May 2019, Week 3, The Sunshine Returns
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years ago
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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years agoRelated Discussions
January 2019, Week 3, The Gloom Goes On and On and....
Comments (65)Jacob, That is very peculiar cat behavior. I've never seen cats that won't groom themselves, except occasionally a very old cat (late teens or older) that is getting old, tired and sort of sickly and just kinda does stop grooming when they are in the final months of their lives. I have one 18 or 19 year old cat that I have to bathe now because that's the stage in his life that he has arrived at. He is shrinking down to nothing....like very old humans do. Since he generally took care of his own grooming for almost his entire life, it takes two of us to bathe him---one to hold him so he doesn't escape and the other to bathe him in the tub or our deep farm sink in the kitchen. I hope your seeds from Victory Seeds do well for you. I have purchased tons of seeds from them over the years and have been very happy with them. They are extremely dedicated to preserving heirloom varieties. I am watching the weather closely. Y'all know I go on instincts that I jokingly refer to as the voice in my head. Well, the voice is my head is cautioning me to go slow and to not get in a big hurry to do anything, so I'm trying to comply. I just feel like we haven't had enough winter yet. Often, when we have a warm January, we have a bad March and April. Well, so far, January has been pretty warm overall. Right now it is almost 9 p.m. here and the outdoor temperature is 61. That seems so odd to me. We just aren't cooling down. I guess when the cold front gets here, our temperatures will fall like a rock. Megan, Trial and error gardening is true gardening...and the best kind of gardening....where nothing is guaranteed and anxiety levels build as you wonder if what you're doing is what the plant needs. So, I hope it works for you. I think back to my dad's generation (he was born in 1919) and to his dad's generation before him (born in the late 1880s I think) and I wonder how they farmed and did everything they did with....no internet, no gardening shows on TV or the radio, very primitive agricultural universities that did publish occasional ag bulletins, very few books available to dirt poor farmers, etc. Where did the know-how come from? I suppose it was handed down father to son, etc., but also bet there was a ton of trial and error involved. Nancy, I agree that it feels like we are waiting for someone to drop a bunch of bad weather on our heads. What if it doesn't happen? What if everything sort of fizzles out as it blows through? I suppose I wouldn't mind and I wouldn't complain, because it would be hard to be unhappy if we weren't as cold as expected or as rainy/snowy as expected or as windy as expected. At least it seems like this weather will race through here pretty quickly and won't linger here for days and days. It can only help that they have raised those overnight lows a lot higher over the last few days. Today was oddly warm. I don't know what to make of this weather. We hit 66 degrees, and had south wind and sunny skies until some clouds came in late in the day, and now it won't cool down. I am not complaining, just trying to understand why it doesn't want to cool down at night. Last night was pretty warm all night long as well. I guess that changes overnight sometime after midnight here. Megan, I am so happy for your friend. I can only imagine the great joy she is feeling now. My wish for her is a smooth pregnancy, an easy delivery (well, it never is easy, but you know what I mean) and a healthy baby. I cannot think of a single way to include tomato seed packets in a shower theme. Nancy, You need to be distracted by other things so you won't fixate on gardening during this hostile weather time of the year. Here is how I distracted myself today....the thing that I did to push my focus to something other than gardening and then, in parentheses, the thoughts that were running around in my brain so you can decide if the distractions worked. Lillie came over to spend the day because it was a school holiday for her. (We have a whole day.....we could work in the garden together.....her name is also the name of a flower. Still, it is foggy and cloudy and chilly, so not a day to garden with Lillie.) We went to Frisco TX to CarVana to pick up the new Acadia SUV. On the way down, we discussed everything among the four of us (Tim, Chris, Lillie and I) from school to work to vehicles to friends and pets....you name it, we discussed it. We did not discuss gardening at all. (This is what it is like to be in a car with three non-gardeners. Boo hoo. Not one word about gardening. I was dying.) Lillie and I were the least bit interested in talking to the car guys, test driving the vehicle, discussing the extended warranty, etc. because as long as Tim was happy with it, we were going to be happy, so we got the guys to drop us off at the nearby IKEA, which is our happy