April 2018, Week 1
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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Rebecca (7a)
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6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoRelated Discussions
March 2018, Week 1, Time to Plant Cool-Season Plants
Comments (100)The only thing I am afraid of on the general forums is when people pop in and say something even I know is totally not true, and they usually pronounce it dogmatically, as if it is gospel. Sirens go off in my head and I think, "Oh MY. How many people are going to glom onto this bit of gospel and run with it?" The phrase "First, do no harm" always comes to mind. That, and what Amy said. And what Dawn said. I bet you can predict what's coming, Bruce! Totally believe that. And what Jen said. Brr today. Since it will be cool for the next few days, I'm in no hurry to run and get raised bed soil. But am looking forward to the present forecast of really warmer temperature in 4-5 days. I shall be prepared. HJ, I had that happen, only cardinals up in Minneapolis (I'd like to think ONE cardinal, and it very likely WAS the same one as they were extremely territorial up there.) The first time I was standing outside after it had snowed, marveling at the beauty, and thinking of Russ while shoveling the driveway. Glanced up when I got out there, and there was a cardinal,stark red against a white background, on the light pole across the street, directly opposite me on our narrow street. My first thought was how beautiful the scene was. As my mind was occupied with thinking of Russ, how goofy he was and how I wished I could be visiting with him, I'd glance up. There he sat, just watching me. This continued until I was through, and then he softly flew away. Then I actually keyed into him when I'd be out in the winter, or spring or summer that year, and he often would be sitting fairly nearby, oh, say 15-20 feet, and just watching me. And so I came to associate him with Russ, after that first time. I never though it WAS Russ, but I didn't discount the possibility that it might be a messenger carrying messages about Russ or from Russ. Or maybe he just found me interesting. haha As we know, birds are no different than humans. Each one an individual, with THEIR own little quirks. Now down here, the cardinals don't appear to be quite as territorial, and further, none of them has shown the slightest interest in me, nor have any of the other birds. :) The ticks and chiggers, on the other hand, they think I'm magic. I suspect you had a riveting movie to watch last night, Dawn. That was OUR deal at sleepovers. Big batch of popcorn snuggled up together on top of the quilt, not under, with our OJ, watching one of the marvelous movies. Beautiful memories. It is proving to be an extra special day here today, full of thankfulness and love for gardening, nature, and people, and the source for it all. The only gardening I'll do today is potting up, no small thing in itself. Hope you all are doing well!...See MoreApril 2018, Week 4, Planting and Rain
Comments (63)Kim, If it is any comfort, hilling potatoes is not my favorite thing either. I don't do it. I just plant them 8-10" below ground in the first place, and then, once they have broken through the ground and it is time to hill them, I pile on the mulch instead. Inches and inches of mulch. Instead of hilling up a couple more times, I pile on more mulch. Insane amounts of mulch. If it means I don't have to hill, I'm all for it. I realize this works because my potato patch is small. There's no way at a place your size that you could mulch all those potatoes, which is too bad. I'd give you a 2 a.m. wake-up call except for the fact that I will not be awake at that time. Sorry. Hailey, Zinnias are great in our climate. I've grown them every year for as long as I can remember---dating back to my childhood in the 1960s. They love heat and tolerate drought well---I don't mean that they are xeric and never need water, but just that they don't need as much water as most other flowering plants do. They reseed prolifically. I just redid our zinnia bed this Spring after 15 years of letting it reseed itself because I wanted to add a lot of compost to the soil, and I wanted to start over with fresh seed in certain colors. After 15 years of reseeding, our flowers had gotten too predictable and were mostly the more common colors, so this year I added lemon yellow (a lot brighter than the yellow of other zinnias) and lime green. I think I added purple. Or, at least I added a mix that includes purple---let's hope that some of the plants from that mix actually are purple. Just be sure to give your zinnias good spacing. They need good air flow to avoid powdery mildew, which is about the only problem that I think zinnias have. Butterflies love zinnias too. Rebecca, Whatever you're going to do to the squirrels, we support you. More tomatoes, less squirrels, you know. Good luck with it. Go ahead and plant the cukes. I'd only hold back if powdery mildew is an issue with your peas, because you wouldn't want for PM to start on the peas as they near the end of their lives and then transfer to the cukes as they are sort of just starting out. Most years my peas don't get PM....so it isn't something I worry much about. If I see it starting up I just go ahead and yank out the pea plants to get the PM out of the garden before it can begin to spread. Amy, I'm laughing about Curious George. I loved those books. I probably wouldn't appreciate them as much now as I did when I was a kid. I think the violas will survive under the coleus. I just finished interplanting Lemon Yellow Profusion Zinnias with my pansies and violas today, with the idea being that by the time the now-tiny zinnia plants are taller than the violas, the weather will be heating up and the violas will be about done. My violas either come back every year