July 2019, Week 3
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years ago
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farmgardener
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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 MoreJuly 2019, Week 2
Comments (24)Jennifer, I would not really describe the smell of a copperhead as being similar to a cucumber. It smells like a.....copperhead. It is sort of a musky smell, not as bad as the odor of a skunk, but not pleasant. Maybe it smells a little like a cucumber to some folks, but not necessarily to me. I have some friends who say it smells like copper to them. It doesn't to me. You won't always smell it. I usually smell it when I have walked by one and startled it. Copperheads don't want to tangle with us and usually will slip away if they can, but if they are startled or surprised and can't slip away because maybe a person is between them and their best escape route so that they feel trapped, they'll release that scent. I try to freeze in place when I smell it, first checking the ground near my feet to make sure I'm not about to step on one. Sometimes I can find them after I smell them, but sometimes I cannot. Brandywines do seem a bit more prone to have fused blossoms (aka megablooms) than many other varieties, especially from blooms formed when the nights still were cool. Usually as the season goes on, the megablooms become more and more rare. The fused blossoms do tend to produce very large fruit, but because of the way the skin of the different fruits fold together as the fruit enlarges, you often end up cutting away and tossing a significant portion of the ripe fruit, so lots of people just toss those flowers before they form fruit. I never do, merely because blossom drop happens so much here once we get hot that I hate to waste a single tomato blossom. Nancy, If you plant milkweed, you're just going to have milkweed pests. Insects cannot afford to be picky---if they have to eat milkweed to survive, they're going to eat any and all milkweed. I've never noticed that any particular type of milkweed is less susceptible to the specific pests than others are. Like everything else, the milkweed plants and their pests are natural parts of our ecosystem. If the pests are doing too much damage, just destroy them. I leave them alone if I can and wait for the birds or beneficial insects to take care of them. I've never had the tussock moth caterpillars here and do believe I'd kill those things in a heartbeat. Whether you appreciate it or not, the ecosystem is functioning properly. While we plant milkweeds for the monarchs, we also have to expect that anything else and everything else that feeds on them might show up too. I usually don't see milkweed pests until the fields turn brown and the milkweeds go to seed and, in dry weather, began to fade and dry and die back to the ground. Guess what? We're already that dry here. The milkweed plants in the fields look sad and pathetic and the pests are moving to the milkweeds in irrigated green gardens. It happens every year---if you are hungry, you go to where the food is found. Pest-free gardening is a myth perpetrated by chemical companies. A healthy garden is full of insects, both good and bad. Milkweeds existed on this land before we bought it. They are still here. They'll be here long after we are gone unless someone scrapes the ground bare and pours concrete on it. (What a horrible thought!) Nothing kills them, though excessively dry weather can make the ones in the fields die back to the ground. They often green up and grow again when rainfall returns in autumn. The milkweed in our flower border never dies back to the ground (I hope I didn't jinx them by saying that) but can look ratty if drought gets too extreme and I stop watering because I cannot water enough to help the plants stay in good shape. Sometimes I just give up in the heat and close the garden gate and tell the plants I'll be back in the fall, or after we get decent rainfall, and the milkweeds survive, so if they can take a couple of drought months with no water, they can handle feeding by most pests. Probably not the tussock moth caterpillars, but pretty much everything else. As for being a Monarch Waystation....don't think of it that way. That's a sort of gimmicky way to make people feel good about growing plants for the monarchs. I want to grow plants for the monarchs to help them, not so I can display a Monarch Waystation sign. (sigh) You aren't trying to have a monarch waystation for its own sake, right? Instead, you are trying to fix a broken (by others) ecosystem by providing habitat. Approach it with the attitude that you are restoring the ecosystem to what it once was and needs to be again and remember that doing so provides a habitat for everything and that will have everything inhabiting it....those insects and creatures we would choose to see and those that we'd rather not see around. It is the way of the world, and they all have their place somewhere in the food chain. Everything in any ecosystem eats something and everything gets eaten by something. Accepting that and not going overboard trying to micromanage the garden 'pests' is so much less stressful, and it is natural. God made the world and