August 2019 Week 4

4 years ago

Yikes, I don't have time to write anything right now. Headed to the movies with the kid. I'll come back and add the chore lists later, but here's this week's thread in case y'all have anything to discuss today.

Dawn

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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b

4 years ago

Ron was just at Atwoods in Owasso, they have Bonnie cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and lettuce plants. He also brought home wooden barrel style pots that were on clearance.

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Comments (37)

Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Haha, Dawn! I've been cooking all day so have nothing to add to yours! Was the movie good?
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago

I will post the picture first because I have such a hard time with this tablet.

I mowed my pea vines after the deer picked the peas for me. I noticed a lot of peas sprouting, so I will toss a good supply of winter pea seed in with the cow peas. Hoping they will grow together, with frost killing the cow peas and them the winter peas using the cowpea vines for support, hoping to reduce mold and mildew on the lower part of the winter pea vines. The peas are only for a cover only.

You will notice a hoe handle leaning against my hot wire where the wires are just looped together. The fence is only on 3 sides of the garden, and still leaving a gap on east side large enough to drive a mower or tractor through.

You will also notice my pepper plants ( under the conduit) are very stunted, but producing very well. The okra is near the end of production. The sweet potatoes ( between the okra and peppers) looks good, but I do not expect much from them because I am not seeing potato ends sticking out of the ground.

One of my granddaughters came to visit this afternoon, it has been a wonderful day.

