June 2020, Week 1
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years ago
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dbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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January 2020, Week 1
Comments (56)Moni, Tim and I think the cedar trees started pollinating here about 4-6 weeks ago, which of course is so much earlier than usual, so maybe what I should have said is that they might be peaking now. There is a property next to us that has a solid couple of acres of them just about as thick as grass, and another that has probably 45 to 60 acres of them not quite as thick. While many of us try to cut them down and keep them to a minimum, many others just let them run wild and reseed all over, so we have a shocking number of cedar trees around here. I'd been trying to stay away from taking allergy medicine, but it is time to take it daily again. Amy, I know! I was so happy to be over the flu and feeling good again, and then here come the allergy symptoms after just a few days of feeling really good again. I even told Tim that it felt like cedar season had begun, but surely not....and I believe that was in late November. So, the next time we were out, we looked at the cedar trees and were stunned by have heavily laden they were with pollen. I am going to guess that the early autumn freeze followed by several periods of warm weather got the cedar trees going early again. I think this is the third year in a row cedar pollen season began early. I can't help thinking an early start to the pollen season is just another complication for anyone with allergies who also is dealing with the flu, a cold, bronchitis or pneumonia. There's also been a lot of strep throat going around. I suppose it is just that time of the year. Tim, Chris and Jana all are exposed to tons of sick people in the jobs on a daily basis, and I'm not, so usually I'll get sick once and that's it and they might get sick more often, but they also bounce back more quickly...especially Chris and Jana since they still are young and probably have more robust immune systems. This winter the kids have been perfectly healthy. Aurora had a cough for a couple of days, but it lasted no time at all, and Lillie hasn't been sick at all. Perhaps they are just old enough that they aren't bringing us every virus they encounter any more. I do remember what it is like with infants and toddlers who seem to have a runny nose more often than not at this time of the year. I did see that meme about seed buying and seed planting and it made me laugh out loud. The seed buying....that is the dream, right? The seed planting, though, that is the actual reality. Some gardeners live more in the dream and others live more in the reality, and most of us have some sort of combination of both the dream and the reality. I have really, really cut back on the seed buying, but still have a huge accumulation of tomato seeds from past years. With everything else, from veggies to herbs to flowers, I've stopped buying more than I can plant, and am trying harder to plant all the ones I buy. So, at least I'm partially reining in the seed madness. This is the first year I haven't ordered a single veggie or tomato seed, and most of the flowers I ordered were wildflower seeds. It feels odd to not have seed deliveries flooding in. Because of the landscaping projects, I suspect I'll be buying more plants than seeds this year, which is a big change. Kim, I'm glad you're getting all settled in and ready to have a big garden again. I know how much you've missed having that garden. Jennifer, Last year we bought the orange storage tubs for all the autumn, Halloween and Thanksgiving décor and I am so glad we did. It was so easy to spot them and pull them out immediately when it was time for autumn decorating and I was thrilled with not having to figure out which tub in the attic had which stuff in it. So, this year, we bit the bullet and invested in the red ones for the Christmas décor. I am so excited to have them, and they immediately made me feel more organized. We are going to recycle the previously used gray storage tubs to the garage to store Tim's junk. Did it hurt to go out and buy all these red storage tubs right after Christmas at full price? Of course it did, and the miser who lives inside my head kept telling me to wait another 2 or 3 weeks and they'd be on clearance, but I couldn't do it. I wanted the Christmas stuff taken down and put away promptly. I do consider them a worthwhile investment because they'll keep us organized and save time and frustration each year when it is time to bring out the holiday decorations. We even moved the 2 artificial Christmas trees from their old, torn, tattered and taped up original cardboard boxes to the red plastic tubs. I believe overall it will simplify our lives and decorating a lot. Rebecca, I'll see if Chris and Jana want to come to the Spring Fling. They both usually work on weekends though, so it is the luck of the draw, schedule-wise. You know, I am sure that back in the fall he sent me diagrams of his plans and I know what he intended to plant, but for the life of me I cannot think of any of it. I know they are more interested in blooming perennials than shrubs or trees, and they invested heavily in bulbs of all kinds, especially lily and daylily bulbs. What happened with those....Chris was visiting websites and making lists in May or June of all the lilies and daylilies he wanted for the yard. He'd show his lists and the photos to Jana and she'd add some others she liked. Then, at some point, he thought he read where they