everything in it and I trust that he created those darn milkweed pests for some reason that he understands, even if we do not. My goal never has been to have an insect-free garden or landscape, nor is it to have pest-free plants, because such a thing isn't possible unless you use synthetic chemicals strong enough to kill everything. My goal is to have an ecosystem that is healthy, strong and balanced, where I interfere in the food web as little as humanly possible. Make peace with the pests and only destroy those that truly destroy plants, not those that just damage them. Look at it this way: plant asparagus and eventually asparagus beetles show up (and harlequin bugs). Plant brassicas and cabbage loopers, imported cabbage worms and diamondback moth worms will show up. Plant potatoes and Colorado potato beetles will show up. Plant okra and sharpshooters and aphids are likely to show up. Plant squash and you-know =-whos will show up. Plant sweet potatoes and morning glories and tortoise beetles show up. Plant milkweed and milkweed assassin bugs, milkweed leaf beetles, oleander aphids and tussock moth cats show up. It is the way things are. The older I get, the more I have learned to chill, relax and let the garden ecosystem just be an ecosystem. I have learned I can ignore most pests and the plants will outlast them, so I don't worry about anything except the ones experience has taught me do extreme damage to the plants we grow for a food harvest.. Blister beetles are an example of one you can ignore most of the time. After all, blister beetles are beneficial because they devour grasshopper eggs. However, on some plants (cucumbers and sweet autumn clematis, for example) they can eat the foliage down to nothing, so if they're doing that, a gardener really cannot ignore them. What matters the most, though, is how many blister beetles show up. If I see an occasional handful of them in the garden, I just ignore them. However if they show up by the hundreds or thousands, a gardener cannot ignore them. Rebecca, It is just one of those years with the Septoria Leaf Spot. It was really hit and miss in my garden, but definitely more widespread than usual (some years I don't see it at all) and, in a most interesting way, I saw very little Early Blight, which is more common in my garden. It is almost like the Septoria Leaf Spot outcompeted the Early Blight for the right to hit tomato plants randomly. Sorry about the squirrels. I was hoping those squirrel treats would work. I've always found it interesting that most tomato varieties that produce bite-sized fruit just do not seem to suffer from common fungal and bacterial foliar diseases like the varieties that produce larger fruit do. I've never seen this addressed in technical literature, but have observed it in my garden. These diseases may hit the plants, but the plants outgrow them and never stop producing either. I watered twice this week and probably will have to do the same next week. It just depends on how much the soil dries out. Tim is already fretting over the coming July water bill (which will arrive here in the first week of August) because, he says, the water bills haven't been at all bad this year and he dreads getting a high one. I laughingly told him to adjust his attitude and just be grateful that the water bills for January through June were not bad and to remind himself that a high water bill in July and August is normal and expected. lol. I also still don't think the July water bill will be that bad--I certainly am watering the remaining veggies and herbs, and all the flowers, much less than I water when I'm trying to keep a ton of tomato, cucumber and melon plants happy in the heat. I think he just needs something to fret about. It hasn't really felt hot here since that day our heat index hit 116. Of course, the obvious explanation is that after that miserable day, any other day will feel cool by comparison. (grin) Tim wasn't here that day though and was in his air-conditioned office at work, so he missed the worst of it. I think our heat index had dropped into the 70s or 80s by the time he got home because of all the rain storms around us that basically missed us but gave us rain-cooled air. (And, I believe, a measly 4/100s of an inch of rain.) I do think the heat returns at the middle of next week. Since that hot, miserable day, I've felt like our weather has been only warm, not hot, but by mid-week, we'll be hot again. We need to mow and edge everything tomorrow, and especially all the fence lines and such where the fields really are drying out now. Keeping as much vegetation as possible cut short reduces the fire danger, and we are starting to have fires. By the way, while typing this I have heard some fireworks going off in our neighborhood. Really, people? I think that by now people should have all that out of their system. Apparently they don't. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2019, Week 4
