September 2018, Week 4
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years ago
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5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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September 2018, Week 1, September Morn.....
Comments (33)Lisa--so amazed you did it, and so proud of you for doing it! And am so thrilled it was good for you. I've had two other friends who did it, as well. Very rewarding for both, just to know. One of the friends and her family bonded and see each other. Wasn't as good an experience for the other, but she was grateful that she knew about it all, finally. The deer incident affected me more than I thought it would. First, the reality of it and how to handle it. How sad it was to see this creature in such distress. And how problematic it seemed to wonder about the appropriate way to deal with it. It's like we live in the country, with all the critters around us; and yet we live in the country with neighbors very near to us, save for the forest directly across the front of our immediate property and behind our immediate property. GDW felt strange, walking across the street and shooting the poor thing in view of whoever might be driving by or outside. I felt a little freaked when I went out to help him load her into the truck, and two vehicles drove by about that time. I don't think they saw the deer, who was in a bit of a ditch right next to the road, but I felt kind of like a criminal. Had push come to shove, we'd have felt fine about our actions had we been asked to explain. I suggested we call the game wardens, but GDW said the chances of them being able to come right out were slim; so that's when we loaded her into the truck to go to the burn pile. As it stands now, she is still in back of the truck; we will unload her tomorrow nearby, with the nice game warden's blessing. He said I might be surprised to know how many calls they get like ours. And he told me to thank my husband for him, in choosing to put her out of her suffering. And here was poor Garry, with one eye swollen shut! He waves it off, and any of the rest of us might, too. But he is definity hampered temporarily. Now if he was going to be like that from now on, he'd get used to it. We've been laughing about it today; I found myself thinking, "Let's see; if I lose an eye, which one would I prefer to lose. Definitely my left one." hahaha I've been loving binge-watching Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown series, connecting with people all around the world through food. I had only caught 2-3 of the shows when I had TV. Liked them, but not the way I do now. Eileen, it's your fault. How little I knew about Singapore! And now I know a LOT about that supercity/super country. (AND my new favorite, Asian foods and learning to fix them!) And it sort of lit me on fire with how little I know of other cultures. I won't be doing any traveling (not any more than necessary now), but I will travel through books and excellent documentaries. I am absolutely blown away by these journeys of Bourdain's, and the care and attention that team took, to present important and worthy shows that illustrate societies around the world and our commonality. And the sadness many of the countries have gone through, might even be going through now, and the buoyancy and resiliency of the people. And how he manages to bond/communicate with them in these episodes, and also to introduce the rest of us to these people all around the world, a bit of their history, and the common love of food. Great show, glad I finally am watching it all. And so with this great Asian way of cooking, it has ignited and changed to some extent, the way I want to grow veggies. I see a lot more greens in the future. Sigh. I hate salad. BUT when I watch or read about Asian cooking, greens look good and fun! LOL Thanks, Eileen. It's a little late to be planting some of what I want to, but have gone out on a limb with a few. But will be putting in a few more greens tomorrow. I got my garlic order in to SESE before they ran out; I got my coral honeysuckle order into Almost Eden (I had it in the cart and just remembered yesterday that I hadn't punched "Order.") So did that. And you guys know how it goes. Couldn't order JUST one thing, so also ordered some rainbow-kinda colored echinacea--a couple of them. That was because my present grown-from-seed ones have done so splendidly. I was so so ticked off today pulling Bermuda out of the front shop bed and the back Bermuda bed. I hate Bermuda. I'd rather have mud or dirt in our "lawn," or crabgrass, than Bermuda. YES, it's fairly easy to get out with my Hori Hori, but it's every brutal inch or two, and in the front bed today, some of it was 10 inches down. Thing is with those two beds, I didn't properly prep them in the first place and work to get it all out. Hmm. On the other hand, the soil is so much better now and deep enough, and loose enough, that it's easier to get out. So. I guess it's okay. My concern is the established plants. I may end up having to take them all out, just to get all the Bermuda. I hate Bermuda. Will sign off. Life is fragile, we must remember to appreciate every single day, even Bermuda grass days. Maybe especially Bermuda grass days. We're dealing with it, we're fixing it, inch by slow inch! And so far, I'm digging it up faster than it can grow . Diligence will produce victory....See MoreDecember 2018, Week 4, Happy Holidays