said that sales were closed for summer 2019 and they wouldn't ship again until fall 2019, so he ordered a ton of lilies and daylilies on sale, expecting them to ship in the fall. Well, somewhere there was a misunderstanding and tons of bulbs started arriving in the mail very soon thereafter, and they had nowhere to put them. So....molasses feed tubs to the rescue! We took him 6 or 8 of them, he filled them up with soil-less mix, packed in the bulbs close together since the tubs were just their temporary home, and the lilies and daylilies have been happily growing in them ever since. Now he is ready this month to move all those to the planting beds he created in his front yard this week. I believe that this week he planted his carefully selected mix of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, crocus, anemone, guinea hen flower, red fritillaria, and whatever else he ordered. Back to the lilies...Once he knew he could temporarily plant them in the molasses feed tubs, he went back and ordered more lilies and more daylilies on sale all summer long, so now he has amassed an army of lily and daylily bulbs, ready to move to the garden whenever he has time to transplant them. I'm not even sure he has room for all of them, much less anything else. It is possible that Chris is a gardening maniac who wants to plant it all, and we didn't even realize that before he bought the house. They have specific rose varieties picked to plant this spring, etc. They really did their planning last spring while it was raining every day, and that carried over into summer along with all the bulb purchases, and then this week they built and planted the first two beds. He said they've been stopping traffic because everyone in their neighborhood wants to see what they are doing to replace all the lawn grass they've torn out. Moni, To label our tubs, I tape clear plastic page protectors to them. Then, we can slide a sheet of paper inside the page protector on each tub and, if the contents change, we slide out that sheet of paper and slide in the new one. I write on the sheets of paper with black permanent markers. I'm the most organized I've ever been, but it has taken me 60 years to get to this point. Now, if only we could apply all the great household organization techniques to Tim's garage/shop, where junk just piles up. When we were younger, he knew where everything was from memory. It would amaze his friends. Some friend would stop by and say "do you have a whatever..." and he could go straight to a location and get it in the blink of an eye. Now he stands there and looks around and says "it is in here somewhere". Then he has to dig and paw through everything to find it. So, just like last year, cleaning out/cleaning up/reorganizing that building is on our To Do list, and I hope we have more success with it in 2020 than we did in 2019. Larry, I hate that the mud is slowing you down. It is the same here...mud everywhere. I hope you and Madge recover quickly from the bug you have. I'm hoping the mud dried up before spring. We cannot rent a sod cutter and remove all the Bermuda grass until our clay dries out more. Right now it is so wet that I fear the sod cutter would bog down in the wet soil and get stuck. It is hard to have just the right conditions for cutting sod....you need the soil a bit moist, and certainly not rock hard like it is in the summer, but you don't need it wet and soupy like it is right now. I look at all the mud and puddles and just roll my eyes because I'm so tired of looking at all of it. We need to get Elvis to come spread a new load of gravel on the driveway, but it is in the same boat---probably too wet to be workable at this point, so we need it a bit drier so his equipment doesn't bog down in the mud. The good news is there is no rain in our local forecast until at least next Thursday, but the bad news is that the ground dries up so slowly in the lower temperatures and less intense sunlight in the winter. Jennifer, I have no idea what lights we have because Tim chose them while I was elsewhere in the store doing something else, but I know he bought LEDs and they are nice and bright, but the lights themselves stay cooler than the other ones we had before and don't build up a lot of heat, and you can put more strings of them together since they use less energy. It is good to see your little Brussels Sprouts. Yay! I've been working on my tomato grow list and it is an unbearable form of torture to keep chopping it down smaller and smaller. I was aiming for only 6-8 varieties since they are going to be grown in containers, but I think that when I'm done with it, it will be closer to 12 varieties. There's just no way to make it any smaller if you factor in needing a couple of cherry types, (I could do only one cherry tomato plant, but how can you choose between SunGold and Black Cherry?), some blacks/purples, some pinks, some reds, at least one orange (Tim's favorite Nebraska Wedding) and a couple of late types for production in late summer and early autumn....then 10-12 varieties is the bare minimum. I think if I can cut the list to 10-12, then I will have done really well when you consider my usual long grow lists. Rotating all the nightshades out of the front garden this year and next as a form of crop rotation means growing no potatoes this year. I don't like growing tomatoes in feed tubs, and there's nowhere else to grow them where voles won't get them. (Voles will go up through the drainage holes in the feed tubs, but only for potatoes....not for tomatoes or peppers.) I am feeling iffy about using the back garden at all with all the other