Comments (36)Jennifer, Yes, Tim's family did come back to visit, several times, and I don't think we ever had weather that hot again during one of their visits, but I also think they were smarter in future years and came in June, having learned our hottest weather tended to be in early August. Yes, the plant available water on that map is very dismal. I'm thinking that some parts of OK are very much in danger of slipping into a flash drought and, if rain doesn't fall, they may end up in drought soon. Oooh, a new Drought Monitor was released yesterday. I wonder what it shows? So, I went and looked to see what it shows....and it shows the part of SW OK I was thinking of is now in D-0, as indicated by the color yellow, and this is not technically a drought stage, but is considered pre-drought. We'll have to watch the map weekly and see what happens with them because some of us have conditions that are not too far behind theirs. Here's this week's Drought Monitor Map: Oklahoma Drought Monitor Map Most purchased soil is inferior quality no matter what the supplier tells you, and it needs a lot of work to turn it into good soil. This is why we don't purchase soil and instead just work to add organic matter to what we have. You know, if you add 8" of organic matter (not all at once because the tiller couldn't work it into the ground all at once) to the soil, you've raised the soil grade 8" and then can build your new edging around it to hold it in place. That's what we did. Yes, it is a slower process, and buying enough organic matter to add 8" at one time is cost-prohibitive, but you're getting better quality stuff. Tim and I decided long ago it was better to spend our money on good quality stuff than to buy crap soil (we already had our own crap soil, after all) and I'm not sorry we did it that way. I know people who have bought what seemed like good soil and brought in all sorts of stuff they didn't want....nut sedge, too many various weeds to count, soilborne diseases and even root knot nematodes. If we were building new beds nowadays, we'd do it hugelkultur style, and wouldn't even have to purchase amendments, but our first couple of years here we bought bags and bags of Black Kow, mushroom compost, Texas greensand, lava sand, dry molasses, soil conditioner (a blend of pine bark fines and humus) and more. Once I got a good-sized compost pile going, we didn't have to buy much, but it took a few years for me to get a huge compost pile operation going that would produce enough compost for a large garden. Friends gave us old spoiled hay, which helped a lot in the early days, and Fred gave us cow manure once, but it did bring in a gazillion weeds, and I never wanted to use local manure again...and have turned down all subsequent offers of it, especially since herbicide carryover became such a huge issue. One thing about soil-building is that it is never ending, since heat eats compost (i.e. makes it break down quickly). Going no-till has reduced how quickly our organic matter breaks down, because we aren't fluffing up the soil with a rototiller and introducing fresh air, which then helps compost break down more quickly. Still, it shocks me how quickly soil reverts back once its organic matter breaks down. I added 4-6" of compost to the front (southeastern) corner of the garden in the winter/spring of 2018 and had gorgeous soil there, after doing the same thing in 2017. Guess how that soil looked at the beginning of this season? Like I'd never added any organic matter to it at all. That is frustrating. There's no way I can add 4-6" of organic matter to every bed every year, so I just do the best I can and hope our heat doesn't eat up the organic matter too quickly. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I'm trying to replenish soil that was conventionally farmed, so it had nutrients taken out of it without having organic matter given back to it for decades, and that sort of restoration is slow. It is not weird to be thinking of Garden 2020. The best time to plan for next year is this year when things are fresh in our minds. I've been planning for 2020 since at least May. Rebecca, Your plants look like they mostly have Septoria Leaf Spot with maybe just a tiny touch of EB on a couple of leaves. Both have been incredibly common this year thanks to all the moisture and humidity. I do not know why it is not working its way upward the traditional way, but had the same thing on some of my plants this year too. Larry, My pepper plants stalled for a week or two, so I watered them like crazy and they quickly bloomed and set a lot of new peppers. I was relieved that all they apparently needed was more water than they were getting. I'm so pleased to hear that the highway department showed respect for your zinnias. That is just so awesome, isn't it? I really think most people nowadays are trying their best to do the right things to help out the bees, butterflies and pollinators. I've noticed our highway guys delay mowing as long as possible to let as many flowers live as long as possible and set seed before they mow. Poppies reseed very well, but in the pastures where there is a lot of competition, the amount of reseeding drops each year. I suspect we could plow up the front pasture and a billion poppy seeds would sprout because they are lying there under layers of thatch, but we've never tried it. I just overseed with poppies every few years to ensure we keep the poppies going. In the garden they reseed just fine, despite my heavy mulch. Jacob, The insurance premiums for young adult males are ridiculous, aren't they? Our