Rains Again; But a Little Less Intense:
organic_kitten
4 years ago
Went outside to wet blooms and since it was early. some weren't open yet; then it rained again:
ETIV looked lovely though wet:
The side bed was blooming: pleased to see Grape Twizzler has put up a re-bloom scape. since it is new this year, I didn't expect it The reds (No boys Allowed and High Heeled Lap Dancer) with Mean Green in background"
Shelby:
Ruby Spider:
Orchid Majesty:
And my "pet" pink Tarantula:
House says that is on. the rest in comments.
kay
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Comments (19)
shive
4 years agoRelated Discussions
It's raining again
Comments (4)Good Morning Bessie! I think of you and your poor waterlogged plants every time the sky is dark/stormy-looking to our west/northwest. What a change this is from all the drought and wildfires we all suffered through in 2005-2006! Our conditions are very much like yours--except I believe you are getting significantly heavier rainfall in your county than we are getting here most days. We had 1.5" of rain last night. (Sigh.) We have now had rain at our house every single day since Friday, June 15th, and it has varied from maybe 2/10s to 3/10s of an inch on the lighter rain days to 1.5" or more on the heavier days. Our mesonet station at Burneyville apparently flooded last week when Gainesville flooded and we are getting some goofy numbers from it, so I am not relying on its measurements for June 2007. I cannot believe the amount of rainfall you have had this year, and especially just the last few weeks! Our worst June since we've lived here was in 2004 and I think we had 13" or 14" of rain that month. Undoubtedly you have had much more than that this month. Every time that our local CBS affilliate, KXII, shows the radar on the weather portion of the news, it shows rain over in your area. With all the rain that you have had, I don't know how you have any tomato plants that are still alive, much less producing fruit. I wish I knew of a way to make your fruit ripen. My son suggested to me that you could pick some tomatoes green, put them in a brown paper bag with apples, and the ethelyne gas from the apples would 'cause them to turn red. I told him that while he was technically correct and that this would work, the end result would most likely be home-grown tomatoes that taste like grocery-store tomatoes, and what is the point of that? But, if you are truly desperate for ripe tomatoes you could try it. On Sunday I picked a lot of green tomatoes that had just the TINIEST hint of a little whitish-pink blush on them, and brought them in and set them on the counter to ripen. Most of them are already fully colored up and ready to eat. I was surprised at how quickly they turned once I brought them it. Of course, I would prefer to let them ripen on the vine, but that just isn't happening quickly enough for me. If you have some tomatoes that seem full-sized and about to ripen, but they still aren't blushing or ripening, you might try picking a few and bringing them in to ripen on the counter. If you do this, and they don't show some ripening within 6 or 7 days, you might want to go ahead and eat them as fried green tomatoes, or something. I have had some tomatoes ripen on the counter for up to 2 or 3 weeks before they turn really red, but usually they color up much faster than that. If the plants that appear to be dying are looking really bad and you feel that their death is imminent, you can pull them up by the roots and hang the entire plant upside down in a DRY location like a tornado shelter, garage, or under a porch overhang. The green tomatoes on those plants that are near their mature size will probably color up within 2 or 3 weeks. Sometimes I do this to salvage viable fruit off plants that are dying, and sometimes I do it in the fall to get the tomatoes before a frost does. It works with pepper plants too. We aren't having much sunshine here either, and I truly sympathize with you. I have 12 tomato plants in large containers sitting on a concrete slab outside the garage/barn. I was hoping that the heat/light reflected onto them from the concrete slab, the gravel driveway and the garage/barn walls would help them ripen fruit faster, but I don't really think it has helped much. Oh, if only we had some sunshine and heat! Our weather forecast for the next 10 days is very bleak indeed. Rain every day, with heavy rainfall on some days....that's our forecast through about Tuesday of next week. I miss summer! Dawn...See MoreRain again for us.
