July 2017, Week 4, Garden Talk
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agohazelinok
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Week 2, June 2017. General garden talk
Comments (112)Amy, It is a PITA to find places to stash things when you buy in bulk, but the upside is that when you buy in bulk, you tend to not run out of things so quickly. CostCo is so far away that I'd like to only make that drive down there once a month, but most of the time we make it twice a month. I'm trying to always remember to keep a list running and to not forget to take it with me. Really, though, just the act of making a list, even if I forget to take it, usually means I do remember everything that was on it. I get tunnel vision during canning season and don't even want to leave the house to go get canning supplies, so I try to stock up ahead of the start of canning season and then I never have to drop everything to go get lids, pectin, canning salt or just whatever. It is funny---on our way down to CostCo I'll be thinking that I want to stop at a Barnes & Noble, and then pop into Hobby Lobby or Michael's for this or that or whatever, and by the time we're through in CostCo, all I want to do is get home. I'm not much of a shopper any more unless I need to get something specific. Most of the time now, if I 'need' something and cannot find it at CostCo, Sam's Club, WinCo or Walmart, I figure we don't need it. Well, except for gardening stuff, but that's a whole category unto itself. About once every month or two we'll make a short side trip to Central Market to get something special but their produce section just kills me and you almost cannot avoid walking through it because the main entrance brings you in there. They have the biggest, most diverse produce section you'll ever see, and tons of organic stuff, and it isn't so much that I am buying much there.....but, rather, I'm looking at things and whispering to Tim...."Look, organic Habanero peppers are $6.98 a pound...." or whatever, just in awe of the fact that people will pay that price when they could be growing their own. It is like a trip to Disney World for me, and then when we get to the meat and seafood area, it is the same thing there for Tim. I get my Dr. Bronner's Lavender soap there, and a few food items, but we could live without it if it wasn't there. They do have the biggest selection of cheeses you'll ever see. I could kill an hour in there just looking at stuff, but there's always that nagging feeling that I ought to be at home working on something. They are one of the few stores that have pickling cucumbers, and they tend to have them all summer long. It isn't the same as homegrown pickling cukes pickled the same day, but if a person has a crop failure and absolutely, positively needs to buy pickling cukes, at least you know a place to find them. I'll try to weigh the potatoes tomorrow to see what we actually got. It won't include, of course, the ones we already ate. The year I planted too many and had to dig over 300 lbs. of them myself from pretty dense clay (it was amended, but it was a drought year and the sun/heat had baked the clay into concrete anyway) in immensely hot weather surely did break me of planting too many potatoes. I said 'never again' and I meant it. I still plant too many, so will try next year to reduce again and plant only about 50-60% as many seed potatoes as I did this year. I also need to plant fewer tomatoes. The good news is that Tim's new work group means I only need to can about 60 jars of salsa for him to give away at work, and that is so much less than I usually can for Christmas that I am almost giddy with joy. Except.... Well, what about the what if's? What if I can enough giveaway salsa for Christmas gifts to cover those 60 people and then his boss rotates the Asst Chiefs around to new areas (this job rotation is very common in his department) and suddently he has an area with 150 people and maybe tomato season already has ended? So, even though I am going to can less, I'll have that nagging worry in the back of my mind. Next year, I'd love to cut back the number of tomato plants I grow by 50% but I don't know if I have the self discipline to do it. No matter how hard I try to cut back, there's always more plants in the ground than I ever intended. That results in tomatoes piling up everywhere and me feeling stressed by the need to hurry up and process them all. Tomorrow will be a long day in the kitchen with tomatoes, but then I'll be able to breathe much easier after it is done. Still, silently and under my breath, I am starting to chant "die,die, die!" to the tomato plants every day when I am picking tomatoes. I know that is wrong. I know it is a sign of tomato overload and tomato burnout, but still, I can't help doing it. I dream of only having 10 or 12 tomato plants and not even doing any canning at all, just one summer, to see what it is like to not wake up every day in June and July with harvesting/canning/food preservation goals first and foremost in my mind. If it doesn't rain soon, I'll likely get my wish for plants to start dying, but with Murphy's Law being what it is, the wrong plants will die and the tomato plants won't die. That would be so funny, and so sad. So, after having believed for many years that it is impossible to have too many tomatoes, I've noticed increasingly that we have too many and I'm tired of having too many and I'm more and more ready to cut back. Of course, in June I see that, recognize it, understand it and acknowledge it, but in the hard winter months of December through February, all logic and rational thought flies out the window and I want to grow everything, and lots of it. If Bigfoot shows up here, I'll just throw tomatoes at him and scare him away. Or, I'll