place. What did they have? Oh wow, some new Boho type patterns on pillows and some lamp shades and fabrics. (Boho? Flowered prints and paisley. Bright colors. I was in heaven.) Then we walked through a bunch of furniture (who cares) but spotted some lovely new vases (for cut flowers, of course, I said to myself). When we got closer to the Marketplace, they had fake indoor plants, plant stands, hanging planters, vases, self-watering pots, watering cans, more plant stands, a ladder that leans against the wall with little pots hanging from it (would be perfect for succulents....I want one), etc. There was outdoor furniture, outdoor storage units, etc. (Gardening! IKEA is into gardening now. Spring is here. My life is complete! I am so happy.) Ring....ring....ring.....all too quickly, my phone was ringing and it was the guys to say they were headed our way with Chris in his vehicle and Tim in our new one. I mean, it was in the blink of an eye. Lillie and I weren't even a quarter of the way through the store yet. Panic time. With hope in my voice I asked if they wanted to come inside and meet us there or if they wanted us to come out. They suggested we come out so we all could see the new SUV, figure out what all the buttons and dials and crap do, etc. etc. etc. Since that was the purpose of the trip, I agreed to come out the same door through which we had entered less than a half-hour before, and Lillie and I rushed our way through the infernal maze that is IKEA because I know all the shortcuts. (I was lamenting the fact I hadn't grabbed a cart and thrown all the gardening stuff in it as we looked at things, because I honestly want a lot of it......). Outside I called them and asked what row they were in. They said halfway between I and J. (I? Ice plant. J? Jasmine.......now I've got plants on the brain......it is not my fault. I blame IKEA for having such a lovely selection of garden enabling stuff.) The SUV was beautiful and gorgeous, leather seats and all sort of fancy stuff that Tim and Chris love.....heated seats (in case I get cold while hauling home bags of mulch in early Spring). I wasn't thinking about the vehicle. I was thinking about how much gardening stuff I could cram into it. (Hmmm. Fold down the back row of seats and we can fit anything in there....a new wheelbarrow.....bags of mulch.....how many bags of mulch? Maybe 12? Fold down the middle seats and we can probably get 16 bags in there.....or more. Hmm. How many flats of plants can we carry to the Spring Fling with the second and third rows of seat folded down? That is the sort of vehicle-related thoughts that were running through my mind.) We went to On The Border and ate lunch. (On the Border. Border? I like borders. I love flowering borders on all four sides of the garden filled with flowers and herbs for the wild things. Borders are nice. Food, wait, food? You guys want me to stop daydreaming about flower borders and order lunch? Okay. Fine. Be that way. Clearly you all are fuddy duddies who only want to discuss vehicles and the football playoffs when, clearly, people in a restaurant called On the Border should be discussing flowering garden borders. Whatever. I do not fit in with you people---I am from a different tribe. Where is my tribe????) We ate lunch. (Restaurant tomatoes. Ugh. I want real home-grown tomatoes.) Chris headed off the bird seed store and Tim, Lillie and I headed for CostCo. We hurried through it, since we have shopping there down to a science. There was all sorts of gardening stuff there now, but I didn't even stop and look because we had a long To Do list of places to stop and shop on the way home and I just wanted to get it done and get headed north out of the DFW metroplex before rush hour traffic began. (Don't worry, I consoled myself, you'll be back here in 2 or 3 weeks and they'll have more gardening stuff in stock and you won't be in such a hurry. You can buy what you want that day.) We stopped at Sam's Club to pick up two items (specific brands we like) that CostCo doesn't carry. It was a very quick in-and-out, but guess what I saw. Gardening stuff. (Hmmmm. Roses. I wouldn't plant those until February. Packaged perennials. I need to buy those now before they sit in the plastic bags too long and rot. I got a great bag of lilies here last year for Lillie. Bags of soil-less mix. Oooh, I always need some of that. Planters. Tools. Raised bed kits. I am in hog heaven. I hope it takes Tim a while to find the Cat Litter. Darn it. He is back already. What is the rush....) and out of the store we went, all too soon. On to Gainesville on the endless trip home. I did the only thing a smart woman could do when making a trip to the feed store. I said "We'll just sit here in the car and try to figure out what all these buttons do" (I did this on purpose because I didn't want to buy potatoes, onion, seeds, etc. with a big winter storm bearing down on us. See, I use the brain God gave me sometimes. I am not totally garden obsessed. Not really. Not too much. Not much at all. Hmm. This vehicle's back door can be opened with the remote.....I can have a flat full of