Comments (15)Ilene, Everything looks so lovely! I especially love the arches and the bottle tree, and Pearl is such a cutie pie! A bottle tree is on my "one of these days" list. Now that the veggie garden is more under control, I hope to start spending a little more time on the back yard. My butterfly bed needs weeding desperately, and I need to thin the dogss "sunflower bed" which shades about 1/2 of their dog yard. I need to take out about every other plant (they are 8' tall and about 1' to 2' apart, but have hesitated to touch them since I feel like they hold each other up in the heavy wind. The plants are so thick that the dogs aren't spending as much time under them in the shade as usual. Well, I don't live near a park OR near a lake. I live in the middle of a cow pasture on an old farm! Finally, though, in our tenth year here, the trees we planted are getting large enough that we have substantial shade in the front yard (kept two pasture trees there, one large native pecan and a post oak) and ever-increasing shade in the back. The problem is that we've been here ten years, so things that were "new" in 1999 are wearing out and breaking down. This year, it has been the water heater and now it is the stove. I think we're going shopping for a new stove after lunch today. Last year it was the dishwasher. I just hope the air conditioning unit lasts a few more years! Some friends of ours just up the road about 7/10s of a mile (no blocks out here, so I just use distance instead) recently (May, I think) had to replace their air conditioning unit, and their house is only 5 years old! Another family up the road about 2 miles bought an older home (maybe 20 years old or so?) and their A/C unit went out either in late May or early June too and had to be replaced. Our A/C unit "went out" during the wildfire summer of either '05 or '06, but it was repairable. I remember we came in from a huge, major wildfire....and we were completely exhausted....and the air inside the house was about 88 degrees in the middle of the night. Luckily, one of the local A/C guys is a retired professional firefighter, and he came to our house early the next day and had it fixed in a day or so. It also is about time to paint the house and I think maybe we'll do it in the fall after the weather cools off. With a house, it is always something and time seems to evaporate around here. The "To Do" list, of course, tends to come in second to fighting fires and working accident calls (and that is OK with me, community service is important too). And, speaking of fires, we've had a big spike in grass fires in pastures this week, and I am afraid that's a sign of what is soon to come. Often, our county's "winter wildfire season" ends with the spring rains in May, but May and June are both drier than usual and the harvest fire season is starting early. We ALWAYS have a few grassfires during the haycutting season in late July or August, but there have been some already. (sigh) We need rain, but then, we always need rain. So far, most of the grassfires have been west of us, closer to Leon or Burneyville or Jimtown, which have terrain more like Jefferson County and always seem to get dry earliest. Today I thought the garden looked wonderful, but I did get behind on the weeding during the deer-are-eating-everything period, so I need to spend at least one day this week removing the weeds before they take over. Now that we are successfully (so far) keeping the deer out of the garden, I have been able to relax a little more and not worry that I'll walk outside and find more plants have been devoured. Our rather large bunch of white-tailed rabbits are starting to diminish. I haven't heard or seen a lot of coyotes yet because they are still denned up with their young, so maybe it is the bobcats. I have been enjoying having a lot of gladiolus plants blooming, but they are about to finish up. Coincidentally, the fall bulb catalogs are arriving which makes me want to order and plant some more bulbs for spring color. Our biggest problem also is people who dump animals, and we have no animal control in the county. Someone abandoned a dog about 6 weeks ago and it is still living on the corner where they left it, waiting for them to come back and get it. It breaks your heart. A lot of people drop off food there for it, but we all worry that the dog is going to get hit by a car. Several folks have tried to catch it and are willing to take it in and give it a home, but it won't let anyone get near it. It runs off and hides. Also, a lot of people dump trash (including tires, old refrigerators, etc.,) in the bar ditches. If they dump it on your property, you have to clean it up....the county doesn't come and do it. It is disgusting. Dawn...See MoreRain Again