stuff we have going on because, realistically speaking, there's only so many hours in the day for planting and maintenance,, so there likely won't be many other veggies. Probably onions, cucumbers, beans and southern peas, maybe all squeezed into one raised bed in the front garden, with all the surrounding beds filled with flowers. That means that onions will be the only cool-season veggie, and I am okay with that. Oh, maybe kale and lettuce. See there....cutting back is impossibly hard. Anyhow, I'm going to finish my tomato grow list and post it in the next few minutes. I've been working on it all week. I went through the seed box, pulled out all the packets of tomato seed that I wanted to plant, then began editing that big pile down to an ever-increasingly smaller pile. I piled up the seed packets in groups by color, then had to choose our favorites from each color, and while doing that, I tried to take into consideration which ones produce early, mid-season and late, as well as which ones' flavor we absolutely, positively must have this year. Ultimately I put back tons of seed packets into the seed box, and ended up with the ones that made the final cut this morning. It is odd to not plant any paste tomatoes, but not planting them is essential if I am to have the year off from canning (still gonna make pickles though) so I can focus on the landscaping projects. If I had more self-discipline and didn't love all the various types of tomato flavor so much, I probably could cut the current tomato grow list in half, but I lack that self-discipline and enjoy the wide variety of flavors too much to do another round of cutting. As it is, we'll probably have twice as many tomatoes as we need for fresh eating, but then I can just whip up tomato-basil soup or fresh pasta sauce for dinner when too many tomatoes start piling up on the counter in the summer time. Dawn...See MoreFebruary 2020, Week 1
Comments (56)dbarron, The time is flying by, but I think it is because I'm keeping myself busy with other projects since gardening is a dud so far. Tim and I should put all these long-standing water puddles to use and open a fish hatchery, because we're never going to dry up ever again. We have more rain in our forecast for tonight, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. After that, we are supposed to have a few days with no rain. We'll see if that happens. Our soil is squishy and squishy is not good. The only flowers we have blooming here are wildflowers, but they are early. The little Spring Beauty flowers have been in bloom (at least on the occasional sunny day or sunny portion of a day) for about a week, so they are slightly behind the henbit and about six weeks or so later than the dandelions. Normally the Spring Beauties do not bloom this early, but once we had that 83-degree day last week, all the plants here declared that it is Spring and they are rushing headlong into blooming....probably too early and undoubtedly they will suffer from later cold weather. We walk past a big Burford Holly each time we walk in or out of the mudroom's exterior doorway. I only have to take a few steps south of the door to look at that holly up close, and so I did...and there's tiny flower buds all over the stems. They aren't nearly big enough to bloom yet, but their presence this early is a bit shocking. I want to knock them upside the head and remind them it is only early February, but they probably wouldn't listen. Larry, You have a lot going on in the garden considering how wet it has been. We have winter grass (poa annua) dying now, leaving bare patches where the dormant Bermuda grass is visible, because the poa annua cannot handle all the standing water. I wish the Bermuda grass would do the same, but it won't. Nancy, All the plants are so confused, and it alarms me. Most years when we get the really early blooms combined with the erratic temperatures, we get enough cold later on to freeze back the plants that have bloomed really early. It is different when we have a consistently warm winter....the early bloomers sometimes get away with it, but not in the yo-yo winters. Just in the last week our temperatures have gone from the low 80s here to the low 20s and back up into the low 60s. Most nights have been pretty darn cold, in the 20s, and with frost, so it doesn't matter if you have a lovely 60-degree afternoon as you're still likely to have a 20-something degree morning. It drives me crazy, and I'm guessing the plants don't love it either. I noticed poppy plants popping up in the front wildflower meadow. They must have been in the wildflower seed mix I sowed back in November...or October....or whenever it was. Normally the poppies don't pop up here until late March or early April, so it is odd to see them sprouting in early February. Everything is odd this year. I still have no veggie seeds sown indoors. Maybe Monday. I won't get it done any earlier because the grandkids are here and they are keeping me busy. I'm totally not in the mood to grow veggies this year---I wanted to focus almost 100% on renovating the landscape and just let the front veggie garden be mostly all wildflowers, but the rain is ruining those plans. You cannot rent a sod cutter and cut up remove sod that has saturated soil (and standing water), so we cannot start on that most important part of redoing the landscape and it is making me crazy. I'm wondering if it will stay too wet all Spring to work on the landscape. That really would drive me crazy. I may have to revise my plans and postpone the landscaping (and I am not happy about that prospect) until we dry out this summer, and just plant