plants and still open it, virtually hands free, and put the plants in the area behind the back row of seats. Cool! No. I. am. not. gardening.obsessed. Why do you ask?) Home again. Driving past the garden. Looking at all the green. Thinking how it might not be green by Sunday evening. Proud of myself that I hardly spoke about gardening on this trip.....not to Tim, not to Chris and not to Lillie. (Whew! What a relief. I didn't torment the three non-gardeners with lots of garden talk. See there. Distraction worked. We didn't discuss gardening at all. I didn't even buy a gardening magazine and Sam's Club had 2 or 3 of them on the magazine rack. I am so proud of myself. Nobody but me knows that my mind wandered away from the conversations we were having and thought of nothing but gardening no matter where we went. I have concluded I can be externally distracted from gardening stuff, but internally.....that is where my mind goes. Is this normal? It is normal for me. Is it normal to carry on an entire conversation about non-gardening things with other people while you are carrying on a gardening conversation with only yourself inside your own head? And those other people have no idea your mind is fixated on gardening? Am I nuts? (Hmmm. Nuts. We grow nuts here. Pecans. Hickories. Black walnuts. Ooops. Sorry. My mind 'went there' for just a minute.) See there, Nancy, if you just get out of the house and go do other things, you can make it through the entire day without buying one single thing related to gardening and without saying one word aloud about gardening. You won't order seeds or plants. You won't pick up a few things while you're in the store. Why, you'll hardly have gardening on your mind at all. I know this because I did it! Those random garden thoughts that roll through our minds? Nobody can control those and I don't even try. I'll try to think of other things to distract us tomorrow because I fear the weather will pin us down indoors, merely because none of us like to have frostbitten nosies and toesies. The wind chill is supposed to be brutal. Remember, y'all, wind chill only applies to fauna and not to florals.......so our plants only have to endure the wind and the cold temperatures, but aren't, technically speaking, affected by wind chill itself. Is is Spring yet? I cannot remember if I already asked that question today. Oh, and the answer is no, it is not. Luckily for us, we can start planting in late winter.......Crazy? No, I am not crazy. Dawn...See MoreMay 2019, Week 4
Comments (40)Nancy, I saw where they were advising some folks in Wagoner to evacuate, and that kind of surprised me, but then when you look at the rainfall map for the month of May, maybe the big surprise is that the whole northeastern quarter of OK isn't evacuated already. Yes, there's so many good people doing so many things to help the people, livestock, pets, wildlife, etc. It is touching....like fire stations offering their use of their 1 or 2 showers to people whose homes have lost power and/or water....and people who are just showing up with cases of bottled water, figuring somebody needs it for drinking water. Shelters popping up, volunteers coming to staff them, restaurants feeding the first responders, and on and on and on. That's the Oklahoma Standard, isn't it? Like you, we're on high ground, so while the Red River is on three sides of us, it never could flood enough to reach us. I had a few doubts in 2015 when we got 80" of rainfall and the river seriously flooded (including washing away two homes not that far from us--but at a much lower elevation--but water never got close to us. We could drive a couple of miles and sit in the parking lot of the McGeehee Catfish Restaurant and watch the incredibly high water go by, but then we drove back uphill to get back home. Everyone said the creeks might back up because they couldn't drain into the river, but they really didn't. They ran high after heavy rainfall, but they always do, and even then, the water would have had to rise 12-15' to make it up the hill to our yard. There was never any chance of that happening. Our road never has flooded at the creek, but there's been flooding to our south and to our north, so we might temporarily be trapped at home for merely a few hours. We almost bought riverside land at a much lower elevation, and I am so grateful we didn't---although we would have had incredible neighbors. (We also have incredibly wonderful neighbors here.) I paint that way....forgetting myself and ending up with a new set of painting clothes too. I don't think it is that I don't know I'll get paint on me, just that in my excitement about getting it done, I forget to go put on clothes that already are dotted with paint. Thanks for sharing the story about Russ. I'm glad he had the chance to get to know his father better. Jennifer, First, congrats on Ethan's high school graduation! That's such a monumental point in a young adult's life (and in the parents' lives as well). Everything eats seedlings. Caterpillars, snails, slugs, flea beetles, army worms, pill bugs and sow bugs (they are decomposers but I