Comments (30)Megan, I don't really know of any bird feeders that can prevent the issue of dropped seed---it isn't a problem here because our free-ranging chickens scour the ground beneath the feeders searching for dropped seed. I don't suppose you can have free-range chickens there? Actually, there are some seed trays that you can attach beneath feeders that supposedly will catch dropped seed, but I've always wondered what stops birds from kicking seeds out of the dropped seed trays? One year, I put a piece of plywood on the ground all winter beneath the feeders so I could sweep up seed that fell to the ground and landed on the plywood. That works, but it gets tedious.....although I noticed the chickens policed the plywood for me most days. When you live in an area as rural as ours, for the most part, the existing wildlife takes care of the other wildlife. I'm mostly referring to rodents....everything eats them....snakes, owls, coyotes, bobcats, ring-tailed cats, etc., so they are not as big of a problem here as one might imagine. During the day, our own cats will hunt them, especially Pumpkin who is the youngest and considers himself to be the Great Hunter, but our pet cats are locked up indoors at night, because pet cats that stay outdoors at night usually don't last long around here. Jen, I'm laughing about the Indian princess comment. It is so true. dbarron, Your connection to John Ross is fascinating. I've read quite a bit about him. He lived a very interesting life to say the least. Jennifer, You can get bogged down in that genealogy stuff, and I just do not even want to go there and get started on that so I stay away from it. I know if I ever started it, I would be obsessed with it and would drive myself crazy. It is exciting to think about plans for the 2019 garden. Rebecca, I do have some Burpee exclusives that I like to grow , like Brandy Boy tomatoes and Biker Billy peppers, so I have to order from them occasionally, but I try to only order once every 3-5 years and to just be sure I order enough seeds to last a few years. Their seed prices have gotten so ridiculous and before I order anything from them, I make sure they are the sole source for it. (I have found that sometimes a seed company will claim to be the exclusive source for a specific variety and they are not, so I always search for another source to see if they really are the sole source.) I think Jambalaya could be a good one for you, but I haven't grown it myself. It is supposed to bear early and often, so at least on paper it sounds good. Cajun Jewel is fairly dwarf as well but bigger than Baby Bubba, and Jade and Lee are two other varieties suitable for containers. Shumway's has Pink French Quarter and Red French Quarter this year and they both are dwarf, and look good in the photos online, but I haven't grown either of them yet since they are new. Last year my Stewart's Zeebest plants produced so much okra I couldn't keep up with the harvesting, so I want to grow smaller, less productive plants this year. I know that sounds crazy, but not being able to stay caught up on harvesting and using all the okra drove me nuts. Jennifer, It was cold. It felt worse, I think, because it mostly stayed cloudy. We got a little sunshine late in the day. This coming week's weather doesn't look too great. Oh well, it is winter time and I guess we just have to deal with it. To clean chicken (or any sort of bird) poop off anything, you need Poop-Off. You generally can find it in farm supply stores, feed stores, and in most pet stores in the bird section. Or, you can order it online. I'm sure Amazon.com has it. Here is what it looks like: Poop-Off It really does work, but if the poop has been there a while and has dried out long-term, you may have to go through several rounds of spraying and scrubbing to get all of it removed. Wear gloves and a respirator type mask---not because of the Poop Off spray but because of the possible pathogens that can be found in bird poop. I hate buying veggies too. That's why I try to fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes every summer, but still, they are things we don't grow or that cannot be preserved long-term (like lettuce, for example), so I just try to buy organic and still must remind myself that purchased produce never will have the freshness or quality of home-grown. Going to Central Market for produce helps---their produce is superb in quality and quantity and going through the produce section for me is like a trip to Disney. I have a good time. However, being a gardener, I'm always tell Tim when we are there that it still kills me to buy produce, even when it is theirs. We still have fresh onions from the 2018 harvest, but some of them are starting to sprout now so I don't know how much longer they'll last. I do have a ton of them already chopped and frozen. It isn't the same, I agree, but I'd rather take my own frozen produce out of the freezer and cook it in winter than buy it at a store. I have enough frozen tomatoes to last us another year, and they smell garden fresh when I thaw them out and have them cooking away in a pot on the stove so I can make soup or chili or whatever. It is about to be chili type weather again, I believe, based on our forecast. It is time to go start next week's thread for all of us to post on. I cannot decide whether to make it December week 5, or January week 1. lol lol lol. Decisions, decisions, decisions! Dawn...See MoreSeptember 2019, Week 4
