning it is just a stick. Then to start watering regularly one new growth commences on the roots or once the new growth is at least a 1/2 inch tall which will come for the old pseudo bulb. He also told me not to fertilize until then. Jason said that new leaves will come in summer while the flowers come after or just before the leaves fall off...That they LOVE to be grown outdoors in a sun protected area, like under a tree or morning and late day sun..Does that make sense? Do you keep yours in FULL sun all day? Do you have to do much to it? Is it a pretty much good grower if neglected? Do you just let it sit udner a tree or on a porch?Some Orchids hate attention and baby care while others thrive on bone dry to when ever it rains method..I can't believe it was exposed to the thirties..Wow! That gives me hope..I might be able to leave outside longer than just June, July and August!...See MoreApril Planting/Conversation Thread: The Sequel, April 19 & Beyond
Comments (193)Amy, Congrats on the turnips and I think the parsnips will be fine. With all the cloudy days we tend to have at this time of the year, even if the parsnips leaves sunburn a little in the first couple of days after you harvested the turnips, I'd think that new growth will appear and the plants themselves will be fine. Turnips grown in the fall can turn woody too if the gardener leaves them in the ground too long. I know people who are stuck in that bigger is better mentality (with which I strongly disagree) and they leave their turnips in the ground until they are huge and woody and not fit to eat. Bon, If you were out in the wind and cold pulling weeds yesterday, I'm fearing you're crossing over to the dark side. The wind here was gusting in the upper 40s and lower 50s and I stayed indoors as much as possible as did Tim, the dogs and the cats. The chickens didn't like the wind either and spent a lot of time huddled under the shrubs and even came up onto the porch and huddled up close to the exterior of the wall to stay out of the wind. Augustus the turkey spent most of his day huddled underneath the gigantic Burford hollies on the south side of the porch, gobbling away. That wind was strong and cold. I hate ivy and all kinds of it try to invade from the northwest corner of the garden. I have some smilax, poison ivy and Virginia creeper vines to pull out of the corner of the garden this week, as well as some unknown ivy-looking creeping and crawling vines that I don't want there either. Where does all this crap come from? I blame the wild birds. I think they sit on the fence and plant things. Dawn...See MoreMay 2017 Planting/Conversation Thread
Comments (155)Amy, Same thing here with current prom pictures. No one back in our day (I was a senior in 1977) would have been allowed in the door with the exposed flesh I see nowadays. Sometimes I wonder what the parents are thinking, letting their daughters dress in such skimpy prom dresses. Waves of nostalgia can be fun. When I am visiting my mom at our childhood home, I am nostalgic for certain things....the roses Daddy used to grow along the backyard fence, the big mimosa tree we played beneath while hummingbirds and butterflies visited its flowers, the roses, peonies, zinnias, cosmos and cockscombs that mom and I (okay, mostly I) grew in my mom's flowerbed by the porch, the fruit trees in teh back yard and the veggie garden. All of those are gone, but I can close my ends and practically see them, and all of us out and about and near them, when I am at mom's house. Then I walk into the house and wonder how in the world my parents raised 4 kids in a small 3-bedroom house with only 1 bathroom and a tiny galley kitchen. The miracle is that no one died in the perpetual fight to get into the bathroom at peak periods. The house always seems smaller than I remember it being, but I guess that's the difference in looking at things as an adult versus how you thought they were when you were a kid. Melissa, The more I eat hot peppers, the more heat I can handle but I am mostly careful to avoid overdoing it. There's plenty of time to plant habaneros. They really thrive in warm soil and hot air so I never put them in the ground as early as the rest of the hot peppers. Bon, The only thing I don't like about potatoes is digging them, but the digging is a necessary evil that makes eating them possible. Jay, It is about time the snow is gone! I am glad you're getting to plant. We only had really good rainfall here in January, so it is long gone. Otherwise, our rain has been sporadic. It keeps missing us (uh oh, had summers like that before, haven't we, and you as well), going around us, just flat out not falling, etc. Our forecast highs also have consistently run 4 to 6 degrees above whatever the forecast says. Yesterday the forecast high was 80 and we hit 86. I'm starting to dread the summer weather since we are trending hotter and drier than forecast. Our back garden in the sandier soil does drain too quickly, but our front garden drains too slowly......if only I could take a gigantic mixing bowl and mix together the clay from the front with the sand from the back. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2017, Week 3, General Garden Conversation & Harvest Talk
