August 2018, Week 3, I Made It Through The Rain
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years ago
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farmgardener
5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
5 years agoRelated Discussions
February 2018, Week 3, Planting and....Rain, Sleet, Snow
Comments (135)Kim, Sophie has my sympathy. Our dogs hate it too when the neighbors are shooting. I usually let them stay in, but sometimes they just have to go out at least for a couple of minutes, and then they are at the back door barking and carrying on and wanting back in within 60 seconds. I'm glad Sophie did so well getting her pins out. Nice score on all the seeds! You CAN teach a class. Just pretend you are talking to Ryder or to any of us instead of a larger crowd. You can do this! Sorry about the wind. I wish it would blow hard here---it would help dry up some of this excess moisture, but I know you don't need it there. March is coming and you live in a very windy part of Texas, so I'm guessing the wind is going to be an issue for quite a while yet. Is there any sort of windbreak anywhere near your new garden plot? Nancy, That sounds like a wedding miracle to me! Of course you cried---seeing one of your kids so happy on their special day is going to lead to tears, and rightfully so. Kim, Most of the seeds you got should do just fine with direct sowing. I am a little worried about the wind, but we have wind here too (usually not quite on the scale you have it there) and it doesn't seem to blow away my seeds. Everything you listed except ice plant and delphinium should be fine from seed sown directly in the ground. Ice plant---it might do okay. Do you have clay there? It needs well-drained sand or sandy loam and it does not tolerate staying overly wet for long periods of time. Delphinium is very iffy. They are beautiful flowers but they like prolonged, cool weather so your luck with them in any given year will depend more on the weather than anything else. Think of them as something that would like the weather in the cool, wet parts of the Pacific Northwest more than the west Texas plains, and don't get your hopes up too high. I simply grow the closely-related larkspur instead, and even the larkspur sometimes rots off at the ground when we are too wet for too long, but it tolerates the heat a lot better than delphiniums do. I have had the best luck with delphiniums when sowing them in the fall. They will germinate and remain as small plants down close to the ground all winter, but then when it warms up they'll grow pretty quickly. Sometimes I have managed to get blooms before the heat kills them, and sometimes not. Our Spring weather is so variable that the results were all over the place when I tried to grow them here. Whenever I see them in bloom in gallon pots in the stores in the Spring, I want to buy them and bring them home and plant them....but I don't.....because they'd basically be expensive annuals here in our hot climate. Jennifer, Three sounds like a nice number. Another 100 might be a bit much, you know, and that's doubly true of the straight runs, which tend to lean very heavily towards being roosters and not pullets. It sounds like yesterday was fun, and I hope you're outdoors enjoying your free afternoon now. Nancy, Well, 10 minutes of plant shopping squeezed in at the end of a day with the girls was enough to hold me another week. We saw ladybugs all over the garden center flying around, and then saw some outside Wal-mart so they certainly are swarming and enjoying this lovely day too. Rudbeckia is a large family with many members and some do great here for me, and others do not. I think some are more finicky about drainage (and powdery mildew) than others, but they're not the hardest things to grow if you choose the right ones. In my garden, most rudbeckias are happier with morning sun/afternoon shade than with full sun all day long. Kim, That's crazy about your friend's Dodge pickup. Try explaining that one to your insurance agent! We do try to be careful which way we park on really windy days, but it is more to keep the wind from slamming the car or truck door shut on someone who's attempting to get in or out in strong wind. I never once thought about the wind being able to break a door off a vehicle. It still is sunny and warm outside, so Tim's got ribeye steaks (our standard Sunday dinner) cooking on the grill and I have everything else cooking indoors. I suspect he'd have been out there grilling even if rain was pouring down, but I'm grateful he didn't have to do that. It only took one week of nonstop rain and cloudy skies to make us tired of the rain. I'm not wishing for another month or two with no rain, but I'm hoping whatever rain we get over the next couple of weeks at least will come in smaller, more manageable amounts. Dawn...See MoreJune 2018, Week 2: Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Comments (92)Nancy, Welcome home! How tragic that accident must have been. I'm glad you made it home safely and can just picture Titan going all out to welcome you home. I'm glad GDW, you, Tom and Jerry survived Titan's enthusiasm. I hope the animals will leave you alone and let you sleep tonight. They might not want to let you