son always has been a careful driver. He had one minor accident as a teenager...slid off a gravel driveway and hit a tree. He and Tim fixed the car themselves (it was just minor stuff) because it was cheaper than going through the insurance company and having them raise his rates. Later on, he had a major accident on his way to work, but he was in his late 20s then and it didn't make his insurance premiums rise nearly as much as it would have if he'd been 25 or younger. Enjoy the camping trip. Our weather still is slightly cooler than normal, but the temperatures are rising daily and the heat really cranks up next week, and we'll end next week with high temperatures near 100, as usual. I need to get out there and work in the garden while it still is cool, but am having a hard time getting motivated. I noticed today that the ground near our house is cracking, which is something we try really hard to avoid, though we ignore the cracking soil everywhere else. So, I have the sprinkler on, watering the lawn (including the bermuda grass I wish would die) and guess that is what I'll do today...water the lawn on all 4 sides of the house, and also run the soaker hoses that are set up around the house's foundation. Our next-door neighbor's house in Fort Worth suffered from severe damage when her soil cracked badly when she was in a rehab center undergoing rehabilitation after her stroke, and we learned a lesson from that. She had to have extensive foundation work with new concrete piers poured, etc., had to have her wood floor lifted, repaired and nailed back down (her hot water heater pipe busted when the house shifted and tons of hot water poured onto her hardwood floors, warping them), had to have cracks in the walls fixed and everything repainted, etc. We figured that whatever money we spend to keep our clay soil from shifting too much around the house is worth it to avoid having that sort of thing happen to us. A couple of things were happening in the garden yesterday. Let's see if I can remember them. The white cosmos that I planted when I took out tomato plants started blooming for the first time yesterday. The pink, rose and mauve cosmos had begun blooming a couple of weeks ago. The garden is chock full of frogs. I've been leaving the northern edge, where I once had tomato plants and now have zinnias, unweeded for them so they can hide more from the snakes that inevitably show up to feed on them. Hummingbirds are simply everywhere. When our hummingbird population suddenly spikes like this, I'm never sure if it is occurring because the babies all have left the nests, or if hummingbirds from further north already are migrating, or if we are just seeing so many because all our trumpet creeper vines are blooming---we have them in at least six different places and they are hummingbird magnets. We always see a huge spike in hummingbird visitors in late July and early August, so what we are seeing is typical. Unfortunately, the purple martins apparently are gone. That, too, is typical, as they first desert the Martin houses in early July when the heat cranks up, but remain around at least a couple of weeks, living in the trees, and we'll still hear them and see them until....suddenly, we don't. Well, we haven't seen or heard them since last weekend, so I think they've gone south. They must leave so early for a good reason. There's still tons and tons of assassin bugs in the garden, and I'm seeing fewer and fewer pests each day. It is good to watch the system work. One thing that has been driving me nuts is the oleander aphids on the yellow butterfly weeds in the perennial border. No matter how often I hose them off the plants with a sharp stream of water, they're back the next day. At first the ladybugs came after them, but then the ladybugs disappeared so apparently the flavor of the oleander aphids (remember, they are eating milkweeds, so they would taste bad) doesn't really appeal to them. So, I did some research. I wanted to avoid using a chemical pesticide. So, technically, I did. Honestly, though, I did use a chemical, just not a garden chemical---Windex. After reading that Chip Taylor had experimented with using it to kill oleander aphids and it didn't harm his milkweed and his caterpillars (you don't spray the Windex if any caterpillars are on the plants, obviously) that fed on those plants later on seemed fine.....well, I thought, why not give it a try. I just sprayed the Windex directly on the oleander aphids, soaking them well, around 8 p.m. one evening. Then I watched the plant for damage for a couple of days. There was no sign at all of any damage to the plant, but the next morning after I sprayed, all those orange oleander aphids were black and dead. I suspect that a person could mix a little ammonia (or, perhaps, rubbing alcohol) with water in a bottle and get the same results, and I might try that if more oleander aphids show up. After hosing them off the plants daily for weeks, I was tired of dealing with them. That is my garden experiment for the summer and I'm happy it worked. I honestly thought that in this heat, the Windex might damage the plants, but if it had, I just would have pruned away the damaged parts. I didn't even hose off the plants....I wanted those dead aphid bodies lying there on the plants as a warning to any other oleander aphids. I also saw and cut in half another milkweed bug, and killed all its babies too. The only other pests doing visible damage in the garden are grasshoppers (tons of them, unfortunately), spider mites (typical) and stink bugs, so it isn't the worst pest year ever. Oh, there still might be a few unwanted army worms and similar caterpillars around, but the wasps are carrying them away, which I enjoy seeing. Have a good day everyone. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2019, Week 5