find them eating plenty of green plants as well), and I could go on and on and on. Most plants outgrow it, but the brassica family plants need to be treated or the cabbage loopers and cabbage worms will destroy them. There's just too many of the little caterpillars and they munch until they become big caterpillars. Bt 'kurstaki' is the answer. Many of the pests that will eat kale, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower really, really prefer collard greens or mustard greens, so often I grow those on the edge of the garden so the pests will flock to them and not bother my other crops so much. That works pretty well. The non-organic gardeners spray with synthetic pesticides. I have friends who do that. Their plants always look perfect. They use stuff like Bug-B-Gone and Liquid Sevin, and in the olden days used all sorts of heavy-duty stuff like organophosphates like diazinon and malathion. I'd probably give up gardening before I'd ever use those, but using them doesn't bother some people. Guess what is missing from their gardens though? Lady bugs, green lacewings, butterflies, dragonflies, hover flies, flower flies, bees, and often....anything that anyone would consider a pollinator, so they end up having pollination issues. The organic gardeners often spray with organic broad-spectrum pesticides too. I'm not going to fault people for doing that because it is their garden and their choice, but I just do not like spraying a broad spectrum pesticide all over everything. I feel like it isn't worth (to me) the risk of running off or killing all the beneficial insects. Still, I'll never say that I absolutely, positively never would use these products because some day something might happen that pushes me to that point. There are many broad-spectrum organic pesticides available---Spinosad, Neem, Organocide (soybean extract, fish oil and sesame oil), PyGanic (pyrethrins, so can be deadly to felines), Safer Insecticidal Soap (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids), Safer Tomato and Vegetable Spray (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids + botanical pyrethrins), Take Down spray (Pyrethrins and canola oil), Hot Pepper Wax (more of a repellent) and Garlic Barrier (also a repellent), Zero Tolerance (herbal oils like rosemary, thyme, cinnamon and other oils), and Beauveria Bassiana (when you need to bring in the big guns---it is a mycoinsecticide that is a fungus in a Liquid Emulsifiable Suspension used to kill soft bodied insects and a few hard-bodies ones as well). I bought Beauveria bassiana last year when I felt like the grasshoppers were winning the war over who was going to harvest from the garden, but then they disappeared (I think birds were eating them) and I never used it. I probably wouldn't have sprayed it on my garden plants but was going to spray it in a 10-12' wide band all around the exterior of the garden fence in the hopes that the grasshoppers would make contact with it there and would get sick and die. Every time that I think that I could and would and will and am going to use a broad-spectrum pesticide to combat some horrible thing in my garden (hmmm....leaf footed bugs or squash bugs or stink bugs, for example), I think about all the living creatures in my garden that I like seeing there, and I just cannot do it. I guess I am a total failure as an organic pesticide user because I cannot use the above products. I will use some narrow-spectrum ones---like sometimes Bt on the brassicas or Semaspore for grasshoppers (it is a bait) or Slug-Go/Slug-Go Plus (a life saver when you have a heavily-mulched garden full of pill bugs and sow bugs), but cannot bring myself to use the broad-spectrum ones. If holes in your kale or cabbage or whatever do bother you that much, then why not find the right product and spray them? Bt should take care of most. Little tiny grasshoppers are just now beginning to hatch out here, though I have not yet seen that many, and they eat holes in everything. I don't think I'm seeing enough of them to make me worry though. Not yet. I usually have a bottle of Take Down spray in my shed so I can spray it directly on hard to catch things like leaf-footed bugs, but I've been out for a couple of years and just haven't bought another bottle yet. It is your garden. If the thought of holes in things bother you, spray with whatever pesticide you're comfortable using. I've just gotten away from doing that and hardly notice the holes in leaves any more. dbarron, Ha! I have had to water my containers the last 4 days. That's what we get for having a combination of strong winds all day long and temperatures in the upper 80s, sunshine (finally) and no rain (oddly). I won't complain and say the rain is missing us, but we aren't getting anything close to what everyone else is getting and May is barely above average rainfall at all compared to other months over the last year. Our ground is starting to dry up some (woo hoo!) and there's no rain in our forecast until Tuesday. I'm glad you're safe from flooding. That's one less thing to worry about anyhow. Eileen, With regards to your