Comments (103)Amy, I avoided the kitchen all I could this weekend because of the heat. We either ate cold meals, ate out, or cooked on the grill outdoors. It is too hot to can, but I'll be doing it this morning anyway. At least the weather today won't be quite as hot. My purple pole beans still are producing too, but I'm tired of picking them (because, you know, then I have to process them or cook them for dinner, lol) so I am going to let the ones still on the plant dry for seed. Nancy, The cooler air is just so nice, even without rain. Rebecca, I cannot believe how hard the squirrels have come back after the tomatoes after they figured out they still could get to them despite the stockings covering them. It is too bad you aren't rural and couldn't let a neighbor just shoot the little furry rodents. That would solve the problem. For what it is worth, I've been watering the zinnias 2 or 3 times a week, and they still manage to wilt and twist and look bad every afternoon. It is sad when the heat is too much for them. I'm hoping to be able to get them through the next couple of hot weeks so they can continue to bloom into fall. The butterflies love them so much that I'd hate to lose them. Melissa, Congrats on getting the home projects done. This is the time of the year when I usually start working on projects indoors in order to give myself a reason to avoid going outdoors in this heat. Even though my garden has had squash bugs for a couple of months, they really haven't been doing much apparent damage until the last couple of days. I know it is time to yank out squash plants now, if I can make myself stay outside long enough to do it, so the squash bugs will perish for lack of something to eat. The danger in doing that is that the surviving squash bugs might move to the muskmelon and watermelon plants in order to survive, so maybe I'll take out the squash plants one by one---maybe one per day---so I can continue to harvest melons for as long as possible before the bugs move to those plants. There are times (and this is one of them) when I wish I could just not care about being organic and instead just go nuts and spray all the squash plants with a synthetic pesticide to kill the squash bugs, but as much as I fantasize about doing it, I'm just not willing to use those chemicals in my garden. Sometimes peppers are slow in the heat and then produce very heavily in the autumn. Since yours haven't done much yet, I'm assuming they're saving themselves for the cooler fall weather. Sometimes putting out shallow pans of water for the birds will deter them from eating the tomatoes since what they're really after is water. Sheets will work only if they completely cover the plants like a tent and are held down firmly to the ground to keep birds from getting up underneath them. Bird netting works, but only if the birds cannot find a way underneath it. Those fake owls absolutely do not work so save your money there. Anything that moves in the sun, preferably something highly reflective, often will startle the birds and keep them away. You can use bird flash tape (our Walmart had it earlier in the season, I don't know if they have it now), aluminum pie pans, old CDs, etc. Tie them to the plants or to the cages using thread, string or fishing line and leave them loose so they can twist and turn and move in the wind. Eileen, Those cucumbers are diseased, which is not uncommon because there's tons of diseases that affect cucumbers---they are disease magnets and cucumber beetles spread diseases right and left all summer long. If you haven't fed the plants lately, you might feed them the water-soluble fertilizer of your choice to see if it pushes out a lot of new growth. Then you could remove all the old diseased foliage. I'm not sure what your cucumbers have. You can go to the Cornell University vegetable MD online website and compare your plants to photos there of cucurbit diseases and see if you find a match that helps you figure out what it is. To me, cucumber diseases look so much alike that I rarely bother trying to figure out which one a plant has---it largely is irrelevant because once they're sick and we are this hot, it is hard to save them. I just yank out the cucumbers in late July or early August and plant new seeds for fall. Here's the cucurbits page from vegetablemdonline: Cucurbit Disease Info At Vegetable MD Online With cucumber diseases, you often get multiple diseases at the same time, making diagnosis by photograph really tricky. You can cut off the sunscalded parts of the cucumbers and eat whatever is left. H/J, Normally the spider mite population peaks around late July and starts falling. Hopefully that will happen in your garden (it would help if some rain would fall since spider mites like it dry and dusty). The spider mites I had on my peppers earlier in the summer never did much damage and seem mostly gone now. Perhaps lady