If this post looks crazy, it is because I have to post pictures with my tablet, which I can barely see it. Eye surgery did not help much.
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March 2019, Week 4.....Finally Spring and We're Loving It!
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Nancy, We all seem like we have cold symptoms down here, but it is just the standard spring allergy crap we have every year when the trees are pollinating. I'll be so glad when it is over! The funny thing about frost blankets....when I first read about them in Dr. Sam Cotner's book, which I guess was around the mid to late 1980s, I scoffed at the thought of buying any sort of special textile to cover up plants to protect them from the cold. I thought it was a ridiculous idea, and they were so new (and we didn't have the internet for research) that you couldn't find any info about them from people who actually had used them. To be fair, I lived in zone 8 and we really didn't have that much cold weather after February, so late cold weather really wasn't much of an issue. Then we moved here.....and now I think they are essential. Jennifer, A blanket or sheet would be less damaging. 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Moni, It sounds like you're staying really busy! Jennifer, I only covered up the tomato plants, and did most of that prep work yesterday. Late this afternoon, I went out to the garden, picked up the fence poles that were lying flat on the ground to hold down the row covers, pulled the row covers over the hoops to completely cover the beds, and then laid fence posts on the southern edges of the row covers to hold them down. I attached the row covers to the hoops on the south side of the beds with zip ties so they wouldn't blow away in the strong late afternoon wind. I was so relieved I had gotten the hoops and row covers in place yesterday when there was substantially less wind because it would have been hard to wrestle with those row covers in today's wind. I don't cover up cool-season stuff or any of the perennials....they all have endured much colder weather than the 32 degrees in the forecast for us for tomorrow morning, so I know they can handle it. Most chickens start laying before they are 6 months old, and a lot start at 5 months, so it seems like Stormy actually is a bit late, but blame that on winter and daylength. I doubt this weekend is the last gasp of cold weather and I just want to get through it, get it over with, and get on with planting more warm-season stuff. Warm season volunteers are sprouting in the garden again, so I know our soil is plenty warm---it has been hitting the 70s by about noon every day so technically I can direct-sow any seeds and expect them to sprout pretty quickly. It is annoying to have to cover up anything, but I had it so much worse before I invested in row covers and started using them. I used to have to gather up every bucket, flower pot, basket, box, etc. that I could find and then I'd through old textiles over them....blankets, quilts, sheets, table cloths, curtains, etc. My garden always looked like an odd redneck yard sale was going on by the time I got everything covered up. 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She said she can't wait to go back to see it next weekend with her mom and little sister, which means she really did like it a lot. I am not a huge fan of going and seeing a movie again after I just saw it, but some people like watching them multiple times, and she surely does. The bluebonnets are gorgeous in Texas right now and mine are substantially behind them, but that's okay---mine are still early, it is just that theirs were even earlier. I cannot get over how many trees are leafing out. It is happening in the blink of an eye---except for the pecan trees. Mother Nature rarely fools the pecan trees, and this year is no exception. We'll see if they start leafing out after this weekend cold spell ends, or if they're holding out a bit longer. I cannot believe all our fruit trees are done blooming already and it isn't even April yet. I hope all our plants come through tonight and the next two chilly nights with no damage. Dawn
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June 2019, Week 4
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Thanks, Sandplum! That is something I really want. I don't need it right now because I don't have many ripe tomatoes, but hopefully next year will be like 2016 and 2017 for me--lots of tomatoes! Dawn, you did a great job reading my mind. IF my squash plant is butternut (oh, I hope so!), then it is a C. moschata, like you said. I did have SVB moths flying around it and think I found a small SVB grub. It was very small. And trying hard to chew into the stalk. I squished it of course. I've never seen a SVB grub that small. I usually don't see them until the plant dies and they're falling out of the dead plant. Ew. I love butternut squash so much and would love to get a good harvest of them. There's several fruit on this plant. They are growing in compost so probably don't need to be fertilized, right? Yes...I was wondering about the coloring and fruit size of the Lime Green. I might have picked it a little early. For some reason I thought the outside stayed green too and was surprised to find a light orangey fruit. Thought I had mislabeled, but not really because the plant looks different from other tomatoes. I have two. It tasted okay--a little tart. Maybe 'cause it wasn't quite ripe. The inside is a gorgeous color of green. It was a free package of seeds. I think either Rebecca, Jen or Megan got a free pack too. Carrots! Lovely carrots. I had success this year! They were crowding out and shading the shishito pepper (Actually I think it's the hot banana pepper I got from Bruce but the tag was accidentally switched with the shishito...by me) so thought it best to harvest them. Their tops were so tall, but I couldn't see the root pushing up from the soil so expected to find a skinny, underdeveloped carrot. Nope. These are lovely. I mixed up the seeds and scattered them all around the bed so have orange AND purple carrots. LOVE. They smell so nice too. Only the ones near the pepper plant were pulled so I have a whole bed of carrots to pull. Yippee! I'm going to start more seed when I can find a place for them. While scrolling through FB, I saw that someone had to pull out their hose for the first time this year. Me TOO! Last night. Dawn, I accidentally left the chicken door open a couple of nights ago and was surprised to see them out in the morning. At first I thought that Ethan had let them out (he's an early riser for a teen). Then remembered that I had closed the little chicken door so I could deal with broodies without interruption from the others. As it got dark I wondered why there weren't going into the coop. DUH! I shut their door. So went out and opened it, but then forgot to close it. Seriously. The pen door was closed, but our pen is not 100% predator proof. Something that was very determined could find a way in, which is why they have to be in the predator proof coop WITH the door locked during the night. That could have been a disaster because we have all sorts of critters lurking around at night too, Dawn, more than we've had so far out here. K, I need to finish work. We have a date night tonight and I want to leave early to take a nap so I don't fall asleep at 10. We are going to Picasso in the Paseo Arts District. One of my favorite restaurants. Have a good day, Everyone.
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August 2019, Week 2
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Comments (30)
I'm working my way backwards from bottom to top today because my brain is tired and only wants to remember what it read most recently. In general, the reason you're seeing so many wasps, Nancy, probably is because we have had tons and tons of caterpillars all season, and the wasps feed on the cats. I have seen a lot of blue thread-waisted wasps carrying various caterpillars out of the garden this year. They take them back to their nests to feed their young, stashing them away, paralyzed, so that their young can feed on them. In years with significant fewer cats, we see significantly fewer wasps. Like everything else in nature, the level of the predator population rises and falls with the level of the prey population. Butterfly-lovers don't like seeing caterpillars carried away but it is the ecosystem and food web in action and I don't interfere with it. We always have a lot of bees here, perhaps because pesticide usage is fairly low out here in the sticks. There's plentiful butterflies pretty much every year, though it seemed like their numbers fell through the floor during the horrific drought of 2011. The population rebounded though when better weather conditions returned. We have had dogs that have chased the deer, but after Honey and Jersey ran off into the woods to do that once and became entrapped and surrounded by coyotes determined to engage them in battle, we stopped letting the dogs run freely and keep them confined to the fenced dog yard for their own safety now. I never want to hear the sounds of dogs and coyotes engaged in battle ever again, and I don't want to see our dogs with the hair/flesh pulled out of their hips by the attacking coyotes either. Our dogs suffered only mild plucking like that, but we've had friends whose dogs have come home with their rear haunches looking like raw hamburger meat. Y'all probably don't have coyotes in abundance there like we have them along the river here, so Titan probably isn't in the same danger if he runs off a bit. I enjoy seeing the possums, but not the coons because they will prey on chickens. I'm not crazy about seeing skunks either, especially in the daylight hours, but they're part of the ecosystem too. I don't mind seeing the foxes and bobcats as long as they aren't after our poultry. There's an endless array of wildlife to see here and I like that, but some days there's too much of it too close to our pets. It is crazy y'all still cannot use the boat, but that rain just keeps falling in parts of NE OK, and it has to run off somewhere. Our lake and river levels have been back to normal since probably June but the heavy rainfall stopped here long ago. Since so much of our river water comes from SW OK and they are in drought, there's not a lot of water flowing downstream now and huge sandbars continue to emerge from the river. It is not yet so dry that you can walk across the river without having to wade through some water, so there's still more water in the river this August than in most years. Some years I freeze summer squash. Of course, as with everything else, it changes the texture, but the squash still can be used in squash casserole, which is my favorite way to cook it (other than frying it, and we don't eat a lot of fried food any more). You can make squash pickles or squash relish though. Our school system in Marietta has dealt with the school supply issue by supplying all those school supplies for each child themselves these last few years. I think that is pretty wonderful even though I know they are making budgetary sacrifices elsewhere in order to be able to provide the supplies. Our community in Marietta has been really good about supporting bond elections to improve the schools since at least the early 2000s, so it seems like one building or another (or one athletic facility or another) always is in the process of being improved, built, replaced or whatever is appropriate in each given case. Thackerville has not had the same success, and saw bond elections fail for probably a solid decade before finally getting one to pass so they could build a new elementary school. Here there is a lot of support for the schools, but still the tax dollars can only be stretched so far. Larry, I have some family members who will not work either and it frustrates me because they are capable of working. Instead, they have learned every-which-way to work the system and get stuff free. I love them but this sort of behavior is not how my parents raised us and I don't care for it myself. When they plead poverty, I ignore them because I know they are capable of working and supporting themselves. If they want to have more cash to spend, they should work. I'd better shut up now before I say too much about them. They were taught how to work, they know how to work, but they'd rather not do it. Ooops. Gotta get off my soapbox. The deer were crazy yesterday. I cut up some cucumber and tossed them on the compost pile for them and they acted like it was Christmas. Then they stalked me the rest of the day every time I went outdoors, so I won't do that again for a while because I don't want them expecting such things every day. No wonder I never get much compost out of that back compost pile--the deer eat things before they can decompose. Some days the deer stand in our neighbors' woodland, right on the edge, and just watch me all day. I know they are wishing I'd leave the garden gate open so they could wander into the garden and eat. Well, I'm not going to do that, but sometimes they startle me because I'm not expecting to have one standing nearby, perhaps under a tree or two, staring at me. It gets sort of creepy after a while. Jennifer, We have watered so long and hard around all our concrete slabs, using soaker hoses, trying to prevent cracking in dry summers, but when all the land around you is cracking badly, you really cannot prevent it. It is very frustrating. I hope your slab in the coop doesn't crack too badly. Rain before September sounds great but I don't see anything in the long-range forecast that makes me think it is likely to happen. In some years when we let the chickens hatch their eggs, we'd get about 80% roosters. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it happens, and that is why we do not often let them hatch out eggs---we don't need more roosters! We've always let our babies run with the adults once they are about half-grown. The adults protect them and teach them to protect themselves from all the wild things. I've never seen bagworms here. I suspect they might be on cedar trees on our neighbors' place across the property line from my garden, but we've always done our best to cut down the cedars that appear on our property so we don't have to deal with bag worms. It seems odd they just popped up on your apple trees, but then so many things are odd this year. With regards to poverty, there's always going to be some people looking for a free ride---always has been, always will be. I have no pity for those who want the rest of society to support them, especially if they have high expectations and expect to be given fancy shoes, for example. There's a difference between true poverty that a family cannot overcome and choosing to be poor and dependent on others because one is lazy and shiftless and we all know that. I just hate seeing children being brought up that way---if a child is taught by example how to obtain housing vouchers, WIC, SNAP, free cell phones, food from the food bank to supplement what they get from WIC and SNAP, free school supplies at those big back-to-school events and free gifts at Christmas, then what are they being taught? They're being taught how to depend on others to give you things instead of being taught how to work, earn your living and be responsible for yourself. That is the part that is so unfortunate. To change society, we have to teach those children who grow up that way that there is a different way to live or the cycle perpetuates itself. To me, changing mindsets like that is the real challenge. To me, there's a difference between people who make a career out of being dependent on social programs and charities and people who temporarily fall on hard times and truly need help until they get back on their feet. I see it in my own extended family---and we have bailed out those kids once or twice but won't do it again because they won't work to support themselves. When I grew up we were taught you'd better get an education and be able to support yourself because "TANSTAAFL", i.e. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It was just a given that people grow up and support themselves and their families. Nowadays the problem is that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and more, and it has given us a lot of people who expect a free ride. I'm grateful we had parents who taught us to work for what we want, though not all my siblings are willing to do that work. I could tell you stories....but I won't. Sigh...... The kids here started school yesterday so my FB feed was full of bright, shining faces in new school outfits carrying brand new backpacks. The kids seem excited to be back in school, and the parents are possibly even more excited to have them back in the normal routine again. Our own granddaughters looked pretty adorable. Lillie started 5th grade, which means middle school is next year. Oh wow. None of us are ready for that! Aurora started four-year-old pre-K and was so very excited. She wore an outfit we let her pick out herself when we took her school clothes shopping---thankfully she chose a skirt and a top that actually coordinated well with each other. (grin) We are going to have a good-bad weekend. At least one of the granddaughters is coming to spend the weekend, and we might have both. It depends on whether she goes to her dad's house as expected, which is iffy, because so often they don't even hear from him when it is supposed to be his weekend. So, if she doesn't go to his house, we'll have both of the girls. That's the good part of the weekend. The bad part is we're going down to Fort Worth tomorrow to finish cleaning out mom's stuff so we can list the house with a realtor. I think that the work itself won't be too hard---our niece already has bagged up and gotten rid a lot of the smaller, personal items like clothing and shoes, and we're going to sit there and equitably divide old photos and stuff. Then we'll load up various appliances and furniture items that will be going home with some of my siblings and nieces and nephews. We don't plan to bring back anything like furniture here as our house is fully furnished and so is Chris'. My brother, who is the executor of mom's estate, expects the house to sell pretty quickly---it is on a lot-and-a-half on a street corner directly across from the local park in a very family-friendly neighborhood and houses like that usually sell fairly fast in that neighborhood. So, the hardest thing about tomorrow is that it may be the last time we're all together at mom's house while it still is mom's house. This house has been in our family since the 1940s and it is hard to think of it no longer being ours. I need to get out to the garden to harvest and water, and I'm sure there's feral cats, deer and wild birds waiting for breakfast. Sometimes I wonder how the chickens ever gain any weight because they seem to share their daily hen scratch with everybody, including squirrels. Have a great day everyone. I think it is going to be another hot one. Dawn
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November 2019, Week 4
Q
Comments (15)
I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn
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Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
I had written the whole long weekly post earlier and it disappeared when I had one item left to go, so I posted the above and left. So, here's this week's stuff:

We begin the fourth week of August with better moisture and recent rainfall for most of the state than what we've had in a while. I hope that means everybody's yards and gardens are suffering a bit less now.

Tomorrow is supposed to be incredibly hot with high heat indices for some of us, so a significant number of counties are under a heat advisory for tomorrow, but the weather is supposed to moderate after that, and there's more chances for rainfall this week as well.

What garden chores are on our To Do lists this week? I think we get a break from irrigation tasks, other than perhaps watering containers if they need it or watering young seedlings if the heat is drying out the soil around them too quickly.

Mowing and edging might be nice chores to accomplish this week if your property isn't a mud pit from the rain or buried under standing water (ours is both, but it will dry out quickly in tomorrow's heat).