Comments (22)Thanks, Amy and Nancy. What a year it has been, though in all the wrong ways. I'm looking forward more than ever to 2020, or even to October, which at least is coming soon. Amy, Do you know what stripped the kale? Have you seen any cabbage loopers or anything? Maybe fall armyworms? Sadly, at our house, when the kale is being stripped, it usually is our own chickens feasting on our kale. I love Beck's Big Buck, but its size does stun a person when they are new to it. I like to slice them and oven roast them. You can sprinkle the sliced with a little olive oil and seasoning and create okra chips that are (to me) much tastier and obviously healthier than potato chips. With the cucumber plants and as moist as it has been, I'd suspect disease more so than pests. I hope y'all have a good weekend too. Nancy, There's three kittens and they all look just like their mother except they are going to be bigger than her. They are growing fast now that they are eating regularly. I think they are about five to six weeks old and beginning to get a little bit more used to my presence every day, but it is going to be hard to tame them. Still, I am making progress. One of them no longer runs and hides immediately when it sees me---it sits and waits to see if I am bringing food. lol. With cats, you can develop a friendship over food, so I'm off to a good start there. I need to spend a lot of time trying to tame them over the next several weeks and it likely will involve putting a large cage in the garage and moving their cat food dishes into it. Once they are used to eating in the cage, hopefully I can catch them in the cage and bring them indoors to start working to tame them. It needs to happen while they are pretty young, or they'll be impossible to tame. As soon as we get them caged, their mom will go to the vet to be spayed so that she won't have another litter of kittens. If I can't tame them, they can become barn cats/garage cats, but I'd rather tame them so they can enjoy being around humans. If we let them remain feral, it will be hard to catch them in order to take them to a vet for shots and medical attention as we'd have to trap them and then they'd be upset, hysterical wrecks. I'd like to avoid trapping if at all possible. I guess I can spend the non-gardening season taming feral kittens. I'm amazed they've survived living outdoors this long because we have raccoons in the yard every night and coons will kill and eat kittens (or even adult cats). This kittens basically have survived by climbing up into the engine of our Dodge pickup truck to sleep at night. You have to lift the hood, check for them and make sure they aren't in there before you can start up the engine....every single time. They also like to hide on top of the tornado shelter, which is covered by a large trumpet creeper vine that gives them lots of cover, so if we can peer into that mess and see them, at least we know they aren't under or in the truck. Have fun with the church group tomorrow. I'm sure the house and yard look simply splendid. I love our house when it is perfectly clean and tidy, which generally doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like! You know, there's a level of everyday clean or family clean but then there is holiday/visitor clean. I love it when I take the time to get it all holiday/visitor clean BUT I don't love it enough to keep it that spic and span every day of the year either. I hope you get a good night's sleep so you do not feel exhausted tomorrow! Today there were new monarchs in the garden. I don't know if they hatched here, but they were enjoying nectaring at various plants. It is too soon for us to be seeing migrants here, so these are local more or less, one way or another, though they could be regional or local butterflies beginning to mass prior to migrating. All the butterflies and bees are why I don't rip out any plants too early....any more, it is all about them in the garden, not us. I looked at the plants at Home Depot today (inside the garden center, I forgot to look at the ones outside on the sidewalk) and they are starting to compress them down into a smaller area, probably in order to make way for holiday merchandise. They still had some shrubs and perennials, and some fall annual warm-season color, but nothing new for cool weather yet, and I forgot to check to see what Wal-Mart had. They had a lot of tropical plants that would look lovely indoors if only we didn't have cats and dogs that would destroy them. We were buying paint at HD to paint the house, a job which has been on our To Do list ever since we got the new roof put on the house, which I think was in July. We totally changed the shingles from light colored to dark colored and wanted a new paint color that would look better with the new color of the roof. We've just been waiting endlessly for cooler weather to arrive because who wants to paint when the heat index is 108 or 110 or 112? We cannot wait too long now that it is almost October or the nights will start to get too cool for the paint to dry properly, so we are going to start painting Saturday. I would have started tomorrow but Fred's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and I don't want to go to the funeral