pepper seedlings, yes, birds will do that sometimes. Usually it is mockingbirds and they do it only to tomatoes and peppers. I have no idea why. They don't eat them. They just cut them off and leave them lying on the ground. It could be something else---there are some climbing cutworms that will climb a plant stem a couple of inches and then cut it off. I have no idea why. They always seem worse in wet years. I hope your house will be okay. There are some limited 100-year flood zones directly alongside some of the creeks in our neighborhood, but I've only ever seen the creek come up into the yard of one house on our street, and it sits quite a bit lower than us---I think they are actually in the 100-year flood plain while we're well above it. Of course, we had the good sense to build on the highest point of our land, not down in a low area beside the creek, and that helps too. Out closest neighbor to the north put a mobile home way back in the woods right beside the creek. Perhaps they should have taken a clue from the fact that the old farmhouse on that property was built on its highest point of ground but apparently they did not. Still, that house didn't flood in 2015 either. I am sure that if I lived up there in your general area, I'd be feeling anxious about all the rain too. The images of all that water everywhere is mind-boggling. So is the forecast. Rain keeps falling and falling and falling, mostly over the watersheds that can least handle more rain. I feel pretty good about the Red River near us and Lake Texoma right now. They've been releasing water from Texoma for several weeks now, and it is to the point where they're finally releasing water from it faster then new inflow is coming in, so the lake held steady yesterday and should be dropping beginning today. The Red River is high and running fast, and absolutely wall-to-wall (i.e. bank to bank is full) which is not all that common here, where it often is so low you can pretty much walk across it---and, sometimes, in the summer you can walk across it without touching water, but as of this morning, it still was within its banks. We had the unexpected pleasure of a weekend with our oldest granddaughter, so today was kid stuff--shopping for summer clothes, going to the playground, to the movies (Aladdin) and then home for pizza night, playing games and watching some TV. We tortured her by forcing her to watch two episodes of Gunsmoke (in black and white) with us. She thought it was funny---especially because it was in black and white. One guest star was Kurt Russell, playing a kid about 12-13 years old, and she asked me if he was Elvis. I told her no, but that later on, after he grew up, Kurt Russell played Elvis in a movie about his life. She thought it was cool that she picked up on his resemblance to The King. Everyone has gone to bed now except me and one cat, and she's lying here beside me trying to sleep. The house is quiet. It is a nice time to reflect, and Nancy's beautiful description of how Russ reconnected with his dad has me thinking about cancer. A few weeks ago we lost one of our neighbors to stage 4 cancer of the nervous system. He went so quickly after his diagnosis that it was mind-blowing. Today, we found out that a family member of his to whom we are quite close was diagnosed with stage four cancer in his spine. This is such devastating news. He soon will begin a very long chemo regimen. It is hard to understand, sometimes, why some families get hit again and again by diseases like cancer. I didn't work in the garden today, but expect to be able to do a little work out there tomorrow afternoon, and possibly on Monday. It has been so wet that I've largely stayed out of there, except to water stuff in containers. I did a little deadheading and weeding the other day, but not nearly enough. I am keeping up on harvesting. We are very far behind on mowing. Neil Sperry had a great reminder in his newsletter this week that it is chigger time. I'm glad he reminded me. I've been walking through the taller grass in the yard without insect repellent on (I hate spraying it on my skin!) and am sort of surprised the chiggers haven't gotten me already. Am I the only one wondering what happens to the insects in the heavily flooded areas? Like the areas along the Arkansas River where floodwaters are 3 or 4 or 5' deep in neighborhoods, cities and homes? Do the insects get swept away in the floodwaters? Do they die? Do they fly away or crawl up high into trees and survive? What about the earthworms? How about the crawdads? Did they get enough warning to flee to higher ground like they did here in 2015? I mean, I have no idea what does or doesn't survive in this sort of flooding. I do know that mosquitoes become a huge problem even before all the water recedes, but what about everything else? It is something to ponder, is it not? Dawn...See MoreAugust 2019, Week 3