In ornamental beds and veggie, herb and flower gardens, the cooler weather might be a nice time to catch up on weeding and deadheading if fire ant beds or slithering snakes aren't an impediment to doing such tasks.

Remember to keep harvesting so veggie production doesn't slow down, and keep watching for pests because some people are seeing population explosions of stink bugs, squash bugs and leaf-footed bugs. In our garden, the population of grasshoppers in the garden seemingly doubled overnight, though in general it had been dropping in recent weeks, so I am not sure why it is up again, but I hope they stop devouring the flowering plants soon. Hopefully the wild birds will be busy eating the grasshoppers this week.

If you're the sort of person who puts out a pre-emergent herbicide to prevent the germination of cool-season weeds, this is the time of year to do that. I'm not one who does that as many of the cool-season weeds help feed the bees when they bloom in the winter, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone here uses these products.

If you want to sow wildflower seeds for blooms next year, autumn is the ideal time for most of the perennial ones to be sown, basically from mid-September through mid-November, so keep that in mind and order seeds to sow if you need them for an autumn planting. When I do this, most wildflowers will sprout and grow as small rosettes low to the ground in the winter months, seemingly not making much growth above ground but I imagine they are busy growing roots below the surface. When temperatures warm up in Spring, they'll grow and bloom quickly. Some annual or half-hardy annual wildflowers benefit from being sown in the Feb-Mar time frame, so research the ones you want to plant.

The only other chore on my mind is that we need to be watching in a few weeks for the attempted invasion of our homes by the multi-colored Asian lady beetles and perhaps doing things now to keep them out. That might include checking the caulking around door and window frames and filling any gaps there or anywhere else needed before the invasion begins. This is doubly important if you're in an area where brown marmorated stink bugs attempt to come indoors (I am not, at least so far). Some people spray their homes with a pesticide at this time of the year to prevent this, but we don't use one of those and I cannot tell you which ones to use or if they work. I'd rather kill the little devils if they make it indoors than to spray a pesticide that might harm some of the good guys.

I only checked at one store today, and they didn't have many cool-season transplants in yet. Our Wal-Mart (in Gainesville) only had chrysanthemums, and the shelves in the outdoor garden center were full so I don't think they are selling many yet in this heat, but over on the veggies shelves they had tomatoes, peppers and a few early cool-season transplants like kale. The tomato varieties they had were Big Boy, Better Boy, Early Girl, Husky Red Cherry, Juliet and Sweet 100 Cherry. The tomato plants were pretty small but the pepper plants were a decent size. I didn't check the pepper varieties.

What Wal-Mart did have was a lot of newly-arrived spring-blooming bulbs---some that can be planted without chilling and some that need a few weeks of chilling in the fridge before planting, so if you're looking for spring-flowering bulbs that you can plant over the next few months, they've got them now. I know I saw tulips, daffodils, crocus, ranunculus, Dutch hyacinths, and grape hyacinths. There may have been others that I don't remember.

So, the above is what I had in mind for what we should be thinking about and doing this week. If I missed anything, please add it! Oh, and if you have empty areas that won't have fall and winter plants, how about sowing cover crops or green manure crops or deer/wildlife plots there now and in the coming weeks?

I have almost no garden chores planned for this week because we have family stuff going on early in the week. I'll re-evaluate midweek and see if I have time to do anything in the latter half of the week.

Nancy, It was a PG-13 horror movie (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) and Lillie loved it. I was worried it might be too frightening for her, but her mom didn't think it would be and I suppose it wasn't. Lillie loves movies like that and has watched them with her mom for years. The story was a good one, but I personally don't like horror movies and like those aimed at teens even less. So, you know, it was your typical teen horror movie where every teen who leaves the crowd and goes off on their own ends up missing/feared dead or actually dead (the movie leaves some doubt about a couple of them that likely will be addressed in the sequel.....because you can bet there will be a sequel) while you're telling them 'don't leave, don't leave, stay with the others'. lol. I spent a lot of the movie checking the time on my phone because I just wanted it to be over so we could leave. Again, it was good if you like that sort of thing and it had a great back story that you don't learn until you get near the end, but these types of movies just aren't my cup of tea.

The rain here was a godsend and I could see today that some of the cracks in the ground are closing up. They may not completely close, but any improvement is a good thing and I'm happy to see it. The ants, wasps (Tim sprayed several nests outside this evening while I was working in the kitchen) and frogs are everywhere. So are the spiders, and the hummingbirds too.

Well, my cake layers have been cooling on the cooling racks in the kitchen for a while now, so I need to go whip up the frosting so I can frost them. It has been a while since I made a cake from scratch and I have 4 layers to frost and decorate. Have a great week everyone.

Dawn
hazelinok
4 years ago
Dawn, that I how the cracks in our property are right now....closing, but not gone.

We got a bit of rain this morning, but only around a quarter inch--if that. I'm happy to take it, though.

Tomorrow I am off work, so I will work on cleaning up the front flowerbeds. I would like to mow, but can't start the push mower which I like to use for the front yard because I can bag it with the push mower.

I have to wait until Tom gets home from work. ti will be very hot then...but, oh well.

In the garden, okra is still going crazy. The sweet peppers are doing pretty well too. The volunteer cherry-type of tomatoes are good. I'm not harvesting a ton of anything, though, other than okra daily. It's sort of annoying because I need veggies for dinner and don't have much other than okra. I did discover that grilled okra is very good.

Dawn, I'm glad you enjoyed your movie with your girl. I love going to the movies, but we haven't gone at all this year...really since Christmas Eve which is a tradition. We did see the newest X-Men while in Colorado. It is SO weird that we haven't been to the movies much this year.

There was a giant hornworm on my chaste tree. Is that a normal thing? I relocated it to the haunted house. It was the biggest one I've ever seen.

I have pictures to ask about, but I'm sorta tired and will do that tomorrow.
oldbusy1
4 years ago
Not much going on here, getting a few peppers is all. The deer took care of the okra earlier and only have a few large pods for seed. Iron and clay peas never set any peas and pretty much almost dried up. I'll probably mow them and till it under. No plans for a fall garden except for some mustard i planted for some late blooms for the bees.

I had to pick all my apples since the birds and wasps were ruining them. Muscadines are ripening already.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Okay, my friend asked me what all of these viney tree things are. They are in her front bed which she is fixing to redo, but she likes to save things and relocate them innher property.

Any idea what these things are? And if they are worth keeping. Thanks.
jlhart76
4 years ago
My paternal grandmother kept me a lot as a kid, and I cherish all the one on one time with her. Since the boys went to their dad's for the summer, I went to grandma's instead of a sitter. While it's a shame the girls don't get to spend weekends together, the one on one time with you is something they'll remember.

Very little gardening done here. We had a pup escape Fri night so most of Saturday was spent trying to find him. Owner said he had separation anxiety but didn't think he'd jump the fence. Well, turns out his separation anxiety is worse than she thought & he decided he wanted mama. Sat about 8 pm someone replied to one of my posts that she saw the dog in a cemetery 4 miles up the street, so off I went to look. Found him but he wasn't ready to come home and disappeared in the dark. Cliff & I were out there wandering around an open field between the church & cemetery, in the dark, calling the pups name in hopes he'd respond. Cliff was smart enough to call the police and let them know, just in case someone called in about some lunatics in the cemetery after dark. Then Sun morning I decided to go by on my way to church on the off chance he was still there, and there he was. Standing under a tree, looking miserable and waterlogged, and ready to come home. Mama was beside herself (turns out she was going to be with her little brother for a surgery, so she was already stressed) and so thankful he came when I called. Power of social media, he's back home thanks to someone who just happened to see my post.
hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Jen, how scary and frustrating about the pup!

Oldbusy, what kind of apples do you have? I have two columnar apple trees and they make the tastiest apples, but haven't even bloomed the past two years. I'm wondering if they need to be fertilized.

I really didn't do much outside today, other than cleaning up the front flowerbeds a bit this morning. In a couple of hours--when it hopefully cools down a bit--we will mow the front and back yards. (Our heat index is 114 right now.) The field can wait. I do want the rain, but would be happy if it holds off until 9 or so...need to get this mowing done.

Amy and Dawn, I checked HD this morning. They didn't have any cool season plants at all. They did have some fresh looking tomatoes, peppers, squash, and herbs. I didn't buy any.