bugs or green lacewings or some other beneficial insect ate them. My tomato plants look like crap but are still producing too. That's really all we can ask of them when it is this hot and dry, and when pests and diseases galore are everywhere. Tomatillos do not fall off the plant while very small unless some insect or disease is infesting them. With tomatillos it usually is because some very small tomatillo grubs, sort of like tomato pinworms, infest them. I haven't had them here, but lots of people in OK have a lot of trouble with them and cannot get a tomatillo crop because of them. Spraying the plants in general with Bt might help. Ground cherries are edible, but I found myself unimpressed by them the year I grew them and never bothered growing them again. YMMV. Jerry, I bet it was all the rain that affected your watermelon flavor. I have had heavy rainfall do that to mine some years. I hope the watermelon jelly gels, but even if it doesn't, you'll have yummy watermelon juice to drink. My garden is burning up right along with yours. I could keep watering and maybe keep it going, but there's no point in this heat. I'm going to focus on keeping the peppers, the flower border and the fall tomatoes alive and let everything else go. In a few weeks, I'll plant stuff for fall......if it seems like it might rain again some day. I'm not big on trying to start a fall garden in vicious heat if there's no rain, so reserve the right to change my mind about fall plantings. Really, with lots of canning done, tons of potatoes and onions in dry storage, and the freezers just about full, I can walk away from the garden and know we have had a really productive year despite the weather. We did have 1/3 of an inch of rain yesterday evening. It was nice, but I'm not overly excited about it---today's sunshine probably will suck up all that moisture right out of the ground before the sun sets today. In the overall scheme of things, 0.33" isn't enough to get excited about. Now, if we'd had 1 or 2 or 3" I'd be deliriously happy, but that didn't happen and it almost never happens in July or August, so I'm not getting my hopes up. We've been dry all year and, while that 3" of rain that fell in early July helped a lot, it is long gone and the soil is dry and cracked and parched and it is going to take a lot of rain over a prolonged period of time to turn things around. I just don't see that happening in July or August. So, thinking about how dry we've been most months of the year just made me wonder what things look like statewide in terms of year-to-date rainfall...you know....who's had above average rainfall (Jerry? Nancy? anyone?)....who's had below average rainfall (Me? Amy? Melissa? Eileen? anyone else?).....is anyone sitting right at average rainfall? So, I'm going to go get the average rainfall maps and post them here and we can all look at them and ponder why the weather does what it does. Here's the year-to-date rainfall in inches: OKMesonet Year To Date Rainfall in Inches Of course, the rainfall map in inches is more meaningful if you know how much rain each area receives because there is a huge variation in average rainfall totals across the state. So, here's the map that shows rainfall as a percentage of average rainfall for the same time frame: Year To Date Rainfall As A Percentage of Average The numbers on the above map surprised me. Even folks who have had plentiful rainfall at times aren't doing that well overall. So, one final measurement is the map that shows how large of a rainfall deficit (or surplus) there is at each Mesonet station compared to what would be average rainfall for the same period. Here's that map: Year To Date Rainfall Departure From Average The above map is pretty self-explanatory. Blue is great, orange is awful, and everything else in between could be considered various shades of good or bad. And, really, for our gardens, what matters most is what has happened in the last month, but it has been so dry, I refuse to look at those maps because it would be too depressing. July is the hardest month. Dawn...See MoreOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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7 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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7 years agolast modified: 7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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7 years agoRebecca (7a)
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7 years agolast modified: 7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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7 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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7 years agohazelinok
7 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
7 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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7 years agolast modified: 7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
7 years ago
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