more veggies than intended in order to keep myself busy and out of trouble. I hate this rainy year already. Larry, I am planting tomatoes and peppers in containers this year, and will fill the bottom half of the containers with old half-rotted wood, chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs and compost....hügelkultur style. I'll then fill the top half of the containers with a good soil-less mix. I've been "consulting" with our son on his gardening all week...starting seeds, building raised beds, etc. I even picked up some supplies for him today while I was out grocery shopping because he was at work. It is fun watching him getting heavily into gardening. They have a new worm bin and are really getting into vermicomposting so the girls can learn how that works. He knows more than he thinks he knows because he always helped me with the garden when he was a kid, right up until the time he got his driver's license and decided he had better stuff to do. I think he fears he has forgotten everything he ever knew about gardening, but I can tell that he has not. The apple does not fall far from the tree.... It is late, I am awake and everyone else is asleep, so I'm going to go start next week's thread before I go to bed myself. Dawn...See MoreApril 2020, Week 1
Comments (70)HJ, I’m ok. Just busy and tired. Working and getting the garden in order. Work is stressful right now. Plus, a coworker‘s father is in hospice, and we don’t know when she will need to be out for an extended period of time. Did my mom’s grocery shopping at Reasor’s this morning. Most people were alone, wearing masks, and social distancing well. I can’t find Minute rice for her anywhere, but other than that, things were mostly stocked. I picked up a few things for me at the Walmart pickup. Part of it was potting mix, and I didn’t have to lift it. I can stay on budget better when I don’t go in. However, I need to go in Lowe’s tomorrow after work for clear lawn bags to wrap tomato cages in the next few nights. I thought I had more than I do. Unless white ones will work. I just need something to put over the tops of the cages, they’re already wrapped. I wrapped the cages to protect the little ones from the wind. Or do I need to cover the tops? Our lowest prediction is 30, but the 3 stations I watch are all over the place. I bought the potting mix mix for the lettuce bins, because the weather made my lettuce bolt and I felt the soil needed to be replaced. However, right now I need those bins to hold seedlings the next few nights. Funny how things work out. When this is over I’ll fill the bins with summer lettuce. I also raided mom’s house for old sheets, for more coverage if I need it. Lilies are too tall to cover. Should I cover the peony?...See MoreJune 2020, Week 2
Comments (57)That was hilarious, Larry. That one's in our playbook, too. Nope, GDW and I weren't raptured. We were out on the fishing boat. Figures. I'm amazingly UN-frustrated with everything this year. I think our potatoes are going to be a bust. I don't care. Which means that NEXT year, if anyone here is planting potatoes, it won't be me. Bumper crop of garlic. Some are enormous. I can pick Contender beans in another couple days; otherwise, just waiting. Heidi--I've never seen so many tomatoes on one plant. Amy! What's Ron making the compost bin out of?? Pictures! Suzanne called yesterday--the milkweed plugs from Monarch Watch arrived. I'll go over this evening to plant them. Where I'm going to plant 32 plugs. . . . that'll be a good trick. lol. I haven't been there in a few days, so it will be fun to see what the plants have been up to. We had so much fun fishing yesterday. Previously we hadn't been finding hardly any shad--hard to catch fish when you don't have bait. Thursday we were out for a while, but we didn't get out early enough, so it was hot and not that much fun. We rectified the situation yesterday--got out earlier, saw shad EVERYWHERE, and we caught 13 perfect-sized catfish in 2.5 hours. First successful fishing trip in 2 years. Actually only one of about 4-5 fishing trips in 2 years. I am so lazy today! I look around and don't see anything that HAS to be done! lol Guess I'll go pick the rest of the garlic and harvest some kale, do a walk-around the rest of the yard....See Moreluvncannin
3 years agodbarron
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3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
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3 years agoHU-422368488
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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3 years agoslowpoke_gardener
3 years agoHU-422368488
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3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoNancy Waggoner
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoNancy Waggoner
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3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
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3 years agolast modified: 3 years agodbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
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3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoNancy Waggoner
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3 years agohazelinok
3 years agodbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years agodbarron
3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agodbarron
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoslowpoke_gardener
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years ago
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