Comments (26)Nancy, Thank you. You know, when Jesse was first diagnosed with cancer, we were deeply concerned---when you are starting out at Stage 4, there is not necessarily a lot of hope. Still, we hoped treatment would have help him live as long as possible. When it became apparent that nothing would ease his intense physical pain, then instead we began to pray for God to end his suffering. So, why does it hurt so much that God answered our prayers? Oh, I know there is no real good answer for that....but we all remain shell-shocked by his loss. I think we all just thought he was invincible and would live forever. So, this morning when I went outside to put out the cracked corn for the doves and the sunflower seeds for the cardinals, there was a herd of 7 deer waiting for me---and I was out an hour earlier than usual. The deer acted irritated. What is their problem? There ought to be plenty for them to eat out in the wild. So, the biggest buck (I've dubbed him Kyle's deer, because our friend Kyle hunts west of our house on land inherited by his grandparents, Jesse and Joyce, and he always gets a big buck that has been feeding at our place in summer and autumn) decided he wanted to engage with me in warfare this morning. He came right at me, lowering his head/antlers and tossing them into the air and waggling his head a little playfully. I yelled No at him and told him to retreat. We had a barbed wire fence and about 20' between us. Instead, he came right up to the barbed wire as if he were going to jump it, putting him about 10' from me (I had the pickup between us though), and I retreated to the garage, with the cracked corn and sunflower seeds still in my bucket. I went to a different area and fed the mourning doves and cardinals (they watch me and follow wherever I go with their breakfast) and told the deer I don't mind them stealing some of the bird food, but I'm not going to put up with aggressive behavior. When the deer start thinking the bird-feeding area is their territory, I stop feeding the wild birds there. From this point forward, I'll feed close to the house instead of close to the compost pile until the deer get the message and back off. They probably still will creep up close to the house and steal bird seed, but not while the dogs are out in the dog yard, as they are now, close to the bird seed. The garden is simply full of butterflies today, and those dreaded oleander aphids are back in the garden on the butterfly weed this morning...but there are lady bugs there eating them. Let's hope the lady bugs can stay on top of them. We started out our day here with fog, condensation on the windows and 99% humidity. I cannot help thinking that our temperature and heat index will be much worse today than yesterday, because the rain-cooled air yesterday really did give us surprisingly pleasant weather for so late in July. Our max heat index was only 100 yesterday, and I do not think we hit that until late afternoon after the clouds broke up. With the fog and clouds this morning, we started out cool but humid and now that the clouds are breaking up and melting away, I expect it will be smart to spend the rest of today indoors. Jennifer, Chick management is really time-consuming, and I'm just glad those days are behind us. We used to have so very many chickens and I miss having that many, but I don't miss all the work associated with it. The five we have now are the perfect number. I would assume that, yes, your neighbors are watering their fields for the sake of maintaining forage for their livestock. There is a place a few miles south of us that does the same for their goats and horses. I guess it is a matter of whether the livestock owner wants to feed their animals on green pasture this time of year by spending the money for irrigation or if they want to spend the money on hay or bagged feed instead. Also, depending on the lay of the land and how common grass fires or wildfires are when it gets dry, it can pay off to keep at least one field well-watered and green to reduce the fire danger. Yes, green fields will burn, but they are slower to ignite, so it buys time for firefighters to get there and get a fire out, or for livestock owners to get home and move their animals to a place safer from a nearby fire. Don't let the wilting of plants in hot weather get to you. Just remind yourself that they are transpiring water out more quickly than they can take it in due to the heat and that transpiration process is essential for plant survival....don't we humans all continue to breathe and sweat out in the heat? Of course we do. Just let the plants do what they do and don't worry. It is only worrisome if they are not recovering from the