The woman who was working in the garden center said it would be a couple of weeks before the cool season stuff came in.

The seed I started a week or two ago doesn't look good. Some didn't sprout and some just looks bad. Maybe because they are outside and it's been hot...I've never started seed like this before. SO...today I started more greens seed and will put them under the lights indoors for 2 or 3 weeks and then move them outdoors when hopefully it is consistently cooler.

Other than those things, I did a couple of loads of laundry and cleaned the dog bowls and the chick feeders/waterers. Those things get so nasty especially after a rain.

I'm about to take some Armenian cucumbers out to them...getting myself psyched up to go out in the heat.

Luckily Tom is grilling tonight so I don't have to heat up the kitchen: chicken, corn on the cob (we haven't eaten any this year so far), okra, and carrots (both Ethan and Tom like grilled carrots.) I'll probably microwave a potato. I still can't eat chicken easily. I don't know if it's all in my head, but it gives me a stomach ache, so I would rather not eat it. I have tried.

Y'all my coleus is insane. I can't remember who picked up the coleus plants I brought to SF, but is your plants out of control too?!

I'm going to come back with a video (if it will post) of my coleus.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Larry, the garden looked wonderful! My own viny things look good, too--cucumber, squash and Seminole vines everywhere with a couple nicely growing tomatoes and several yard bean plants. They all sure look better than most of the herbs and flowers.

I'm thankful for the cool down that will start tomorrow, but keeping fingers crossed about probability of strong storms this evening. Oh my, much stronger probability for Tulsa and north. Yikes, friends. Will be watching, Amy, Eileen, Rebecca, and anyone else there.

Dawn, what was the occasion for the layer cake, or was there one? And what flavor? I bet it has been 25 years since I've made a layer cake! All of a sudden, it sounds yummy. I may need to try it. (I feel a big FAIL coming on. LOL) And, I'm with you on those kinds of movies!

I found a wonderful way to fix pulled pork! It required 8-10 hours or marinating in liquid, and another 8-10 hours baking in the oven at 200 degrees! Can you imagine? It was melt in the mount tender. GDW and I were thrilled. Unfortunately, this was for friend whose FIL died. Then I made a huge back of baked mac and cheese and hardly ever fix it because GDW is not a great fan. But I'm making some in the next couple days. Also picked up another big pork butt roast this morning to fix for us.

I have been enjoying letting the flower beds be neglected in this heat and guilt-free reading. I haven't even mowed and it has been 10 days. Historically, I'm good to do it every 7th or 8 days. It topped out here at I think about 108 heat index, but was sultry even in the shade today.

Jen, I am SO thankful for you that you found the missing dog! Not a fun weekend while he was gone, huh!

And Jen, I only comment on IDs if I'm positive--I wasn't on yours. :)

Best to you all!
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
I am so tired. I did read every post, but now find myself too tired out to comment. I'll come back and comment in the morning, but I will answer Nancy's question about the cake. I made a 4-layer Italian Cream Cake for Chris and Jana's wedding cake. They got married this afternoon---at the office of a justice of the peace with Tim and I and the girls with them. Then we went out together for a casual early dinner at a Mexican restaurant Chris always has liked and came back to our house for wedding cake. Then, they headed home pretty early because all of them have either school or work in the morning. The wedding was not a surprise---we've known for about 3 weeks now. They are delaying their honeymoon until December when Jana has a school break because she really cannot take off from nursing school to go on a honeymoon. And that is how my day went, why I never stepped foot in the garden today and why I am so tired. I'll be back here in the morning to discuss gardening. : )

Dawn
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
XOXOXO, Dawn!!! And what is amazing is that when I read about your layer cake, the only cake I could think of was an Italian Cream/Wedding Cake. I'd never heard of it until I moved down here. I bought one for one of our daughters, and I fell in love. My heartfelt blessings for Chris and Jana, and all of you. I am so happy for you all.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Congratulations to Chris and Jana!

Well, the coleus (that I tried to show in video but it didn't work) are probably goners. The wind is insane! I'm pretty sure it snapped them. (there's no telling what is happening in our veggie garden) Our trashcans were blown over and it's always fun to chase garbage down the street in the wind and dark.

I didn't even know anything bad was coming in because we had NBC on...and I guess they don't do the local new on YouTube TV. We're on another channel now.

Hope everyone is okay.
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
Congratulations on the wedding, Dawn!

HJ and everyone who had storms, everything ok? Hearing about power outages and wind damage. The big storms went around me, just had some rain and thunder.
hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Rebecca, we mostly breezed through the storm. The coleus that I was so proud of yesterday...those are mostly snapped and bent. The pillow I had on the chair on the front porch is at the back of the property, but I brought in the door wreath and other things last night. Oh, it did pull a plant out of a plastic pot and the pot is now missing. BUT, we kept our power and even our internet. A lot of people are without one or both.

The rain gauge says only about an inch which is a huge surprise to me. It seems like it rained most of the night and early morning. I don't know. An inch is enough, though. We already had over 2 inches last week, so we are good. I don't want to be selfish.

I'm about to put on my boots and check out the garden (and pick up the pillow I can see laying on the ground next to the back garden).

In chicken news, they are all doing well. I joined Backyard Chickens. I have been putting that off for years because I didn't need a new obsession...but I did it last week. They have a "what gender/breed is my chicken" thread. So far, the three black chicks are guessed to be pullets (girls for those of you who don't do chickens) by all commenters. It's still up in the air for the reddish/blonde ones. People are divided on their guesses.

My 2 from the "bantam assortment" bin are guessed to be a Dark Cornish (I don't think that is correct, though, because the face is different) and an Easter Egger. Undetermined on the gender. I suspect they are both males...but would love for the Easter Egger to be a pullet. I'm not sure what to do with 2 bantam males. My neighbor will take a couple of roosters, but I'm not sure she wants bantams. I think the one is a spangled old English game chicken. They will both be beautiful roosters, if that is what they are. None have crowed yet. They are 7 weeks old.

Stormy, one of the broody mommas, has started laying her pretty olive colored eggs again.

Why have I been looking at MyPetChicken?! I don't need anymore chickens! But, I want all the chickens.

Okay...on with the boots and out to the garden.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Thanks, Rebecca, I'm glad it is over. Waiting for it was a bit nerve-wracking. I thought Chris and Janna were fairly calm, all things considered.

Jennifer, Thanks. Those two newlyweds were just beaming from ear to ear. It was so cute and so sweet.

I haven't even looked at my coleus after the raging storms hit our county around 2:40 this morning although the really strong stuff didn't arrive at our house until around 4 am, and I kinda don't want to go look at them because they were really tall and probably will be a pitiful sight. Still, if yours (or mine or anybody else's) are damaged, you can cut them back hard and whatever is left will regrow quickly in autumn's milder weather so you can continue to enjoy them until the cold weather sets in. All my big tall sunflowers that were growing and blooming just outside the sunroom are flattened down to the ground and so is the big datura that was growing with them. We only had a power surge and didn't lose power here, but power was out in town, and they were having to dispatch fires and wrecks by phone app instead of via emergency radios. That sure makes you grateful that we have phone apps to utilize in this way.

One good thing about all the rain is that the feral mama cat was so freaked out by the weather that when I went outdoors to feed her, she came right to me and let me pet her, which normally doesn't happen. I think this is only the second time in 2-3 months that she has let me touch her. So, I opened up the garage's walk-in door, put food inside and she promptly moved her 3 kittens (which I've only been able to catch a glimpse of 2 or 3 times) into the garage. This could be the first step towards taming them and catching them and saving them from living the life of a feral cat. They look to be about 3-4 weeks old and are gray. I don't know where they have been living, exactly, but when I've seen them, they all run and hide under our pickup truck or Jeep, and jump up onto the tires to disappear from view or something. It makes me nervous that we'll start up a vehicle while they've climbed up underneath it, so I'm glad that maybe she has decided the garage is a safer option.

I had heard there could be severe weather but the first time I realized it was happening was when Megan posted they were seeking shelter from the possible tornado, which thankfully lifted up before it reached their place. After that I tried to keep an eye on the weather, but it was so far from us that I wasn't watching it terribly closely knowing it would be hours yet before it arrived here.