or they reseed themselves....one way or another, they come back. I just saw seeds on a viola yesterday and was shocked. It seems too early for them to go to seed, but we have had some days with high temps at 88 or 89, so maybe the violas think summer is here and they are done. Yes, I think Elbon rye (or even just plain old winter rye grass like people use to overseed lawns) would crowd out the crabgrass if you plant it in the fall, but I haven't tried to do it. I do know that when we overseed the lawn with annual or perennial rye grass (both are annuals here, by the way) so we have a green lawn in bad wildfire seasons, all the summer grasses are late to appear because the rye grass shades them and keeps them from really getting going in the Spring time. I don't recognize your plant in the photo, but it looks vaguely familiar. Do the plants have square stems like the plants in the mint family? So what kind of gulls scour the Wal-Mart parking lot occasionally looking for food? Do we have a name for those. (grin) I love gulls. Feeding them at the beach was one of our favorite thing to do when Chris was a little kid. I suppose having our kids treat us like we are children is karma for the times we have treated our parents like they are children. Of course, we can look at it in a positive light and say that our children learned their nurturing behavior from us, but it does make me think "oh, he thinks we are getting old....". lol. Well, of course, we are getting older every day---all of us are getting older---us, our parents, our kids, our grandkids....our pets. I still maintain that getting older isn't that bad when you consider the alternative. Jennifer, Getting older is interesting. I don't like all the physical changes that come with it, but I do like the mental/psychological changes that occur over the years. It is funny when I look back at things I worried about in my 20s and 30s and now realize that it was just a waste of time to worry about them. I do think wisdom comes with age, so that's a plus. I know I am a lot more laid back now than ever before, and I think that's a positive. The body changes after menopause suck, but guess what? That's life. At least we're still here, still alive, still kicking and still gardening. I look at some of our older friends who are on the verge of being wheelchair bound and am so grateful that at least we still have our mobility (despite all the aches and pains that come with it). I'll probably color my hair forever. At least that's what I think most days. Then, other days, I look at my cousin who has lovely silver hair and think I wouldn't mind having hair like that. I think the hard part is to go from coloring it to letting it grow out to its now-natural shades of gray and white or whatever it would be. For me, that would be the hard part. Hailey, I agree with Nancy that your flower is an osteospermum. That particular one is Blue Eyed Beauty, sold by Park Seed. Osteopermums are cool-season flowers so generally don't last long here (at least in my part of OK) before the heat burns them up. They were in bloom down here in the Feb-Mar time frame...of course, March was warm, and then April turned back cold, so this year they're probably going to stay in flower longer than usual. Rebecca, Wear whatever is comfortable! Keep in mind that we'll be handling plants and eating, so white probably is not the best color to choose. (grin) Based on that reasoning, I ought to wear brown or black so that all the stains hide. I worked my fingers to the bone in the garden this week and planted, planted, planted. Weeded, weeded, weeded. Mulched, mulched, mulched. Still, in the end, at least it seems like I made progress. I hope to make more either next week or the week after. We'll see what life throws at us and what the weather throws at us as well. The problem is now that it is warming up, everything is growing like weeds----especially the weeds. I have been working hard to get the warm-season flowers in the ground so they can get off to a good start before the weather gets too hot. We still are rain deficient here for April, so probably will end April that way. It looks like May will bring more rain though, and with it, all the thunderstorms and stuff that we don't especially want. See y'all tomorrow. Dawn...See MoreJune 2018, Week 1: Hot Time, Summer In The City
Comments (99)Jennifer, Could the dog have been bitten by a snake she was trying to bite? If you can look at the hard knot in her mouth, do you see any fang marks? When we have a dog with swelling around the mouth/nose/snout area, it usually is a copperhead bite. No treatment required except maybe Benadryl for swelling. The only time we've had a dog stung by a bee or hornet wasn't in the mouth---was in the facial area and there were knots at the sting sites and swelling. Benadyl was the solution. With the onions that got wet, it probably just means they'll need a longer drying period. Watch them for mold though. Amy, When Houzz changes things, I just roll on and work around whatever they've changed. I ignore notifications, FAQs, etc. in the gardening season because I don't have time for that stuff. I just come here to chat with y'all. I'm just grateful they saved GardenWeb when it looked like it was going to go away and disappear into the realm of used-to-be's. Someday it will go away and all we'll have left to help us stay in touch is the OK Gardening-related FB pages. I think it is just a matter of time. I'm surprised your Red Rivers are done. When I've grown them they're usually about the last ones to mature, and it often is late June or sometime in July. This has been a weird year, and my onions are weirder than anything else. Half the 1015Ys fell over and I harvested them. The rest remain strong and upright and still growing. Normally they're done by now. One Candy has fallen over. None of the others have. Copra? Nothing yet and I wouldn't expect