sic our big, bad, mean black rooster on him. Whatever it takes. Millie, Bears would be too scary. My first face-to-face encounter with a feral hog while at a wildfire near Thackerville one night was horrifying. It was huge and my mind couldn't even process what I was seeing. I'd seen them before in state parks while out camping and such, but the first time you see one up close and personal still is a shock. I remember my first thought was "what? Is this a hippo? a rhino?" I laugh at myself now, but I was so flabbergasted when I saw it that I couldn't even process what I was thinking. After about 30 seconds and when I'd had time to calm down a little, I realized it was a feral hog. A couple of years later we were driving from Marietta to Durant to have lunch with our son when he was a student there, and we saw this big dead animal on the side of the road near Lake Texoma. It looked like a small bear or a very large bear cub. We were flabbergasted, so we turned around and went back to look at it. So did everyone else. As each vehicle pulled up and people got out to look at it, someone would say "feral hog" and the new arrivees would say "oh, we thought it looked like a bear" and we all would laugh because we all thought the same thing. Now we see them so often that no one even bats an eye at them, and that's not a good thing. There's too many of them now and they don't stay down in the river bottom lands like they used to---they are right here in our rural neighborhood. We have them a lot at the back end of our property, which is about 1000' west of our house so we rarely even go back there any more. Sunnydew, I grow a lot of hollies but don't have any inkberries. I do know that spider mites like them though, so watch for those. Maybe your web is just some sort of spider. We live on rural acreage and it seems like we have about a million spiders per acre, and each and every different kind has different forms of webs and put their webs all over plants, more so further out....not right up around the house where humans, dogs, cats and chickens will walk right through their webs and bust them up. Spiders can do some odd things some times. Dawn...See MoreWeek 4, June 2017, General Garden Talk
Comments (93)Amy, Our dogs do adapt to Tim's shifts which is great on the days he's working, but on the days he is off, they start whining and making noise because they want to go out at 5 a.m. whether he is awake and getting up or not, so guess who gets up and let them out? They wake me up, so I let them out, naturally. A tornado hitting our house wouldn't wake up Tim, so he sleeps through it all. The sleepyhead dogs also go to sleep early like Tim does, so at 9 pm last night they were all confused that I wasn't turning off lights and putting everyone to bed. I think we were up until about midnight, and the dogs were getting grumpier and grumpier but wouldn't go to sleep until we did. Tim was gone most of that time, either working at the EOC or running on fire calls, and you'd think the dogs would clue in....they hear the fire truck sirens going down the road and howl right along with them. I wonder if they know those sirens are affiliated with Tim's absence from our home? Turnips will store from 4-5 days to maybe 2 weeks in the fridge depending on how wet or dry they were when harvested. I remove the greens, clean and dry the turnips, wrap them in paper towels to absorb excess moisture and put them in ziplock bags. For longer term storage, you can store them in sand or sawdust in a cool, dry location like a cellar (good luck finding a place that stays cool enough in summer, but it is possible with a fall harvest). I am not sure why yours molded. Perhaps the really rainy spring just made their moisture content too high, and there's nothing you can do about that. In some parts of the country, folks leave them in the beds over the winter, harvesting as needed, but you have to cut off the foliage and it helps to turn each turnip a half-twist in the ground to make the roots stop trying to continue growth. I don't know if it would work here since we don't get all that cold in winter any more. I do believe the plant you identified as tansy is tansy. My regular tansy started blooming a couple of weeks ago, but the silver tansy hasn't bloomed yet. Nancy, I agree that Willie is in a class of his own. He won't live forever and it will be such a sad day when he departs from this earth. I like even his oldest stuff better than what passes for modern day country music (so much of which seems more like pop to me). I guess it hardly matters because I hardly listen to to the current country music. I love old, classic country....including Waylon, Willie and the Boys...and Johnny Cash....the Highwaymen...George Jones....Don Williams....George Strait (he's still alive!), and the women....Loretta Lynn...Tammy Wynette....the incomparable Dolly Parton....Kitty Wells....Reba....Emmylou Harris....Patsy Cline. And, of course, having grown up in Texas, I love western swing and know that Bob Wills is still the king! Practically everyone I used to listen to is either dead or well on their way, and that is sad. Poor Kaida. Well, at least they know what it is and solutions for it. I hope she feels better quickly. It seems like the kids have such a short summer any more, and I hate that she's feeling to crappy to really enjoy it. Stores here have had 'back to college' and 'back to school' crap for weeks now...and I keep saying to myself that summer just began....why ruin it for the kids and parents by pushing back to school in June???? I suppose the retail world will start putting Christmas stuff on the shelves on July 5th. (Actually, Hobby Lobby started putting out Xmas stuff 3 or 4 weeks ago and I was not even ready to see that yet.) Before our trees