Nancy, I think I first tasted Italian Cream Cake when my best friends's mom made one for her birthday when we were 15 or 16 years old. It was amazing, and totally new to me, because my mom made cake mix cakes, not from-scratch cakes. I've been making it ever since, and it is on my list of favorite traditional southern desserts.

Did all of y'all get pounded by the rain? We sure did, but I was happy to hear it, happy to see the lightning, and happy to listen to the wind roar. There were a lot of weather-related issues in town (Marietta) and around the county including oil tank batteries set on fire by a lightning strike, but I'm so grateful to have cooler and wetter weather despite the issues it brings. After yesterday's high of 100 degrees with a heat index of 113, guess how much they have lowered our forecast high for today? All the way down to 83, which sounds just heavenly to me. I'm sure the mild temperatures won't last but a day or two, but they are a harbinger of autumn. We might have scattered sprinkles the rest of today and tonight, which also is such a tremendous improvement over having relentless hot sun beating down on everything. I'd be happy if we just had clouds and no rain too---that still would feel nice and cool. Lucky is outside sitting on the porch like a cranky cat, having resolved she is not going to leave the porch and walk on the wet, puddle-covered ground.

The rain lilies already had popped up in the pasture after last week's rain, but hadn't bloomed yet. This morning they began blooming. I expect the struggling late-summer wildflowers will break out into riotous bloom within a couple of weeks, and that will be great for all the migrating butterflies as well as for the hummingbirds. The noon news just came on and they are showing a lot of barns and other buildings with the roofs peeled off of them, more from the OKC metro area than from here, so there's probably some people who aren't loving this weather as much as I am.

I have looked at the ColorBlends catalog and just swooned over the tulip blends. I want them all. Sadly, it is hard to grow tulips here because the voles eat the bulbs, but I'm contemplating ordering some tulip bulbs anyway (to go with the ones I bought at Sam's Club last week), which then would force me to build a hardware-cloth lined bed just for them. : )

I am going to plant more daffodils this fall, and probably will order them from ColorBlends. I'm going to put them in part of the front yard, down close to the western edge of the garden, but outside the garden fence. Voles normally do not eat daffodil bulbs, so we still have the ones I planted (in horrible clay) down near the garden gate and driveway 20 years ago. Thanks to the wicked clay, they haven't spread much, but they also have at least survived all the weather and wildlife. I'd just like to have more tulips closer to the house and garden and I want to plant a lot so I can cut armloads to carry indoors for bouquets when we're stuck in that late winter/early spring cold weather misery.

I haven't spent much time looking at the Geo Seeds catalog yet. Really, it is more of a price list type book because it doesn't feature photos. Since it is aimed more at commercial growers, they assume you know what's what or can look up the plants online. I suspect I will spend days and days looking through it, selecting the seeds I want for next year's cutting garden. I don't think there's many seeds I need 1,000 of, but some of their packets are only a few hundred seeds, and that could work. I might order a few things that lean towards being 'wild' and mix them in with my wildflower seed mix before I plant it.

We have been so busy with mom's illness, death and the stuff you have to do afterwards to close up the estate that I'm grateful the garden has been able to slide by with benign neglect this month. Now that the girls are back in school, the wedding is over, mom's house is ready to go on the market, etc., I feel inclined to coast through the rest of this month and not do a whole lot except plan for next year. I'd like to be out in the garden weeding, but feel like the risk of running into snakes is too high, especially since all this rain has fallen recently and they likely are going to be climbing up into raised beds, plants and containers to get a bit above all the standing water. We're already seeing more mosquitoes following the couple of good rainfalls we've had in the last month, and that situation undoubtedly will get worse over the next few weeks.

Here's the rainfall maps showing all the rain that has fallen over the last 10 days. It looks like most places have had plentiful rainfall, but there's still a few areas waiting for their big rain to fall. Our Mesonet station only shows about 2 and a half inches, but at our house we've had about 4 and a half. I am so grateful for all that rain.

10-Day Rainfall Accumulation Map

Depending on when your rain fell, you should see some improvements on the drought monitor map released this Thursday if you were showing up as Abnormally Dry, or in some drought category.

Dawn
hazelinok
4 years ago
We "need" one more of the half whiskey barrel pots for our shop porch, Amy. I'll check out Atwoods this weekend--see if they have broccoli and cauliflower at the Norman one.
jlhart76
4 years ago
I got one of the coleus at SF. It's in a pot by the front door, so it gets hit by puppy tails regularly. At one point it was about 2ft tall, then someone broke off a piece so I put it in some water and rooted it. May have to get some more cuttings and bring them in for the winter.

I asked my sister in law for some mineral buckets, so she's saving me a few. They asked if I wanted ceramic or plastic, and much as I'd like ceramic ones I don't have a way to put drainage holes in them. I think next year I'm going to limit my tomato plants to only what I have buckets for; and buy some good compost for them. I'm pretty sure the clay soil is still too dense for the roots to take up anything and thrive. Maybe after a couple years I can get enough amended to go back to planting in the ground.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Jen, I only have two "fall" tomatoes and they are in mineral tubs. They've done really well. The wind last night bent one really badly and I foolishly didn't have them caged or staked. They are now as of this afternoon.

And I was thinking about my 2020 garden today, too.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Amy, I haven't been in an Atwood's in so long. I need to go there just to feel normal again! : ) I haven't even bought any new plants at all in ages, which is inexcusable, is it not? This whole summer has pretty much been a blur of trips to multiple hospitals, nursing homes and funeral homes. I am completely over all the illness, gloom and doom and just want for things to get back to normal again. Two of our great-nephews start their youth football season next week, with their sisters and female cousins cheering them on as youth league cheerleaders, and we're going to try to make it down to Fort Worth for as many of their games on Saturdays as we can just so we can hang out with family members in a cheerful, happy context. As a bonus, our granddaughters will get to hang out more with their cousins, whose company they enjoy, even though they don't get to see them very often.

Jen, I used to overwinter tons of plants indoors, but the cats and dogs broke me of that habit. There is no plant I can have indoors, even as cuttings on a windowsill, that they will not destroy if they get the chance. I do overwinter some things in the unheated greenhouse, and I may even heat it at night this year because I have a lot of zone 8 and zone 9 plants in big pots that will need to overwinter in the greenhouse unless I am willing to let the plants die in the fall or winter, and I'm not. I think I planted all but 6 of the tender plants in pots from the start this year, so I'll only have to dig and pot up 6 or 8 plants from various garden beds to move them to the greenhouse. That's not bad. Some years I have dug up and moved a lot more. Every now and then I forget to dig one up, and sometimes it will survive if the winter isn't too cold and too rainy, but since our garden soil doesn't drain well enough in wet winters, that's a fairly rare occurrence. I did have Cape Honeysuckle, a zone 9 plant, survive last fall/winter's very wet weather (our wettest fall-winter-spring ever) in one of the tall, raised beds we had built/lined with hardware cloth for growing vole-free potatoes. I thought about digging it up and moving it last fall, but some zone 8 lavender had overwintered the year before in that bed, which is filled with a very fast-draining sandy loam/peat moss/bark mix so I thought I'd take a chance on the Cape Honeysuckle and I got away with it. While we were very wet, we were not very cold, at least not the sort of cold that would kill plants. I expect the large Cape Honeysuckle will perish in a colder winter, but I'm going to leave it there again this winter to see how much cold it will take and will just hope that this is not a cold, icy winter, because I'm pretty sure it would not survive that. Some zone 8 lantanas (2 out of 3 that were there) also overwintered in that bed and a couple more overwintered in a marginally-improved low raised bed at the east end of the garden, which is another sign it was not a cold winter at all in 2018-19. More and more I'm using those tall, raised, vole-proof "potato" beds to grow ornamentals that cannot survive winter in our clay, even when it is well-amended clay. Hmmm. That means less potato growing space, and I just don't care. I'm on an ornamental plant binge here lately and still have one potato bed left free and clear for them, so far, but I think I'm going to plant tulips there this winter since I'm turning the whole front garden into a cutting garden for next year. That's my form of vegetable crop rotation---to skip all the veggies for a year or two and grow flowers instead.

I've never heard of ceramic mineral tubs, and I don't care for large ceramic pots because they are so heavy to move when filled with a growing mix and plants. I much prefer plastic. I know many people do not find plastic as aesthetically pleasing, but they aren't having to try to move around heavy pots so they don't get to vote on whether I have plastic, clay or ceramic containers.