out of their sight. The combination of heat/humidity has been awful, especially up there in the northeastern quarter of the state. Jennifer, Winter's harshness can depend somewhat on whether El Nino develops or not, and they usually don't really know if it is truly going to develop until almost December even though they can see changes in the Sea Surface Temperatures months before that. The problem is that sometimes SST changes signal that an El Nino (or a La Nina) is going to develop, and then something happens and it never develops or it develops and is very weak or it just fizzles out before it really can develop. And, its impacts vary a lot and can range from minor to major and everything in between, so who can say, really? They cannot even get our forecast right a week in advance, so I don't put a whole lot of faith in long-term forecasts that have lots of moving parts. I think that we'll know by February 2019 if we're going to have a bad winter or not. (grin) Rebecca, Nice plants! Are the squirrels leaving things alone now? Jacob, Start it in flats indoors if that is how you prefer to start seeds. As soon as it sprouts, move it outdoors into the sun so you won't have to spend time hardening off plants raised indoors. Or, direct sow it into a prepared bed outdoors, cover with maybe 1/4" soil patted down gently on top of the seeds, water lightly. Keep an eye on it and water lightly every day just to keep the soil surface moist until it sprouts, which at the temperatures we're having now should take a week or less. I don't start basil indoors any more because it has reseeded all over my garden. This year I thought there were not many reseeding volunteers in the garden, but that was because they popped up late---in May and even in early June. Now I have basil growing in the middle of my Laura Bush petunias and my catnip, and they're all just slugging it out and fighting for control. Amy, I don't know how you get anything done with a grandkid climbing all over you. Nancy, Mortgage Lifter is a late variety, so it isn't a huge concern that it hasn't set much yet. In my garden, they tend to start late but set almost all summer even after other large-fruited tomatoes have stopped setting, so I consider their lateness a good thing---it keeps you in tomatoes late in the season. Jennifer, That is what I'd expect with a pumpkin plant. I think I was able to grow pumpkins and squash like crazy---more than a dozen varieties of each of them each year for the first 6 or 7 years we lived here. Then the squash bugs and SVBs found us and the squash and pumpkin party was over. I've never grown as many since, and mostly only C. moschatas because they can survive the SVBs and can outgrow the damage and diseases carried by squash bugs. In our climate, squash bugs and SVBs are just everywhere and are highly mobile and can travel long distances searching for food. It is just our cross to bear in this region, I guess. Jacob, And that is one of the reasons I've never even wanted to try the Florida Weave---I doubt I could keep up with it during the peak part of the growing season. I prefer cages because once I set them up and stake them, that's it, they're done and I don't have to worry about it for the rest of the season. So, y'all, today we had hornworms in our garden. Not tomato hornworms. Not tobacco hornworms. Nope. We had the hornworms of the White-lined Sphinx moth (probably the sphinx moth that is most abundant here in our area), which even is my favorite sphinx moth that I see flying around. I like them because they have a splash of pink on them. These were not the first White-lined Sphinx moth caterpillars we have had in the garden this year. There's been a couple before this. So, let's say that all this season, I've seen two of them in the garden and I relocated them outside the garden. Then, today, I looked across the garden and spotted a bat-faced cuphea plant that had been devoured. Just devoured. I walked across the garden to it and found 3 5th-instar hornworms on it. That was just the beginning. We found 13 hornworms on the cuphea plants, and Tim relocated them to the Back 40 behind the barn. Then tonight I found a 14th one. It was getting pretty dark so I relocated it to the ground beneath my shoe. Ooops. Were these creatures on the dozens of four o'clocks and daturas that we grow just for them? Nope. They were on one of my favorite little flowers that I raised indoors in flats under lights to ensure we'd have those flowers this summer. In all, we found seven of them on that first mutilated plant that I had noticed from the other side of the garden. I'll watch for more tomorrow. Y'all know I am usually very hornworm-tolerant, but I have to say that finding 14 in one day did not make me very happy. That's a lot of damage occurring at once. If the plants are too heavily devoured, they really lack the strength to bounce back. So, I'll be watching more closely for them now. I think they are a bit easier to spot than the tobacco and tomato hornworms because of the color of their spots, which stand out a bit more. Worried after finding those first 13 that there might be more, I tried to quickly check tomato plants for them. I didn't find any on them, but found a ton of stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs on the tomato plants, especially on the SunGolds. I guess I'll work on that problem tomorrow. Tim and I went to Spanish Fort, TX, today to the cemetery where my paternal great-grandparents, grandparents and my oldest uncle (I think he was the oldest) and his wife are buried. They all died before I was born but we used to go with my parents, aunts and uncles to visit their graves and tidy them up every June. So, today, Tim and I went back for the first time in a very long time and hardly recognized the place. It is a very old cemetery, and one that never had a perpetual care plan in place, so whatever care it gets is from folks who have family buried there. The grass has largely been replaced over time by Mother Nature with wildflowers. It is so much more beautiful with all the wildflowers than it ever was with just the grass. Someone has cut down all the tall, very old cedar trees, and I used those cedar trees in the past to find the family graves, so it was harder to find them this time. Luckily, as I eventually discovered, the lone cedar tree left in that cemetery still shades some of my relatives' final resting place. The oak trees that grow along the cemetery fencelines are twice as tall as I remember. Tim thinks it has been about 30 years since we last were there, but I think we went once about 15 years ago. Since the cemetery was full of wildflowers, it was full of bees. Tons and tons of bees. Spanish Fort is a virtual ghost town now, but the cemetery, the wildflowers and and the bees remain. It was a great reminder to me that Mother Nature does as she wishes and plants her flowers and other plants where she wants them, especially when there's no one around really fighting her wishes in that regard. And all those bees----while we gardeners may worry and fret about where all the bees have gone, I can tell you where thousands of them are....they are buzzing around the wildflowers in a tiny little old country cemetery that has been in use since at least the mid-1800s. Not many people have been buried in that cemetery in this century....most of the more recent burials are in the New Cemetery, established in 1939, but I didn't see many wildflowers and bees in that one, just a lot of short, clipped grass. If there is a shortage of bees anywhere in that county, it is just because there's not enough flowers elsewhere to lure them away from the old cemetery's wildflowers. I liked that cemetery with its flowers and bees. All cemeteries should be filled with wildflowers like that. It was just such a peaceful place, quiet except for the buzzing of the bees. Dawn...See MoreSeptember 2018, Week 3
Comments (35)Nancy, It is just a sad fact of life that heat + lack of moisture give our hot peppers better flavor, and cooler temperatures and excessive moisture do just the opposite. There's not a lot we can do about it. I am careful to choose peppers that are higher on the Scoville Heat Unit scale for just this reason. While this sometimes means that hot peppers harvested in July and August in hot, dry years can be almost unbearably hot, it also means that those harvested in cooler, wetter months still have a lot of heat since I chose hotter varieties to begin with. I'll even tailor my variety choices to the year's expected weather (to the extent that you can know at seed-starting time what sort of summer to expect). If I expect really hot, dry summer, I may choose jalapenos with a lower SHU and do the opposite if I expect a cooler, wetter summer. It helps somewhat. Deer are just that way. They want what they want when they want it. You can jazz up ham and cheese sandwiches by spreading a thin layer of Habanero Gold Jelly on them! Of course, this only works if you happen to have Habanero Gold Jelly handy. Jen, Whatever your pepper is, I don't recognize it and it didn't come from me. Could it possibly me one of the ornamental pepper varieties? It stayed cool, cloudy and mostly rainy---just a slow, even rain that fell all day long until 4 or 5 pm---all day long and the high temperature here only made it up to 66 degrees. It felt like autumn after feeling like summer for far too long. We ended up with 5.8" of rain, so certainly cannot complain about the rain missing us this time. I think the last time we had 5.8" of rain from one rain event, even a multi-day rain event, likely was back in February. It is nice to see all the moisture, but I'm sure the mud and the puddles will get old quickly, and the mosquito explosion will not be welcome at all. We usually have mosquitoes all winter here, so it isn't like we even can count on cold weather to knock back the population completely. I dread the mosquito part of the equation. We'll see if this large amount of rainfall heals up all the cracks in the ground from this summer's drought. I think it will and hope I'm right about that. My garden is a lake as the timbers from each raised bed sort of serve as mini-dams that hold water when there is plentiful rainfall. A lake is probably preferable to a desert after the summer we just had. One lone hummingbird was spotted visiting the feeders in the rain, and then seen visiting the trumpet creeper flowers after the rain stopped. This is the third day in a row to spot only one