wilting in the cool overnight hours. I don't worry about wilted plants in the daylight hours or the early evening hours. I might worry if they weren't beginning to bounce back by dusk, and would be worried if they still were wilted in the early morning. Hailey, Over the years, I have used several different kinds of drip irrigation systems. It is really complicated in our sloping front garden, which slopes downhill so strongly from south to north and also downhill from west to east that I have to use pressure-compensating emitters. I like to set up shut-off valves on different raised beds, so I can exclude any given bed from irrigation if it doesn't need it just by turning the knob on the valve. It is much easier to set up drip irrigation in the more level back garden or in the landscaping around the house. Go to the website of Dripworks and read their blogs and FAQs and you can learn how to set up driplines that will serve you best. I don't know if they still do it, but it used to be that they would help you design your system too. You can start with one of their drip irrigation kits if you see one that you think will fit your needs, and it is easy to add on more lines and emitters to any of the kits if you need to cover more space. My biggest issue with drip irrigation is that in the back garden, once the voles discovered there was water in those lines, they started chewing them in dry months, which means lots of repairs have to be made constantly. So, I'm less in love with drip irrigation than I used to be----but it does work great if you don't have voles. Soaker hoses work well also, but don't hold up for nearly as long to the sun's UV rays. You do need to lift, dry out and store your drip irrigation system each autumn so there's no water left in the lines to crack the lines and emitters in freezing weather. Beneficial insects are not purely good guys for sure, but they're still the best helpers we have. I absolutely refuse to release praying mantids. There is no logic in it. If you put out an egg case and dozens (or hundreds), guess how many you end up with within a very few short months? One. You end up with one, because they eat each other and, in the end, only the one survives because he or she outlasted all the others. They also eat other beneficial insects, butterflies and hummingbirds. Now, I won't kill a praying mantis if I see it, but I'm never really happy to see them either, and I won't buy them and release them here on purpose. It took me only one time to learn not to do that. Blister beetles are another perfect example. If you have a handful around, and if they aren't clustering on one plant and eating it to death, then they are beneficial because they eat grasshopper eggs. But, if you have hundreds or even thousands of them, then there is nothing beneficial about their presence at all. Lady bugs? Don't we love the lady bugs? Sure we do, but they'll eat butterfly eggs and probably very small, newly hatched butterfly larvae, so.....shrug....what's a gardener to do? How about wasps? When I see a wasp carrying away an armyworm from the garden, I am happy, but I also know that same wasp doesn't discriminate---it will prey on the butterfly caterpillars for whom we plant host plants. I just try to provide an ecosystem where they all can thrive, but we have to remember that everybody in the garden eats something and also gets eaten by something, so there's that. A fall trip to Bustani sounds lovely, but I'm not sure one will be in the works for us this fall. It depends on the degree of ongoing drought probably. I definitely want to make that trip next Spring because I'm going to redo our landscaping around the house, and plan to drag Jana and Chris along so they can see Bustani for themselves. Rebecca, I think funerals help a great deal with closure. My strongest feeling after my aunt's and Jesse's funerals yesterday was just a sense of relief---that feeling that we had celebrated their lives and said good-bye to them, and offered comfort to their families. I do understand that some people don't want a funeral service for themselves, though, and we have to respect their wishes, but it is harder to feel a sense of closure in cases like that. Hailey, That's a black blister beetle. I kill them if they are devouring plants...in my garden they will eat cucumber plants right down to the ground, but if there's just a few and they aren't concentrating on one specific type of plant, I try to ignore them. They eat tons of grasshopper eggs, so usually are beneficial in that sense. I usually see a lot of blister beetles either in the same year that there's a bad grasshopper outbreak, or in the following year. If they clustering are on your tomato plants in any appreciable number (I'll ignore them if I see only 1 or 2 per plant), then they need to die. I cut them in half with scissors and get about 75% of them on the first try. It sometimes takes a few days of snipping with the scissors to get them all. Farmgardener, That's exactly how I deadhead my coneflowers, and I never get volunteers. I think the birds eat all the seedheads, or my mulch is so thick the that the seeds never find soil. Or, and this is a really good possibility, the red harvester ants may feed all the seeds and carry them off---I