Comments (44)Rebecca, That's an incredible amount of rain! I bet your plants will go wild with new growth! I hope you can get a lot done in this pleasant, mild weather. Nancy, Stores might have some nectar plants available now or next week if you don't have new ones started to plant in the garden. Because I succession planted flowers instead of veggies, we have nectar plants everywhere. Obviously I've never had quite this many flowers in the veggie garden, since they now make up about 95% of it, and the hummingbirds, butterflies and bees are present in huge numbers because they've certainly noticed. And, well, because we were so dry there's almost nothing in bloom in the pastures---a few yellow daisies and white asters here and there and some Mexican hat and greenthread daisies in the front pasture are just coming back into bloom after previously being mowed down by Tim, but I think the liatris will bloom late or not at all because those plants in pastures were turning crispy brown from the heat and lack of water. I did notice some of our goldenrods in the pasture are forming buds so they'll bloom soon. With the pastures fairly bare of blooms, even more little flying critters have been visiting the garden regularly. I'm pleased to have so much in bloom for them this year. We haven't seen Lillie in almost 2 weeks and it looks like she's grown about 2" since then. I guess she's having a growth spurt. I think it is hard on the girls having opposite weekend's with each of their dad's because they don't get to be together on the weekends right now, but that will change at the end of this year and they'll get back to being on the same weekend visitation schedules with their dads again. Really, it might not be too bad for each of them to get to be the only grandchild on autumn weekends. Because of the five year age difference, really I guess it is 5 and 1/2 years, they like different things, including different movies so there's lots of of compromise in making weekend plans like where to go or what movie to watch when they are together. When only one of them is here, we can choose the movie that child specifically wants to see, so Lillie gets to see movies that are for older kids and Aurora gets to see movies aimed at very young ones. It might not be all bad to be the only child with the grandparents on any given weekend now that I think of it.....but if we take one shopping one weekend and buy her new shoes, we're careful to take the other one shopping for new shoes the next weekend so they know they are being treated the same. I think you'll just have to cut into your overgrown summer squash and see if it makes a good winter squash too. Some varieties are multipurpose and can be used either way, but some are not---some are just really stringy and seedy inside and are not good eating quality winter squash. I haven't tried it with Meot Jaeng I Ae so don't know what sort of flesh it has when it gets large. I have had them hide from me to the point that they were too far gone to eat as summer squash when I found them, and I just gathered all those (it was some of all three Korean summer squash varieties) and piled them up on the porch as porch pumpkins for fall. With white flowers, it depends on how heat-tolerant they are. I like the ones that are white and stay white, but some white flowers just cannot take our July and August heat and low moisture and turn brown on the edges of the petals almost the minute they bloom. I don't care for those. With so many whites in bloom in our garden this month (cleome, garlic chives, several varieties of cosmos both short and tall, several varieties of zinnias, both short and tall, daturas and jasmine), I am loving the way they look, especially in late afternoon and early evening when that white really pops against the plant foliage. I'm not sure what kind of nectar flowers you're hoping to have for fall, but maybe if I list what I can remember that's blooming in our garden and flower beds now, if there's something I have that you don't have, maybe it will give you some ideas. So, here goes, from memory and probably not a complete list of all that is in bloom, but I'll try: Coral honeysuckle, morning glories, mina lobata, cypress vine, cardinal climber vine, yellow bells (Tecoma stans), orange bells (I don't remember the variety, also Tecoma something....maybe Jubilee), hardy hibiscus (Luna), zinnias and cosmos in many heights and varieties, cuphea 'Diablo', roughly six different varieties of lantana, verbena bonariensis, dianthus, autumn sage--at least 4 different varieties, one with raspberry red blooms, one (Hot Lips) with red and white blooms, and two different ones with red blooms (Furman's Red and Radio Red), moss rose, Texas hibiscus, firebush (Hamelia patens), Mexican sunflower, cleome (Helen Campbell White, Violet Queen, Cherry Queen and Rose Queen), yellow butterflyweed (and the oleander aphids are all gone!), angelonia in shades of pink and purple, pink salvia, blue meadow sage, Yvonne's salvia, a dwarf form of gaura that stays more compact that any other I've grown, two varieties of Russian sage, Texas hummingbird sage, echinacea (about done, I think, unless the rain revives it), viper's bugloss, Jasmine (in pots to overwinter indoors), Pride of Barbados (Caesalspinia pulcherrima), Laura Bush petunias, gladiolas (about