got so tall we could see three or four distant fireworks shows without leaving our property, although we often would go up the road a little bit to a friend's place on higher ground than ours for an even better view. We could see the fireworks from Lake Murray in Carter County, from the Falconhead area in western Love County, and from the WinStar Casino east of Thackerville. Then sometimes we could see more distant fireworks shows from other places in Texas. Now that the trees are so tall all around the house and yard, I don't think we can see any of them.....and I don't much care. Been there, done that, blah, blah, blah. Usually on July 4th itself, Tim is at work and I am in the kitchen canning. He's off this year so I probably won't be in the kitchen canning, but I'm hoping for a quiet day/evening at home with no actual fires. I don't think we've had enough rain to keep fields from catching on fire when folks set off their own fireworks so my wishes for a quiet day and evening might not come true. Our first couple of years of living here, we'd go up to Lake Murray and spend the day at the lake and attempt to stay to watch the fireworks and that was a really long, hot day and we came home with Chris and his cousins asleep in the car and us adults all worn out. It was fun, but I don't miss doing that now. The older I get, the happier I am to just be at home at what Tim jokingly calls "The Compound". There's more than enough to keep me busy here all the time, and other than the weekly shopping and errands, if there's anything I want to buy (other than plants), I can just order it online and have it delivered. I think I could have lived 100 or 150 years ago and been a pioneer and would have been perfectly happy---except for the snakes. My grandmother was born in 1898....and I think that would have been a fascinating era in which to live, though life certainly was much harder back then. When we first moved here, I met a neighbor who came here in a covered wagon before statehood. I remember being both horrified and fascinated when he mentioned that his uncle made them a dugout home in the bank of the Red River. Maybe that would have been a tiny bit too rustic for me. We stayed cloudy and cool until mid-afternoon and it was so pleasant, and then the sun came out and ruined everything. At least one half or almost 2/3s of July 1st had really pleasant weather. Dawn...See MoreJuy 2017 Week 2, General Garden and Harvest Talk
Comments (129)Amy, You are a saint. I hope all the fun the kids had makes up for all the pain and tiredness you had to endure, and I hope you're catching up on your rest. Being too tired to sleep is the worst thing on earth and I get that way a lot during planting season. My dad, having Alzheimer's, hit the acceptance stage early, probably when he was in his early to mid 70s (he lived to be 85). He knew what the AD would do to him as it progressed because it ran through his family like wildfire (one reason we kids are so glad we were adopted and didn't have his family's genetics) and, since he was one of the youngest of 9 kids, he'd witnessed it killing many of his older brothers and sisters. While he was very early in his Alzheimer's Disease, he and my mom did all the right things with DNRs, medical power of attorney given to my oldest sibling with me as the backup if anything happened to him, making their wishes very clear and in writing, etc. I don't think my mom reached acceptance until the last couple of years of her life, and my dad has been gone since 2004. When Daddy was put into hospice care in the last week of his life, then my mom freaked out and wanted to rescind his DNR and medical power of attorney (thankfully she could not reverse his earlier decisions that way because he had suffered long enough). So, from watching her I think I have learned the importance of accepting the inevitable and of knowing when to fight and when to let go. At least I hope I have. I'd never try to prolong the life of a loved one needlessly if they were terminally ill and the quality of their life was extremely poor---I think we do too much of that in this life as it is. I hold my grandmother in my heart, soul and mind as an example of a strong woman who did everything in her power to stay healthy and live a long life but who also was ready to go when the time came. Nancy, Our gardens teach us so much if only we listen to them. My garden has taught me that there's nothing on this earth that grows and invades as relentlessly as bermuda grass. lol. Digging it out and staying on top of it is all that has worked for me. I'm glad you're going 'home' to visit your mom even though I know it also is hard to be away from everything/everyone here for a prolonged period as well. Tim's mom had an atypical case of Lou Gherig's Disease that did not present with the typical symptons and which was, therefore, not diagosed during the three or so years that her health was in a steep decline. Tim's sister, who worked in a field related to the medical industry, was taking her mom to one specialist after another seeing answers, treament and a diagnosis and, quite honestly, wasn't getting anything helpful from them. At one point I remember telling Tim "I think it is Lou Gehrig's Disease" (we were driving someone and I was reading a newspaper article about someone else who had LGD with the same nontypical symptoms as his mom's) and none of them could see it like I could, so my amateur diagnosis was ignored. I think that was because they were so close to their own mother emotionally that they couldn't objectively consider that LGD might be what it was since she did not have the usual symptoms. So, anyhow, when a doctor finally diagnosed her and put her in the hospital, his sisters told him her time was going to be short and that