hummingbird. I don't know if it is the same one, staying here and refueling before flying further south, or if I'm seeing various single ones. So far the last few days, all the hummingbirds I've seen have been ruby-throated ones. The main crowd left a few days ago. The deer returned in force to feed tonight and were pretty hungry. I hope they enjoyed their dinner. At least I didn't have to drag out the water hose to fill up their waterer for them because the rain took care of it---it was, in fact, overflowing. They might not even drink from the waterer now that all the creeks and ponds have water in them again, but it is there if they need it. I'm thinking if an unwanted large predator is lurking, we'll know it soon enough because it likely will leave tracks in the mud if it comes anywhere near the house, garden, outbuildings or the deer feeding area. Vultures have been circling our woodland and Tim thinks this means some predator has killed and possibly cached its prey back there. I pointed out anything could have happened---just some wild thing could have died of natural causes---and we'd still have vultures circling. Neither of us is willing to venture into the snake-infested woods to see if we can find whatever it is that is attracting the vultures. If this was November and we'd had colder nights, venturing into the woods wouldn't be so risky, but we've been too warm recently and the snakes are still very active. Dawn...See MoreOctober 2018, Week 3, From Summer to Autumn to Winter
Comments (38)Jennifer, I'm hoping you were able to finally make it home, enjoy Wine Wednesday, and get some rest. You cannot go into this weekend too tired! Some other weekend, yes, but not this one because you are going to stay so busy. Rebecca, Hmmm, pepper bitterness generally only is a problem is you are harvesting them and using them green. They only truly shed the bitterness when allowed to ripen to their full mature color, but there are different degrees of bitterness along the time scale so that the further peppers progress away from being younger and smaller to being older and larger, though still green, the more the bitterness usually fades. I don't know of any weather or nutrient condition that makes them more bitter, but if I run across any description of something that does, I'll try to remember to come back here and tell you. When our mom told us to go out and play, it was pretty easy for me to go out, play a very short while, and then quietly slip back into the house and go into my bedroom and read. With 4 kids coming and going, if you were quiet once you were indoors, you could get away with that. With the seeds that you're sowing that won't sprout, are you surface sowing? That is what works best with me with green seeds---I broadcast sow on the surface of the growing medium and don't cover them up. I do lightly pat them down so they have good soil contact. I don't know if the seeds of greens necessarily need light to sprout, but I know they sprout better (and at a higher germination rate) for me if I don't cover them with soil. I got lower germination rates and slower germination when I covered them, even lightly, with anything---even compost or the lightest amount of peat moss. You are NOT a garden failure. It is either the seeds or the growing conditions that are failing you, so be kind to yourself and please stop feeling like a failure. If I were to allow myself to feel like a failure every time something in the garden doesn't go my way, I'd be so depressed and disheartened that I'd give up gardening. Instead, I push on relentlessly, overplanting everything, figuring if one thing doesn't work, another one will. And, on a lighter side, this is Oklahoma where the weather is cray-cray, so just blame the weather when something fails! Jennifer, You're welcome, and I agree that gardening is grounding. I feel like it surely is as good for our bodies as it is for our souls. I understand how you feel about meat, and I think you are not imagining it---you just have a soul that likely communicates with the souls of the animals. I feel that same way about people, especially native people here in the USA. When we visit a state park, for example, which is the scene of large battles between the native Americans and the European invaders who called themselves Americans, I swear I can feel the souls of the native Americans talking to me....like, I am walking in their shoes on their land, though not in a literal sense as I am not at war with anyone. I feel their pain and suffering when I walk an area like that--not in an intellectual way, but in a true emotional/intuitive way. The first few times it happened to me, I felt quite unsettled by it and then I decided to just accept it and to not try to overanalyze it or to fight it. I hope y'all enjoyed sleeping in today. Nancy, I really used to live in pepper hell because I'd grow 15 or 20 kinds of peppers and wear myself out trying to preserve them all. Now I grow only a few kinds, and only the ones we adore most, and it has made the pepper section of the garden easier to control, and has made the inevitable kitchen mess/workload more manageable too. When we first moved here and I finally had a sunny space to grow stuff (in the city, we had far too