Jennifer, Cauliflower always produces much better for me in fall than in spring, though I don't grow very much of it any more because I'm the only one here who will eat it. I like fresh cauliflower from the garden much more than grocery store cauliflower.

We awakened to clouds and very, very light sprinkles this morning---the kind of light rain that might annoy a cat or dog but that really doesn't add up to anything much in the rain gauge---maybe 0.01" or 0.02". It is clear and sunny now, and already almost as hot as our high temperature for all of yesterday, so I guess the cool weather party is all over.

I didn't get to spend as much time with the GeoSeeds catalog as I wanted yesterdaybut I was on the hunt for green flowers because I want to plant my cutting garden next year as a rainbow garden....and I need green flowers for the green bed that will be a part of the rainbow garden. It took me all day to compile a list of green flowers I like and can find seed for, and now the list is so long that I need to either cut it down shorter, which is the most likely option, or allocate two raised beds instead of one to the green flowers. When I have planted a rainbow garden in the past, it was a blend of veggies, herbs and flowers and I had lots of green veggies, but it is more challenging to do it will green blooms.

Today I'm going to work on the blue list, which will be a lot easier as I already grow lots of blue plants, though they are not all confined to one bed. I'll just move most of them to whatever bed is going to be next year's blue bed.

A rainbow garden, for those of you who haven't grown one, arranges all the flowers (or edibles) in the colors of the rainbow, in the same order that those colors appear in the rainbow. I grew all my veggies, flowers and herbs in a rainbow garden type arrangement for 6 or 7 consecutive years in the early 2000s. It was fun, and I think the grandkids will enjoy having a cutting garden next year grown rainbow garden style.

Dawn
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
You can get a glass cutting drill bit that will make drainage holes in ceramics. 6 piece set at Harbor freight for $10. I had no idea they made mineral tubs in ceramic. Alternatively, put drainage material in the bottom and use cloth pots inside it. Cloth pots dry out so quickly I like to put them in another pot that holds water. Gotta go.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
Ron is at the dentist. I just bought collards, broccoli and lettuce plants at Lowes. They needed to water. If you want them from Owasso, hurry, they may not survive the afternoon.

I put Brussels sprouts seeds in the ground yesterday. We'll see what happens. I haven't gotten Long Island Improved seeds yet, so they won't go in this year. I used the last of my jade cross seeds from 2015.

Also picked a bunch of peppers. I think I had 2 Ashe county pimentos, one "tomato" pimento (purchased) and maybe one other pimento that I started from seed. There is a jalapeno out there, but that is Ron's job to harvest. I also have a purchased elephant ear pepper going. I quit growing bells when I discovered pimentos produced like crazy and had thick walls. I think I started seeds for a few bells, but none survived.

Lime green nicotiana Dawn. One of the few green flowers that intrigues me. I actually bought seeds for Lemon tree because it was so cool looking. I haven't grown it yet.

I bought some mums to put in the pots out front where the pansies have died. I will add pansies when they're available.

I guess I should go pick up Ron. It's so hot when you have to wear "public" clothes.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Amy, I've got Lime Green and Lemontree nicotianas on my list, and a few others. I have grown all the green ones before and like them, but I have a heck of a time with voles eating nicotiana roots. I don't know why. I wish I had the youth and energy to dig out all our raised beds and put down quarter-inch hardware cloth, but I do not, so I'll just have to plant and take my chances. I have noticed that the voles are less likely to bother any bed bordered in garlic, chives or daffodils, so maybe the solution for some of the raised beds would be to plant a living border of any of the above along/just inside of the wooden border that comprises each raised bed. That should would be a lot of garlic, chives and daffs though. Or, maybe I just could use the really small miniature narcissus bulbs but I'd sure have to buy hundreds, or maybe thousands, of them. It just seems easier to plant and take my chances, unfortunately. Life would be a lot easier if the voles would stay down in the woodland where they belong and leave my garden alone.

I did find a new zinnia variety I've never grown before, and it is a new hybrid described as a bright green, so of course I have to have it. I've grown Envy many times and like it much more than Benary's Green because Envy produces better in the heat and the flowers do not turn brown as easily as Benary's Green. Maybe this new one, which is called Magna Pistachio will be even better than Envy. Oddly, I had no problem finding green flowers---it is now actually a matter of cutting the very long list of them down to a reasonable number. In the past, when I had a rainbow garden, I was just happy to have nicotiana, zinnia, lisianthus, celosia & amaranth, rudbeckia, Japonia variegated corn, sunflower (Jade) and gladiolus in green, but this year I have a lot more than that on my list for 2020 and I know I do not have the space to grow them all. Making lists is easy---the hard part is cutting them down to a reasonable level. Of course, all I have to do is price my current list, see the total $$$ amount, be thoroughly horrified by it, and then go cut 75% of the seeds off the list. Works for me!

I didn't even work on the blue flower list. Instead, I went to the garden and deadheaded a bit, though it was awfully muddy and there were lots of mosquitoes....I came back to the house with zinnias in white, pink, orange, coral and red zinnias, red and pale yellow celosia plumosa, tithonia, and chives and then made three flower arrangements to enjoy from all those, and that prevented me from drooling my way through the garden catalog all afternoon long.

It got hotter than expected. (sigh) I hate it when we are expecting a specific break in the weather and get even warmer than that. By the middle of next week, if not sooner, we're supposed to be back in the mid-90s. I do not even want to go there, but I guess it is a foolish pipe dream to think we'd day in the 80s from the point forward. We barely stayed in the 80s today (89) on what was supposed to be a cooler day, so I'm not really looking forward to the next few. On the other hand, I think I'm pretty much through watering the garden for this year so that's exciting. From this point forward, rainfall alone ought to be enough.

I need to go outside and see if I can find the feral mama cat and kittens and feed them. Then I have an hour before the season finale of Yellowstone comes on, so maybe I can work on the blue flower list during that hour. I have a lot of perennial blue flowers in the form of various salvias in my garden, and larkspur that reseeds every year, so it should be easy to fill out the blue list pretty quickly.

Dawn
HU-939938193
4 years ago
I went to the Norman Atwoods earlier on in August and asked about vegetable plants for the fall and they said that they don't get in vegetable plants for the fall. Only in the spring.Home Depot said they won't have anything like that before the end of August and then there won't be a whole lot of it.

I'd like to get some brussel sprout plants for the fall if I can find them. I also do cabbage , brocolli

and califlower. Last fall I got some brussel sprouts from the Norman Walmart but the rabbits got them. If I get any this time I'm going to put some chicken wire cages around them to keep the rabbits out of it.

I try to follow the OSU planting guide for fall gardening but I just can't find the plants at the right time. And it's too HOT! According to OSU, brussel spouts should be planted by Aug 15 so I'm already a little late. I even tried to plant some fall sweet corn by July 15 and it either didn't come up or the grasshoppers took it if it did.

okmulgee boy
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
I love you guys!
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Okmulgee boy, It is the same here. If you do not raise your own fall transplants from seed, you are at the mercy of whenever they arrive in local big box stores or nurseries. Because I'm very, very far south in OK (the Red River is 1/4 mile from our back property line (west), though it dips down another 8 or 9 miles to our south), we stay very hot through the end of September and the stores here don't get many cool-season plants until sometime in September. The hotter it stays, the later the plants are to arrive, so I suspect the stores keep telling the wholesale nurseries to hold the plants at their facility a little bit longer....a little bit longer.....a little bit longer, until it is almost too late to plant them. Some years, the cool-season transplants really don't arrive until October which is a problem because it doesn't allow them much time to settle in before the first freeze in November. I've had the best luck with Home Depot, down in Gainesville TX, as far as them having good, viable transplants, but theirs usually are pretty late as well. I haven't had much luck finding good fall transplants at TSC, Atwood's, Wal-Mart or Lowe's in recent years.

It strikes me as odd that I can go to Hobby Lobby right now and buy fake pumpkins, winter squash, gourds, autumn flowers like mums, sprays of autumn leaves, phony acorns of all sizes, etc., to do fall decorating, but cannot find living autumn type plants yet. This might explain why some of my friends have fake silk mums on their porches and in their window boxes---they are ready to decorate now, and the weather and stores aren't ready yet for them to do that with living plant material.