see them carrying stuff out of the garden all day long. Thanks. I agree with you that as we get older, the losses pile on more and more quickly. Only my mom and one aunt remain from their generation in our family, and that is sort of hard to think about. What we are going through is nothing new---everyone goes through the same, but between friends and family, we just seem to have a lot of that happening this year within a fairly short time frame. We'll get through it. It is, after all, such a blessing to have such wonderful. much-loved people in your lives that you suffer such grief at their loss. Megan, Thank you. Two in one day was a lot and I did nothing but collapse on the couch when we got home. Except for feeding animals and watering the garden, I'm not doing anything today either. I know I need to rest and decompress. Well, I already did a load of laundry, but you know how that is....laundry, like death and taxes, is inevitable, and I hate to let it pile up. I need to go read what our state climatologist, Gary McManus, said about the impending flash drought. Isn't he brilliant? I love his writing. I know he must be highly educated to hold his career position, but I love the humor he exhibits in the Mesonet ticker and in his FB posts. He makes the climate and weather so easy to understand, and sometimes with our climate and weather, if we didn't laugh, we'd cry. I think he uses humor to get our attention so then he can feed us the facts we need to know. I'm gearing up, too, to start cool-season seeds. I really cannot put anything in the ground, in terms of cool-season plants, until at least October and sometimes not until November if the hot weather holds on, but I want to have plants ready when the timing is right. The last few years, we have had temperatures hang on, even into the 100s and upper 90s, through the end of September, so I cannot get into too much of a hurry. The grow cart looks fine if it meets your needs. My first one wasn't too much larger than that---it had three shelves I think. All of mine have been homemade--plastic assemble-it-yourself shelving from Lowe's or Home Depot, with shop lights suspended from shelves by chains that we can raise or lower. No matter what size you get, it won't be big enough. I learned that from experience. As much as I love gardening, I no longer try to keep crops going all winter. I used to, but it was inevitable that when I was really busy with Christmas or winter fire season or whatever, I'd have kale, mustard, spinach, turnips, etc. demanding to be harvested and it just made it all so stressful since I have zero control over when wildfires break out in winter. Or, I'd be gone to a wildfire all day, or for several days in a row, and then not at home in the evening to put row covers over the plants if a particularly bitter cold night is expected, and that was stressful too. Nowadays I'm just happy to keep a few simple things going all winter in the flower border inside the garden---pansies, dianthus, stock, ornamantal cabbage and ornamental kale, etc. If I plant them too early, the pests devour the cabbage and kale, so there's no point in getting into too much of a hurry. I think that Lowe's and HD here get their transplants of those things in the store in serious numbers in late Sept or early Oct, and they don't keep them long because the live plants get in the way of Christmas merchandise, so it is easier to grow my own and have them ready at the time best for me. Of course, we never know when an early autumn freeze will come, but in recent years those have been very few and far between. Have a good rest of the day y'all. Since it is hot and I promised myself a lazy day today, I'm going to make a list of things to plant in next year's cutting garden, which will be the change of pace from growing an edible garden that I've been craving. Am I worried that in January or February, I'll panic because I'm not planting all the usual veggies? Of course I am, but I really want to do something different. I just realized that I get to be REALLY lazy today. I don't have to cook dinner because tonight is our quarterly VFD Fire Board meeting and Tim goes straight from work to that meeting, eating fast food on the way because there's no time to stop at home and have a real meal. I feel really, really bad for Tim and all our fire board members. Jesse has been (always and forever, I think, since the VFD was founded in 2002) the Fire Board Chairman, so tonight, of necessity, they will need to decide whether a current fire board member will step up and become the chairman, or if they want to recruit a new community member to fill that role. I think that is a hard thing to do just one day after his funeral. I'm going to be content today to sit here with my notebook and gardening catalogs and make lists of things I want to grow for the fall cool season and for next year's cutting garden. There's so many options available since I'm not having to save space for veggies. I think I'm going to make the back garden a wildflower/pollinator garden too. When I say I'm taking a break from edibles, I really mean it, except for tomatoes and peppers in container right next to the back door. Dawn...See MoreMegan Huntley
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