he should fly up and spend time with her while he could. They were talking in terms of months, not days or weeks at that point. He immediately booked a flight for the following week and made arrangements to take time off from work. He was going to fly up on the following Wednesday. He even figured he'd try to go up there for a week here and there over the next few months. The doctors thought she'd last at least another few months but instead she died the night before Tim was scheduled to fly. It was heart-wrenching. He, of course, would have flow up immediately if anyone had said she might not last another week. For all that medical science knows and can do, we still just never know when somebody's time will come. Of all 4 of our parents, my mom was the one who didn't care about trying to be healthy---she didn't eat properly, didn't exercise, etc. My dad and Tim's parents all tried really hard to eat healthy, stay active, etc. So, I guess in one way it is ironic that she outlived them all by well over a decade, but she was a decade younger than them so that may have played a role in it as well. Dawn...See MoreAugust 2017, Week 4 Garden Talk: Planting, Harvesting, Surviving
Comments (96)Whew. Tough watching that, even. Can't even begin to imagine what those poor people are going through. Heartbreaking. And as always, so many good people are working to hard to help others. I didn't--I couldn't--watch it all day. But off and on. Just feel so helpless. Only thing I can think to do is donate to Red Cross (and pray). Anyone have any other good ideas or better ideas? And I'm no weather expert, but it does look like it has come far enough inland that it very likely will hit Louisiana next. Pray it lessens and miraculously more or less peters out by then. We had a pretty low-key day. Church all morning, then our daily Sudokus (lol), doing the garden walk-around with some banana peppers, a few tomatoes and 8 cucumbers, another couple pints of pickles tomorrow (even with just my 3? cucumbers, I've got 23 pints of pickles so far--guess I'll be giving away about 20 jars of pickles to someone.) And we're eating cucumbers nearly every day, too. Guess what, though; with the peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, potatoes and onions, our grocery bill has been significantly less in the past month. Since we're eating so many of those things, well, we just don't eat as much of anything else. Very cool. (And the yummy summer squash our neighbor has brought us.) Of course, we're getting a little tired of all those particular things, but honestly. We just pretend this is all we've got to eat, so we do. And spice things up by having other wonderful main courses with them. Dawn, I was telling GDW about your sleepless night and watching the floods, as well as chiming in the assist the gardening folks. I said I expect you'll be tired and dragging for a few days with this horrible tragedy. Understandable, given Tim's occupation and your son's--and hence, your life. But I do thank you for the blackberry words and flowers of good smells. This brug has me so enchanted, I said to GDW--really, if it doesn't survive the winter (this one is one of the most hardy, to 7B), small price to pay for this amazing small tree. I wouldn't hesitate a bit to plant them every year at $20 a pop--or like you said, from seed, or cuttings. My buddy Scott is going to take some cuttings this fall and keep them in his green house for both of us. GDW agreed, and next year we think we'll put in 4-6 of them here and there. This one gets about 4 hours of full sun. from about 11 to about 3-4. I worry about it being too hot, but it seems to have been very happy. And we do have some other areas that get at least 4 hrs of sun. What a smashing plant they'd be in this big yard. Ditto with the daturas. Okay. So PM is a fact of life down here. I'm gonna skip the PM plants next year. Period and that's all there is to it. (not counting veggies) I'm gonna go with stout and sturdy and boring standbys! For sure, marigolds for one in the sun. We'll throw in tithonia the few places there's lots of sun. I'm building my new list. Laura Bush petunias, YES. Verbena bonariensis, YES. I love my herbs. . . I have 5 rosemary plants at various places in the yard, to see which of them will survive. Have my lemon balm that I love, the sage is good, the thyme and the oregano. But the beautiful thing this year were the 4 o'clocks, nicotiana, datura, and now the brug, which are all near the deck--the smell in the evenings was amazing. I'm going to have all those things all over the yard. I know you have warned me about 4 o'clocks, but oh my are they performers. Pretty and bright and perky and SMELL so good. I do have a really aggressive one in a near bed, and I pulled and whacked the heck out of it a month ago just to show it who was the boss. LOL. Love that it'll come right back, and it has. That is a GOOD thing! Had lots of plant failures this year. . . and some great successes. Like every single other year. I'm looking forward to yanking out cucumbers (which have developed some sort of fungal or bacterial thing, of course, but they're still strong and young enough that I have more coming on. So will call it quits next week. So amazing, though, that I didn't plant them from seed until first of July and they've been producing so much that I have had enough to be good for this year, and it's only the end of August. Besides, they need to leave so GDW can proceed with his veggie bed enlargement/renovation project. We all know life is so fragile and precious, but it takes the floods in Texas to bring it to our minds. Blessings to all of you....See MoreNancy RW (zone 7)
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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b