to finish up), salvia farinacea, marigolds, several short forms of celosia spicata, tons of the taller (up to 6' tall now) celosia plumosa, white and purple daturas, comfrey (cycles in and out of bloom all summer if I keep cutting it back periodically), sunflowers, globe amaranth, red grain amaranth, canna lilies in yellow and orange, trumpet creeper vines in yellow, orange, and red-orange varieties, chaste tree (a particular favorite, along with comfrey, of the bumble bees), four o'clocks and 'Dracula' cockscombs. Then, there's the herbs that are in bloom, and they include dill, sage, rosemary, basil and lavender. If all of that is not enough to provide nectar for the butterflies and hummingbirds and others, then I don't know what else I can do. It is likely that my coleus plants all are flowering now because I haven't been pinching them back lately. Not in bloom yet? The cape honeysuckle, which usually doesn't bloom until September, and the roselle plants, which don't bloom until Sept or Oct and always are in a mad race to bloom before the first frost or freezing weather arrives. I often have to harvest them on the night before the first freeze whether they're ready or not, and I do it in such a hurry that I just cut off the branches (they are huge monster plants 7' tall by then with a base at least 6" wide so I cannot pull them up) and carry armloads of them up to the house, where I then can harvest the calyces and preserve them. Later on, when I have time, I'll dig out the frozen/dead bases of the roselle plants and toss them on the compost pile. Really, it would be late to get much of anything sown from seed to bloom if you're sowing seeds now, so you'll be at the mercy of whatever the stores or nurseries have on hand now. I haven't looked at the plants this week to see what is in stock, but normally at this time of the year it is mostly marigolds, zinnias, moss rose, angelonias, lantana and, perhaps, the first chysanthemums (though we are still too hot for them here). There, I hope I gave you some ideas. This morning we awakened to the sound of raindrops on the roof. After waiting so long for good rain to fall, it seems like an abundance of riches to have it fall two days in a row. The rain was just quick pop-up showers and only showed up on radar as a very narrow band that didn't affect much of our county, but these showers gave us another 0.40" of rain, for a total this week of 2.4". Tim's far-fetched dream of mowing the lawn this afternoon just died because everything outside is heavily saturated and dripping with water---it is our own little rainforest here today. Maybe it will be dry enough to mow tomorrow afternoon. Who knows? We have shopping to do today, and the movies this evening, and swimming to squeeze in during the afternoon hours if we get back from shopping quickly enough, so I'm not sure when he thought he'd be able to mow anyway. The long-AWOL deer herd returned today and were standing in the neighbor's pasture staring at our back door when I walked out the door: three bucks (one is pretty big and the other two slightly younger and smaller), three or four does, and two or three fawns. They re scoping out the driveway, the dove-feeding area and the compost piles. I put out two buckets of cracked corn for them, figuring if I didn't put out extra for that large herd, then the doves weren't going to get any cracked corn today. The deer were too happy to see me (or, rather, to see the buckets of corn), and the biggest buck came within about 8' of me (with a 5-strand barbed wire fence between us) before I yelled at him to back off. Had he not moved back, I would have carried the corn back into the garage to teach them that I won't put out the bird seed if they cannot stay out of my personal space so I can do it safely. That's it for now. We're headed out with our girl. Dawn...See MoreSeptember 2019, Week 3
Comments (46)Jennifer, I am glad the rain reached you. I hope y'all got a significant and useful amount. We look so much greener already, although some of the tired, hot, worn-out zinnias that have been blooming since late May or early June just didn't perk up enough. I think they are really worn out. Luckily, the zinnias I planted as succession crops later are making up for the tired ones and the rain did perk the younger plants up like crazy. With cooler weather in the forecast all week, I hope to really get out into the garden next week and do a lot of cleanup as long as I'm able to avoid the venomous snakes, and they haven't seemed too bad lately. Or, if they are there, I'm not seeing them, so I just hope they aren't out there. I kept the chickens in their coop yesterday because they were so stressed from the dog incident the day before, but they free-ranged as normal today and no dogs visited. I do think the chickens spent more time sort of hiding underneath the chaste tree near the back of the house today than they normally do---it is one of the places they go to when they feel threatened by something. We were out at the pool a lot so we were right there anyway, and that may be one reason they stuck around so close. I