I did notice that our oak trees are dropping tons of acorns already. Guess I could rake up all those and have a bucket of acorns on the porch, but I suspect the squirrels would steal them all. so why bother. Some people have reported pecan trees aborting green pecans, but the acorns I'm seeing look mature, though I haven't cracked any open to check for sure.

If you can find brussels sprouts plants in Sept or Oct, I think they'll do fine for you. A friend of ours here sowed brussels sprouts seeds too late one spring and they never sprouted, likely because the soil already was too warm for them. We assumed they rotted and forgot about them. Around late October, he noticed brussels sprouts plants coming up in his garden, so the seeds had not rotted. By late December or early January, he and his dad were harvesting and eating brussels sprouts, and they had them all winter long. Now, everything you read would lead you to believe he couldn't be getting a harvest in December from brussels sprouts plants that sprouted pretty late in October, but he did. I imagine that year we probably had the perfect autumn/winter conditions for the brussels sprouts. If only we all were so lucky every year.

Nancy, We love you too! Are you still suffering from poor service/lack of service from your Internet Service Provider? If so, I hope things improve soon.

Y'all, I am looking at the calendar in total shock. Everyone kept talking about Labor Day, and I kept wondering what the rush was because Labor Day still is so-o-o-o far away. Only, it isn't. It's Monday! Where has my brain been all month? How can it already be almost September? I am not ready for this. There's a part of me that feels blindsided by the impending arrival of September. Tim told me last night he is excited about Labor Day weekend because it means he can mow ALL WEEKEND LONG. Wow. He needs an intervention. This is not how I'd choose to spend Labor Day weekend...at all. lol lol lol. How can you help somebody who is so obsessed with mowing? Relax, this is normal for him, but it still sort of drives me up the wall, and we've been married 36 years, as of this coming Labor Day. I've never understood his lawn obsession, but at least I've broken him of using chemicals on it and accepting that a mixed lawn of grass, clover and wildflowers is acceptable and better than an artificially maintained lawn that is a perfect green carpet of nothing but Tif bermuda or something similar. Our grass is so wet and heavy with moisture that I don't know if his lawn-mowing dreams will come true. We also still have a lot of big standing puddles of water everywhere.

It is hot, hot, hot here today, currently 92 degrees with an heat index of 100, though the H X has been as high as 102 already. I was hoping we would stay cooler longer. This is supposed to be the cool week, and then the heat returns next week. That makes me dread next week.

Have a good day, everyone.

Dawn
hazelinok
4 years ago
Norman is at 92 right now too, Dawn, and heat index of 103.

Two days ago, the next few days all showed to be highs in the 80's. It's mostly back to highs in the 90's now...and Marietta is showing a bit cooler next week than Norman.

Tuesday was so delightful...so fall-like.

Hi, Nancy, love you too!

Okmulgee Boy, which Norman Walmart had brussels sprouts last year?

We have mums everywhere...at all the stores, but I'll wait until closer to October to purchase any.

Tom was making a plan (on paper) for my hinged hoop. Yay! He had a 4 day weekend so hopefully he will start on it.

In the garden it's lots of pumpkin vines. They are all over my peppers and starting to climb the pole bean trellis. For some reason they like everyone else's trellis better than their cages. I really can't walk in the garden now without stepping on pumpkin vines.

The peas in the back garden with poor soil look sickly and stunted. One of the beds is empty now so I started dumping chicken poo on it. Do y'all think it will be okay by March, when I'll likely start putting plants back there? Or will the chicken manure still be too hot?
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Hahaha! I got sidetracked. Had started the post, then got involved with Blue Bloods. :) Garry binge-watched a long time ago, but was watching it over again. I can't keep up with his binges, so now I'm watching it by myself in here (the woman cave). I'm really enjoying it.

Below. . . left is Amy's Korean Kudzu, and in the foreground the Seminoles have busted loose from their cage. I believe the Kudzu is ahead at this point. I have three cucumber plants, but only one is producing. However, one producing one is plenty. I'm not canning any, and it's providing nicely for us. Same with the kudzu squash. The new tomato plants and yard beans are looking good. I like this spring and fall gardening!

I'll get spinach in soon. And cilantro a bit later.

Your Seminoles must be a week or two earlier than mine, HJ. Mine are just beginning to produce squash/pumpkins. And me too. I'm either walking on cucumber vines or squash vines, wherever I step.

The internet issues were resolved, Dawn--down twice in 1 week. But at least I was glad to see it was overall outages, and not just me. :)

I was trying to mow today, but our weather was same as yours, Dawn, and I wimped out after getting about half of it done. I'll have to finish tomorrow.

I had the same exact experience with Labor Day that you did. A few days ago, saw friends post a "Labor Day party" post and I was thinking how very prepared they were, posting it so far in advance. Duh. AND LOL about Tim. That is NUTS!

I got a good laugh out of your Public Clothes comment, Amy. And speaking of, have to go put some public clothes on to go to a grandson's football game. We're taking umbrellas and water.

Finally, GDW put the Bimini boat cover on the boat so we can have some shade. The water is FINALLY almost low enough to be able to launch. Still not normal, but at least doable.

Well, that's it from here for now.
HU-939938193
4 years ago
Hazelinok, the West Walmart by the interstate I-35 https://www.walmart.com/store/212/norman-ok/details ,.

They had some Brussel sprout plants last fall , I think it was early Sept as I recall. They also had some cabbage , Brocolli, and a little Califlower. They didn't have a lot of it. Some stores don't even bother to get in cool season vegetable plants for the fall cause they think they won't sell.

I guess there's not a lot of people that try to do a fall garden. It is tricky to do when because of the heat , and watering and shading and the bugs ,etc.even for me cause my garden is in Okmulgee and my day job is in Norman. So I drive back and forth every weekend. Been doing it for 30 some odd years now.

Okiedawn , I would try to grow my own transplants but I'm not that good at it mainly because I don't have time.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Look at this beauty.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Okmulgee Boy, that's quite a drive to work every day!

I will start checking all stores for cool season plants. I did start more greens this week and put them under a grow light. We should have planned our remodel better and added more outlets in the utility room. The grow light outlet is currently being used for fans. Our dogs sleep in the utility room and they are spoiled and get fans. I had to drag a cord from the other side of the room to plug into the light. I've really got to rethink this. After a light went haywire last year, I'm afraid to leave the house with the grow lights on, BUT it's probably not the best situation for the dogs to not get darkness at night while they are sleeping.

We might have gotten a ton of rain at our house. It poured at work this morning. Tom and Ethan (who both have the day off) was supposed to move concrete from where we tore out the dog yard to a neighbors' property who is trying to fill in something--maybe an old inground pool. They got out of outdoor chores today. I'm sure they are not disappointed. Tom did text and say the baby chicks' pen is flooded...so I'll deal with that when I get home, I guess. We are supposed to go out for dinner tonight with friends.

Did anyone else get rain?
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Jennifer, My 7-day forecast has been fluctuating back and forth so much that I don't know which one to believe. Currently they have us in the lower 90s for highs, which sounds good...but that was sort of our forecast for yesterday and we went hotter and had a heat index of 108, so I don't know if I can trust even the lower 90s. It is aggravating. Today, though, was the bomb! They raised our chance of rain for today to 40% but the 7-Day QPF still showed us in the 0.01-0.10" category, so I wasn't really expecting much. Then, the cold front came through, the skies broke open, it got as dark as night in the middle of the day (I couldn't even see the rain or the hummingbird feeders hanging 6' from my front window) and poured and poured down rain----2.7" of it. Best of all, we dropped from the mid-70s to 68 degrees when the front came through and stayed there until the sun finally came out around 5 pm. Any day that we can stay in the 60s most of the day in August is a really good day. Now, I know we'll probably pay a price for all this rainfall, and likely it will be in the form of really high heat indices but it is hard to be unhappy about the kind of rain we received today. Unfortunately, it brought strong winds and lots of my plants are flattened and lying on the ground. I'll look at them tomorrow to see if they are going to stand back up on their own. Our county had the usual weather complications---some trees down, some power outages, internet and satellite TV knocked out for a few hours, some flash flooding, etc., but who cares.....we got rain!