it. Either last year or the year before they were the last ones to mature and it took them forever. This has been such a weird weather year that I guess nothing should surprise us at this point. Some of my tomato plants have great fruit set. Some do not. It appears directly related to how early I did or did not plant them. The ones planted in late March (I only planted 7 that early) have had a huge fruit set, and we've already harvested most of that fruit----dozens and dozens of tomatoes. The rest, the ones that were planted about 10-14 days later, have set maybe 1/5th as much fruit. Some have not set fruit at all. We went from too cold to too hot literally overnight here and the plants just sat there forever, shellshocked and doing nothing. It probably doesn't help that the rain mostly keeps missing us. For as bad as I think they look compared to most years, at leaste they are relatively healthy. We may be too hot now for them to ever set fruit and I'm not going to baby them through the whole entire summer, so if they want to stick around, they'd better get busy setting fruit. Next year I'll probably plant them all as early as possible and cover them, instead of planting in stages. Rebecca, We don't have JBs down here. I guess they haven't yet made it this far west and south. We might see 1 or 2 stray ones each summer. Dorothy (Mulberryknob) lives in Adair County and I'm almost positive she mentioned buying and using some type of Japanese Beetle traps from someplace like Home Depot in previous years. I've never seen those traps down here, but it seems like they worked pretty well for her. Larry, I'm sorry about the hail. I hope the damage wasn't too bad, We don't get much rain here in the summer months, and I do try to grow dryland style as much as possible, but I still have to irrigate quite a bit. I wish I didn't. It is a grandchildren weekend so I didn't step foot in the garden today and probably won't step foot it it tomorrow either. I'm okay with that. After working in it all week in the heat, as much as I do love it, I need a break and weekends are a good time to take a break and spend the time with family and friends. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2018, Week 1, Cruel Summer
Comments (68)I am so far behind that I'm never going to catch up. It is hard to find computer time with a grandchild in the house. Jennifer, Tim's hawk/guinea rescue probably occurred before YouTube even existed. It was quite a while back. Regardless, he and I are so old school that we pretty much use our phones just as phones. We just aren't the type to whip them out and take photos or videos. It isn't a habit to us to do that and it isn't routine, and we don't even think about doing it. Jacob, I cannot even imagine temperatures in the 50s at night. That sounds heavenly and it will be months before it happens down here again. We had a lot of pop-up thunderstorms roll thru last night. At our house we barely got any rain, but got cooler nighttime temperatures from the rain-cooled air---a cool 70 degrees overnight low this morning and that felt heavenly compared to our usual 77-80 degree low temperature. Sometimes brassicas do odd things. We had some Piricicaba broccoli survive the horrendous heat (highs up to 115 degrees at our house and over 100 degrees most days all summer long) and lack of rainfall (a total of less than 11" from Jan-mid-August 2011) during the drought of 2011 even though I stopped watering the garden for pretty much all of July and half of August. We were at fires day and night---up to 5 fires in one day, and also some fires that burned for 3 to 5 days each, and I abandoned my garden for a very long time. In late autumn, I ventured in there to pick Seminole pumpkins, which had survived the heat and drought, and found the Piricicaba was producing heads. It was crazy. Native cacti died. Native wildflowers died. Native grasses died. Native trees (including the normally very resilient oak trees) died. A random broccoli variety in an unwatered garden? Survived. The other crazy thing was that even after I stopped watering, some tomato plants set fruit in 100-115 degree weather. The reason? My only explanation is that our relative humidity was very, very low, often in the low single digits, and some tomatoes will set fruit in high heat/low humidity but won't set fruit in high heat/high humidity. Pole beans often survive the heat here, growing well but not blooming, and go on to produce in the fall once temperatures cure. Bush beans are less resilient and the heat and pests seem to get them. So, I plant accordingly---plant those bush beans early, harvest until the heat stops them from producing and then yank them out. By then, the grasshoppers are devouring the foliage and the spider mites are all over them. The pole beans I just leave alone and ignore unless they become sick or pesty, in which case I yank them out and replace them with new ones for fall. So, this year my bush beans are long gone, but we froze a lot of beans from them, and my pole beans haven't produced a thing yet. They are still alive but grasshoppers are all over them. The lima beans have not one single leaf that isn't full of holes like Swiss Cheese, but are producing beans finally after stalling for a long time. In our heat down here, the usual production sequence is bush snap beans, Lima beans, southern peas (all summer long) and then pole beans (in the autumn) and another round of snap beans in the autumn. So, this year, that is how it has gone except the Lima beans stalled and the first variety of southern peas beat them to production, but now that variety of southern peas is fading fast (they only produce for a few weeks) and the Lima beans are coming on strong. This year's strange weather has caused lots of strange stuff like that down here. March and May were both extraordinary in how hot they were so early, but periods of cold in April