do not mind the neighbors' dogs visiting at all as long as they don't bother the chickens. If they bother the chickens, then that's going to be a problem. I know one of these dogs killed their owner's chickens when he lived somewhere else before he moved here, and I appreciate him telling me that because at least I know which dog to keep a close eye on. Even a dog that has killed chickens in the past can be reformed with some training, so I certainly don't think this dog necessarily will be a problem---she's sweet and she's smart and I think she now knows (because I yelled at her and locked her in my mudroom) she isn't supposed to chase the chickens here. She did look longingly at the chicken coop as we were leading her to her owner's vehicle, but she didn't break away and try to go to the coop either, so she gets points for that. Jen, It is hard to have pets and plants co-exist inside the house, so I understand your need to create a cat room and a plant room. Our dogs and cats are the reason I don't have plants indoors, except for seedlings on the light shelf in late winter/spring, and I keep the pets out of the room with light shelf. Oh, and in winter I usually have the Christmas cactus and a few potted amaryllis and paperwhites indoors, but for whatever reason the cats don't bother those, and I have the plants high enough out of reach that the dogs can't reach them. Nancy, I feel the same way about the oleander aphids, but what I noticed this year is that all I needed to do was basically ignore them. They never seemed to hurt the plants, so I'm not going to worry about them in the future. With hundreds and, dare I say it, even thousands of native milkweed plants in the pastures all around us (a few pastures whose owners don't maintain them well have more milkweeds most years than grass) for miles around us, it is a pipe dream to think our garden milkweed won't have the oleander aphids on them, so I am just going to pretend I don't see them. Even if I hose them off the plants twice a day every day, they come right back, so what's the point? Really, with all the native milkweed around, I could skip growing it in the garden except that I worry about those really awful drought years when the milkweed plants in the pastures all wither and dry up and go dormant months early, so that's why I try to keep a few milkweed plants going in the garden. All the fields here are full of everything possible in bloom thanks to the August rain and now the more recent late September rain will keep those plants looking lovely, so at least the migrating monarchs will have plenty of flowers in bloom in our county for nectaring as they journey southward. We had lovely weather today although it was a bit humid, and we just watched lower-level moisture-laden clouds fly over us headed north all day long. Wherever that moisture ends up, I think someone will get some great rainfall out of it. There's still big standing puddles in our yard today, though some of them are not as deep as they were yesterday, so you can tell the rain is soaking into the ground. The newish cracks in the yard that had appeared recently are all closed up and I'm grateful for that. A great side effect of the rain is that the feral mama cat moved her three kittens into our garage to escape the deluge and they are so happy in there that they've even let me see them a few times, though they still are inclined to hide when a human appears. I'm happy that they are in a dry location, and one that keeps them safe from the wild varmints at night. I hope to tame them and save them from living the feral life. It is especially hard to tame feral kittens who do not grow up around humans, but we tamed Yellow Cat after he had roamed our neighborhood for at least a decade, so you never know---sometimes kindness, love and food win over even the wildest little feline. I almost bought a pot or two of mums today. I really wanted to do it, but I still am inclined to not quite trust the cooler weather to stick around just yet. Maybe in another week or two. We'll see. If we heat right back up into the 90s, I'll know it was smart to wait. I'm already seeing mums in the garden centers that bloomed too early and are browning out even before someone has bought them and taken them home. You can't really blame the wholesale growers for that---they grow on the same time schedule each year so they can deliver the plants to the stores when the stores want them, and it is beyond their control if the heat sticks around for longer than usual. Ugh. Today we noticed that Wal-Mart is pushing the indoor garden center merchandise into a smaller and smaller area and replacing it with Christmas trees and such. I am SO not ready to see Christmas stuff in the stores, though it has been in Hobby Lobby for months and in HD and Lowe's for a few weeks already. I hate the way they rush the seasons. I'm not ready for all the gardening merchandise to disappear from the stores already when we still have another 2 months, more or less, of warm growing season left. Dawn...See Morehazelinok
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