Of course, Tim's plans to mow all weekend long are dead in the water because our property is heavily waterlogged with huge puddles everywhere. There's no sense in wearing anything but water shoes, flip flops or boots outside because your feet are going to be soaked up to your ankles in 3 seconds. The chickens got tired of wet feet and sat on the porch steps for a long time after the rain ended, and the cats and dogs weren't any happier about the rain than the chickens were. I'm pretty sure there will be no mowing of lawn tomorrow because I think the riding mower, or even the push mower, would sink into wet clay and get stuck. We'll see how much it dries out by Sunday or Monday.

Since I was totally stuck indoors all day, all I could do once the darkness passed was watch the hummingbirds fighting over the feeders. I think a lot of that nonsense they were engaging in designed was just to stay under the porch roof and out of the rain, which is fine. Oh,and I read the Cat 6 blog and watched TWC to see what's going on with Hurricane Dorian since Tim has cousins and one aunt and uncle in Florida.

I think your bed will be fine by March if you go ahead and dump the chicken poo on it now so it has all winter to break down.

Pumpkins and the vining types of winter squash/Korean summer squash go wherever they want and I mostly just let them because fighting them is too hard.

Nancy, I'm glad the internet issues our resolved. When ours goes out, it almost always is weather-related, and it rarely goes out like it used to back when we had line-of-sight internet because the trees would interfere in that line-of-sight transmission. Now that the new transmission tower near us doesn't require line of sight all we have to do is roughly aim the received towards the tower (no precision needed any more) and we have service. When the roofers re-roofed our house a few weeks ago, they took down the receiver, shingled that area, put the receiver back and we hardly had any interruption in service at all.

I'm not ready for football season to start and, yet, here it is! If only the weather, not counting tonight's weather, were feeling more like football weather.

Amy, Public clothes! Ha! I thought I was the only one who has public clothing and private clothing. It takes a lot these days to get me to change out of my comfy private clothes and put on public clothes and go anywhere. I'm perfectly content to stay home and be more comfortable most of the time.

Okmulgeeboy, That is a long commute. My husband makes a long commute from here (Love County) to Dallas to work and has been doing it since we moved here in 1999. For a few years, he carpooled with one of his coworkers who also lived here then, and that made it somewhat less tedious. He's used to it, though, and says he can get from DFW Airport to our house almost as quickly nowadays as he could get from DFW AIrport to the west side of Ft Worth when we lived there because the traffic down there in Fort Worth is so bad, and once he hits I-35 headed north, he never really has to stop so he makes good time.

I understand about starting seedlings. They are very time-consuming.

Jennifer, I hope y'all got enough rain today but not too much. I discussed our rain above so won't repeat it. It is so good to get rain, and it came in the nick of time. Believe it or not, yesterday I saw new cracks in the clay ground down near the gate, just days after the big old cracks had closed up. Surely today's rain took care of those new tiny cracks.

I left the walk-in garage door open so mama feral cat could move her babies inside out of the rain, and she did. They look like they are about 3 weeks old at the most and they are extremely skittish---they act like they'll die if Tim or I lay eyes on them, so they hide the instant they hear us, see us or smell us. The difference between now and a few days ago is that this time she decided that she and the babies would stay indoors and not go back out this evening when the sun came back out. Maybe this is the first step to being able to see them, pet them and start to tame them.

We don't have any grandchildren here this weekend. I think I'll be able to sleep in tomorrow morning! Woo hoo. I never sleep in.

Dawn
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
I stopped by Stringers and they said it would be a couple more weeks before they got in any fall veggie starts. I ended up getting 6 Green Magic broccoli starts and 6 Early Dutch cabbage starts at HD. I was worried about how late Stringers was getting their stuff in. They did get me for $10 in clearance flower seeds, though.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
I called all over today looking for Brussels sprouts seedlings. Found none, and Southwood told me the same thing, a couple of weeks after labor day. I put seeds in direct, but nothing has come up.

It was a great gardening day, though. Put in the collards and broccoli I got from Lowes. Pulled some weeds, man I have definitely let THAT get out of hand. Despite all the rain we've had I couldn't pull up bermuda. More mulch next year.

I've got a "cover crop" of cosmos going on. I was going to pull them, but I decided to wait and let them shade the weeds until I'm ready to plant there.

How do I know when sorghum seeds are ready? I think they're close.

Ron had all his upper teeth pulled for dentures and he looks like Rocky after his first Apollo Creed fight. Black eyes, bruises around his mouth, swollen lips and face. Yesterday the black eyes were swollen, but they're better today. He won't be doing any mowing, and we need it. Called my son's lawn guy, but he hasn't contacted us.

Ron's sister lives in Orlando. She was not particularly worried about the hurricane. She does live in a 3rd floor apartment. I think being that far inland, last time the big inconvenience was no power.

Yeah, my dog knows when I'm going out...public clothes: long pants, shoes and support garment. She will get nervous and lovey. My son once told me when I put my hair up in a french roll I was a lady and when I wore it down I was a mommy. Guess I've been doing public vs private clothes a long time.

Everyone have a nice holiday.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Amy, I found brussels sprouts seedlings at TSC today! Do you have one near your?

Lowes and Walmart also had cool season plants...alongside the zucchini, tomatoes and peppers.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Our Walmart has all the cool-season plants in now. I wouldn't worry about brussels sprouts plants going in late as long as the first freeze doesn't hit when they've only been in the ground a couple of weeks and aren't well-established yet. Brussels sprouts can tolerate a lot of cold weather with little to no damage. I'm pretty certain they survived temperatures down to around 15-18 degrees in my winter garden in 2012/13.

Amy, I'm glad the cone of uncertainty has been shifting off shore for the last couple of days and hope it doesn't shift back again. I'm sitting here watching TWC this morning and Dorian now is a 175 mph (sustained wind speed) Cat 5. That bad boy is hitting The Bahamas now. I feel sorry for anyone who is vacationing there this week and either had to flee or might be hunkered down in a hotel riding out the storm. It looks like Florida likely will avoid a direct hit, but still might have storm surge and coastal flooding and that sort of stuff. I think it helps that it is a relatively small storm for a Cat 5.

To harvest sorghum seeds, treat them just like winter squash---take a seed and see if you can dent it with your fingernail. If you cannot dent it, it is ready. There may be too much moisture in them right now so that even if they look ready, their moisture level might be a touch too high. If so, just wait and they'll dry down a bit more while they sit there.

My whole garden is cover cropped in flowers....and crab grass. I might work on that crab grass tomorrow. We'll see. It is very wet and the last time it was this wet in there, I stood in the 7' deep flower border pulling weeds, and got chiggers. Lesson learned! If I am going to pull weeds this week while it all is so wet, I'll spray my clothing and shoes and my arms at least with a mosquito repellent. I also sat down in a pathway and pulled out weeds and got chiggers, so I had to do some research and found out that in very moist conditions, chiggers may be found in mulched beds and pathways. Another lesson learned. We're usually not so wet that this is an issue but my wood mulch is heavily water-soaked now.

Poor Ron! I am wishing him a speedy recovery.

I need to go start this week's thread.

Dawn
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago
Amy, I hope to plant brussel sprout plants also. I planted some in spring, but they did not make it through the summer. I dont like brussel sprouts but my daughter does, so if I can find some plants I will try again.

I Feel for Ron. Madge had all her teeth pulled a few years ago and the false one put right back in. It must be a "woman thing", she did not want anyone to see her without teeth. She looked like she had been in a fight and stayed hid for a week or so. Madge also does the private and public clothes thing. She is one of these people that wants to look good all the time. I dont know how she wound up with someone like me. I seldom go to town unless I need a part to repair something I am working on, and quite often If can call around and find the part I will send Madge, and I will be working on something else while she is gone. I thing she likes going to town for anything, or maybe just going.

I started brush hogging this morning and the lift quit working on the tractor, so I took that as a sign I should be doing something else. I am very tired from brush hogging most of yesterday. The last time I brush hogged that area I ran the tractor off into the creek. It really is a hard place to cut because it is low and wet and the weeds and berry vines get very thick and high. The fellow that I lease the place to is supposed to keep it cleaned up, but he is not doing a very good job of it.

I will be working in the garden today. I will try to make a place to plant a few cole crops, picking the okra and tying up the pepper plants.

I seldom have problems with bermuda grass. But I cam remember when I was young and sitting on a stool using a hand tool and a water hose to dig all the bermuda out, roots and all. After I started digging a ditch around my gardens and beds, the filling it with mulch I was able to stop the bermuda before it got into the garden.

August 2019 Week 4

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