Comments (16)Larry, While I agree that you likely won't have enough days to get a corn crop...you might. What if this is the year that your first killing freeze is extraordinarily late? It never hurts to take a risk and plant early or late in the hope that, for once, the weather will cooperate. Do you know when you'll find your kale seeds? If you're like me, you'll find them the day after you've completely given up on planting kale. Or, you'll find them the day after you buy another package of seed. It happens to me every time. I just finished ordering my cool season seeds for 2013. Now I'll work on my grow list of warm-season varieties and order the seed for them. I like to work ahead of the season so that I am not sitting around watching the mailbox at planting time because some of my seeds haven't arrived. My fall garden is doing great. The plants that were planted for fall are really reaching a good size now. The broccoli, kale, Swiss chard, beets and cabbage that went into the ground earliest are huge. Everything else is a little farther behind, but all these crops are so cold-hardy that I'm not worried they won't have time to mature. The southern peas and bush beans should produce at least through late October, or possibly early November and the pepper plants and squash still are setting fruit, but we're getting late enough into fall that I don't know if any of the late-setting winter squash will mature. The half-inch of rain we received wasn't really enough, so I'll likely water the garden today. The lettuce went into the ground and containers later than the broccoli and other stuff did since it is so heat-sensitive, but some of it is now large enough to start harvesting using the cut-and-come again method. I kinda went crazy with kale--planting not only several varieties of edible kale, but also planting some ornamental varieties. Well, technically, all the ornamental varieties are edible but I grow them only as ornamentals. Their leaves do make a lovely garnish. Sometime this winter, I am going to seed more ornamental kale for late winter/early spring. I only planted purple and white varieties of ornamental kale for fall/winter, but for winter/spring I want to plant some of the red and pink ones. Shallot, The grasshoppers have eaten my sugar snap peas down to the ground repeatedly, and each time they did that, fewer and fewer plants grew back so I don't have an expectation of getting a big harvest from them. In a bad grasshopper year like this year has been, it is really challenging to get the fall plants growing well because of the hoppers. We have had two very cold nights--one night hit 34 degrees and the next night it hit 29 degrees, and those cold nights have really reduced the grasshopper population, but there's still too many. I have my lettuce growing under floating row covers in order to keep the hoppers off of them, and those grasshoppers sit there on top of the row cover (which is suspended over hoops) all day trying to figure out how to get to the lettuce plants. Scott, It still is unbelievably dry here too and we had modest rain this past weekend, but wonderful rain a couple of weeks ago. You cannot tell it rained....the ground is still badly cracked, and to me it looks like the cracks are actually getting wider. The pond has been dry so long that sometimes I wonder if it ever will have water in it again. Dorothy, At least y'all are finally getting some really good rainfall totals. I know you still have a long way to go in terms of having enough rain to mitigate the effects of the long months of drought. For a while I was thinking that we might get enough autumn rain to bring our year-to-date today up near our annual average. I've pretty much given up on that idea. Dawn...See MoreHere Comes the Rain Again
Comments (16)whooooo-hooo, whooo-hoo, on Abraham D'Arby!!!! Wooowza! Boxo, whenever I see your Abraham D'Arby it always is the Biggest and Best-AD always feels like a Powerload Surprise. Think of it this way....My poor Dad is stuck home all by himself while my Mom gets to cavort in Italy with her fellow choir members, singing and performing in Italy, lol! Well, I do my usual Friday and Sunday evening visit with my Dad, and he has waiting in the refrigerator the most delicious slice of Wild Oats Market organic cake with almond flavored real whipping cream topping with a hint of mascarpone and with blackberry/blueberry filling in it and cake in between! We only have that cake once in a blue moon so that was a huge surprise last night. That's the way I feel whenever we get to see Abraham D'Arby, it always feels like the BIGGEST and the BEST SERVING of the MOST DELICIOUS CAKE! Laden with full whipping cream, fruited filling, and heavenly scent of almonds, whenever I look at A.D And Hot Cocoa, my 2nd favorite in line, it's like having real Irish Coffee with whisky, a splash of Peppermint and lots of Cocoa laden. I could get drunk on that rose, hahaha! And once again, Hansa is really bringing down the house, hahaha on how loooooong and what a non-stop bloomer your rugosa is! whoooooa!!!! I can't even get my first-time rugosa to even send up an itsy bitsy bud yet, sheesh! But at least it's fully recovered! I was seriously worried at first. During the transit to my house USPS must have laid out the package several times outside in the blasting heat I suspect. 2/3rds of the leaves were goners, and the stems completely brown but looks like even the rugosa is loving my super dilute Gardenville sea tea. The leaves looks so fresh and green, but I'm still waiting for that flower. I tried to get Krista's Rotes Meer but no luck! And of course Hansa was not available. So instead I ended up with Amelie Gravereux, if it has no fragrance I'll be super mad! Hansa and Rotes have great fragrance, but Jim let me know that there are some folks in England who say it only has light fragrance :( :( :( The ratings that I read said strong/intense in the U.S. so now I'm sweatin' it. Ooooo Sunset Celebration is looking sooo beautiful too. Another one of my favorite roses....See More
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