complicated things. It has been so weird that I'm just glad my garden is producing a harvest. Amy, The cloudy spot can be ignored and the tomatoes can be used however you choose, including running them through the tomato machine. When the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs insert their sucking mouth parts into the tomatoes, they inject an enzyme that helps break down the fruit juices so they can ingest them. That enzyme causes the little spots on the fruit and some people feel it adds a sourness to the fruit. It is not noticeable to me if there's just a couple of spots, but if there's 50 or 60 or 80 spots on one fruit, I cannot bear to look at those and toss them on the compost pile. Once stink bug and leaf-footed bug damage on tomatoes reach that level, I might as well pull my plants and toss them because the fruit isn't going to be harvested and eaten, and we are almost to that point now. It works out okay. I harvest all the remaining usable fruit, pull and toss the plants, and then the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs have nothing much to eat----so they go away. Then I plant fall tomato plants and start all over. Usually the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are gone or almost nonexistent by the time the fall tomato plants are producing. I remember a decade or further back that some of the Texas gardeners on GW on the Tomato Forum would talk about how stink bugs and leaf footed bugs decimated their fruit and that they were done harvesting by May because of the heavy damage....and I couldn't even imagine it. Now, they have gotten just about as bad here even though we're a lot further north, but I usually can harvest at least well into July. This year the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are the worst they've ever been. I know I was seeing stink bugs in April while we still were having those really cold nights. Megan, I'll look at your photos later. I've got to wake up the kid in a minute and get her ready to go to a United Way thing in Ardmore. We're going to meet our son and her mom there for lunch and whatever else is going on at the BBQ bash in downtown today. Nancy, I am glad you found a home for the fox. Eileen, One reason we moved to such a remote area (we still had dirt roads when we moved here 20 years ago, and no TV reception, no internet except via satellite and no cell phone reception) was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife. We got a little more wildlife than we bargained for, I think, and you cannot just sit back and watch them starve in drought summers (or, at least, I cannot) so we started feeding them. Now, it is just a part of who we are and what we do. The deer understand it very well. I've been slicing up extra zucchini and squash for them when I have extra ones (usually it is the big ones that have escaped detection until they are gigantic) and I put those out with the deer corn. The deer get used to them quickly, and sulk on the days when there's no squash or zucchini. It is funny. They stand and stare at me and the deer corn as if to say "where's our squash?" They eat and leave, and then keep coming back all day, checking to see if there's squash. Sometimes, after I've harvested a gigantic zucchini and sliced it up for them, they almost meet me at the deer corn when I bring it out to them....so I think they stand in the woods and watch me come from the garden to the house and are just waiting for that extra food. We are going to have unhappy deer when/if the SVBs finally kill the squash and zucchini plants. I've done nothing special to protect the plants this year, and yet the SVBs haven't gotten them yet, which is odd. Still, it surely will happen soon, so the deer had better be enjoying their extra food rations while we still are getting them. Occasionally the deer become too friendly and start walking towards me to meet me when I am carrying out food for them. I have to stop and get a dog and bring it with me to force the deer back over the fence and away from the feeding area. The dog doesn't have to do anything---just the sight of it sends them back over the fence and into the adjacent woodland. I never, ever lose sight of the fact that the deer are not Bambi and it is never safe to let them get too close. Never, ever, ever. We've had people here in our county let deer get too close, and then the deer attacked them and hurt them and sheriff's deputies had to go shoot the deer to get them to leave the victims of their attack alone. So, we're friendly with them, but not too friendly---a safe distance has to be maintained. I also let bunnies live in my garden if they venture into it or are born inside it, and feed them in the same places at night so that they often let me get within 2 or 3 feet of them while I'm putting out food for them. Like the deer they often are waiting for me to bring out the food in the morning. I'm not sure if I have them trained to sit and wait for the food or if they have me trained to bring them food, but either way we always have a good population of cottontails, at least until the coyote population surges upward and the bunnies all get eaten. You cannot get too attached to your wildlife for that reason. Dawn...See Morebaabaamilker
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoEileen S
6 years agoMegan Huntley
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoMegan Huntley
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agoEileen S
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoEileen S
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoMegan Huntley
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoMegan Huntley
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agookoutdrsman
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
6 years agoEileen S
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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