much shade so my garden was tiny), I grew far too much of everything. It was fun, but the garden and my life both are more manageable now that I have cut back and am trying to grow only enough excess beyond what we eat fresh to give us some food to preserve instead of trying to grow as much as possible and then ending up worn out from dealing with all the excess. It did take me about 15 years of growing far too much of everything before I started cutting back, and I still am trying to get the balance right so we have enough of each thing, but not too much of anything. Well, with tomatoes, I'll likely always grow too many just because I like to have a wide variety of shapes, sizes, colors and flavors. If growing too many tomatoes is my worst garden vice, then I think I'll be okay. Tiny will learn. Even Yellow Cat, who roamed our neighborhood for a good 10-12 years as a semi-feral cat before deciding to move in with us for his retirement years, still had to learn. After a lifetime of dodging wild things, he still liked to come inside and sleep all day and roam all night, which made me nervous. After a bobcat chased him up onto the roof of our house during the middle of the night, and I awakened to horrible screaming and had to quickly open a second story window to bring him in off the porch roof, he quite abruptly became an indoor cat at night, and outdoor by the day. By then he must have been 14 or 15 years old at least. He might have learned the lesson of nighttime safety a bit later than I would have liked, but he learned it, and then he lived for several more years to enjoy his retirement before he died of old age. My dad was naturally quiet by nature, and I took after him, so I never really was a chatterbox. Our oldest granddaughter? She'll talk 24/7 if you'll let her, and I never knew constant chatter could wear me out until now. We are trying to teach her that it is okay to ride in the car, for example, in companionable silence if you don't really have anything to say that isn't just mindless chatter. It is getting better, bit by bit, but we have a ways to go yet. We got drizzly, drippy, mostly misty rain most of the day yesterday, so no sunshine yet again and today is expected to be pretty much the same. The heavier rain is expected tomorrow. I miss the sunshine. The amount of mud we have is unreal. In the back where I feed the deer, the mud is just a churned up mess, so I keep moving the feeding area to grassier spots without as much bare ground showing, though the deer don't like change. The dogs and cats both are going stir-crazy from being indoors so much, and I am right there with them. Whenever I let them go out, or when I go out myself, because we are in between bands of rain/drizzle/mist and it seems wise to run outdoors while we can, it almost immediately starts to rain again. Just let me walk down to the mailbox without a raincoat or umbrella, and it will start to rain as soon as I am down there, 300' from the house. It happens every time. I'm so bored with being stuck indoors I have cleaned out the spice drawer and thrown away out-of-date spices, which meant (of course) making a list of the few that I threw out so I'd be sure to replace them this weekend. My constant cleaning out of drawers and things might be making Tim nervous. He survived the closet cleanout, but I haven't really touched his dresser drawers, nightstand drawers or anything in his office (where all the desk and printer table drawers are crammed full of stuff) and I think he might be worrying that someday when he is at work and I am bored, I might clean out the desk drawers and throw away some of his precious junk. Of course, I will not but the thought of it probably has him antsy. I am dying to get my hands on the garage/shop which is 1200 s.f. of 'stuff', some of which he actually needs and uses but much of which seems to be 'just in case we ever need it again' type clutter. I might make the garage/shop my 2019 project and work at it month by month. He'll have to be home when I do it though, so he won't worry I am throwing away too many of the things that he deems important. On the other hand, we'll never move to another place again because just the thought of packing up that garage/shop building would make him decide that moving is not going to be worth it. (grin) Seriously, when we moved here, we knew this was our forever home. However, I didn't know that "forever" applied to every piece of anything ever put in the garage. I'm really starting to get worried about the prospect of an El Nino winter. If the rain continues on through February the way it has been now, planting is going to be delayed for weeks if not months. I cannot decide whether to order my Dixondale onions for the usual early arrival date in February or to strategically order them to arrive 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 weeks later than usual in case the garden still is a mucky mud hole like it is right now. They've raised our chances of El Nino developing for winter here in the USA from 65-70% to 70-75%, so it is seeming more likely, even if it is going to be a Modiki El Nino instead of a regular one. Dawn...See MoreNancy RW (zone 7)
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Nancy RW (zone 7)