with paint in my hair or anything. I'm seeing a definite pattern change in the behavior of the hummingbirds over the last week or two. Several weeks ago, hummingbirds were flocking to the feeders all day---flying back and forth from blooming plants to feeders in a dizzying whirl of activity that went all all day long. I knew they were our locals eating extra food to put on the fat they need to help sustain them on their journey south to Mexico. It was amazing to watch and then it ended, and I knew at that point that the males were headed south, though we still had females and juveniles feeding all day long but not in such a crazy frenzy---they seem a bit calmer. Over the weekend and at the start of this week, it appears the females and juveniles too had headed south, and we had a day or two with practically no hummingbirds. Now we have migrants. One way you can tell is that they appear suddenly at the feeders early in the day, feed like mad, and then pretty much disappear. I assume these are migrants eating as they travel south. Then, in the evening you'll see more of them. I don't think it is the same ones that I saw in the morning. They seem tired, and content to sit on the feeder perches and feed a long time before drifting away before dark. Then, in the morning, they probably feed again and leave on the next leg of their journey, and then new travelers come in, sometimes in the morning hours, and sometimes in the early evening hours and repeat the process all over again. They're definitely spending more time at the feeders, and somewhat less time at the plants in the garden or around the house. There's nothing feeding in between the morning crowd and the evening crowd. It is fascinating to watch it all happen. Oh, and also at Home Depot today, there was one lone hummingbird who was visiting all the flowers and was so thrilled. It was just happy and chirpy and the whole nine yards and not at all bothered by being in very close proximity to people. I forgot to ask if it is a regular visitor there or just passing through. The garden is full of sulphur butterflies, and some of the candletree leaves are being devoured, so we may have sulphur cats. I just haven't had time to check. The partridge pea plants in the pastures still are in bloom but there's much fewer flowers on them now, so I think they are about done. I'm glad we have the candletrees to fill that niche of time in October after the partridge peas finish up because their blooms won't last much longer. Helenium, goldenrod and and a few other fall bloomers fill all the fencerows and any pastures that aren't regularly hayed or grazed down low, so butterflies and bees have all the flowering plants they possibly could want right now, and that's such a good thing. Our weather was slightly cooler today, but still hot, though our heat index did not break 100 today---yay! The HX was 99 but that is am improvement and we'll take any improvement we can get. Have a great weekend, y'all. Maybe cooler weather is coming next week. Dawn...See MoreSeptember 2020, Week 4
Comments (51)Jennifer, I like the video. It reminds me of stories my mom, dad , and grandparents use to tell. Times must have really been hard for many years. I remember my dad telling the story of when he was very small, the Arkansas and Mississippi river flooding. The family was taken to what sound like a refuge camp, everyone lived in tents, he said disease was so bad that people were dying like flies. They worked along the Mississippi, or Arkansas river in the cotton fields, and never knew anything but hard work. Dad left home when he was 17. He worked his way to the west coast and back. He could not read or write, and the family did not know if he was alive or dead. He made it back home the day his family heard that he had been killed. He then started to work in the coal mines, when called for the war, he failed his physical, but he said that the miners were not allowed to quit the mines anyway, because the coal was needed for the war effort. Dad left the coal field around Paris AR., and came to the coal fields along the Arkansas, Oklahoma line, that was when he met mom. They knew one another 40+ days before they were married. Dad died of cancer about 15 years later. I don't think mom ever quit loving dad. Mom is buried next to dad, I had a stone made just like the one she picked out for dad, they sit side by side. I can remember mom telling about my grandmother, who was Chickasaw Indian, cooking meals out side, she used a very large rock to set the supplies on, and would build a camp fire by the rock. When I was young, up till I was married and had kids we would go on a large camping trip every summer and granny would do all the cooking. I wondered how she could cook so good on a camp fire, that was when mom told me that use to cook like that all the time. I am sorry, this has not been about gardening, but instead about memories that the video brought back to me. Jennifer, Madge and my neighbor are trying to get me to buy a new tractor. They tell me that I am getting too old to work on that junk, I don't see well and am not very strong, and my tractors range from 20 to 70 years old. I dont know what I will do, but I dont wont to just sit here and dry up, and I cant garden by hand any more....See MoreOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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