June 2020, Week 2

Okiedawn OK Zone 7

3 years ago

It is June and the weather is hot. It is, in fact, hotter than average. That's all we need to know, isn't it?

Here's the 8-14 day temperature outlook in case you want to look at it to see what the future holds:

8-14 Day Temperature Outlook

This is the one-month outlook:

One Month Outlook from Climate Prediction Center

So, it looks like what we have to look forward to for June is hotter-than-average weather and drier-than-average weather.

How do we survive the heat? For our gardens, it takes some combination of mulch, water hoses, soaker hoses, sprinklers and drip irrigation lines, I suppose. Maybe rain if any of it can find us. For us? Hydration, hats to shield our heads and necks, frequent breaks indoors to rest and cool down, maybe a strategically placed chair where you can sit in the shade, cool off, drink a cold drink and rest yourself in between rounds of gardening activity. If I have things I must do outdoors in this heat, I go out early in the day and late in the day and stay inside in the middle of the day. I do have a 'beach umbrella' I can set up in a bed so I can weed in the shade and that helps a lot.

Our garden is oddly quiet as far as pests are concerned. I've only seen a couple of stink bugs and none of the other unmentionable bugs (I don't want to say what they are for fear it will jinx us and they'll show up). There are some green lacewings and a ton of brown lacewings this year, so obviously we have something that is serving as a food source for those guys. It isn't that the garden isn't full of insects---it is very full, but apparently the good guys are taking care of the bad guys and I am glad. Mosquitoes still are the exception. There are lots of dragonflies and, of course, our beloved purple martins still around taking care of them, but 2020 has produced a bumper crop of mosquitoes so there's still far too many of them.

All the trumpet creeper vines are in bloom which is such a delight for the hummingbirds. I had to buy new bee guards for some of our hummingbird feeders yesterday, and am glad Atwood's sells the bee guards separately because they are fragile and easy to break while cleaning them, so we're always losing one here and there.

I was noticing yesterday how quickly the fields and roadsides are going from lush and green to that tawny brown of mid-summer and heat, though it certainly isn't even close to mid-summer yet. Partly this is the result of all the native cool-season grasses going to seed, but it also partly is due to the sudden onset of big heat. We're already seeing summer wildfires here in OK, especially in the areas that are already either Abnormally Dry or in one of the drought stages.

I haven't seen any hornworms around, but have seen one white-lined sphinx moth. They are my favorite hummingbird moth, and we have lots of the native plants they feed on here, so we always have more of their cats than either tomato hornworms cats or tobacco hornworm cats.

Our comfrey, which is seed-raised so not a sterile variety, has reseeded abundantly and is trying to take over the northwest corner of the garden. I'd probably be more worried about it than I am if we didn't have dewberries creeping out of the woodland and fighting to take over that same corner. I'm just letting the two of them slug it out, and I think the comfrey is going to win. It is a huge favorite of the many kinds of bees we have here, so it is hard for me to be too unhappy about how much it spreads. It has replaced tansy and lemon balm as the plant in our garden that is most likely to run wild. That's okay though. We never have bindweed pop up in that corner of the garden any more, which is just a huge bonus. I'd rather be pulling out and composting excess comfrey volunteers than excess bindweed plants.

The summer wildflowers are looking spectacular already, but I'm worried about how hard the heat will be on them. Even native plants really aren't ready for July heat in June.

I think we are going to go plant shopping today although I don't know if we'll see anything we want. Maybe we'll find a couple of heat loving plants that are calling our names and begging to come home with us so they can roast in the June heat and sunlight. It is too hot to do anything other than shop.

Have a great week everyone and stay cool and hydrated.

Dawn

Featured Answer

hazelinok

3 years ago

hailey, here’s pics of my onions.

nancy, I took pics of the kitchen garden too and tried to post them last night but it failed. I’ll. be back later. Wanna read what dawn and Jacob posted too later. Where’s HU?

ill explain more on the onions tonight.

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hazelinok
3 years ago

Nancy, a few of the kitchen garden.
hazelinok
3 years ago
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It rained on and off all day, though mostly drizzle and fog and mist, so I couldn't do anything outdoors. There was nothing I wanted to do indoors. So, we went to Gainesville "adventuring", just to see what was going on. There wasn't really anything much that we needed, though I wanted to get some sour cream and some ice cream if the stores had any. I was just thinking that if the coronavirus becomes too common around us, we'd just stay home but that hasn't happened yet, so I wanted to get out for a little while. Atwood's had a ton of plants outside, and I wanted to stay out and look at them, but it was raining, and it started raining harder, so I quashed that dream and went inside. I bought more vinegar for pickling and a few minor things, but nothing big. The major revelation was that the sell bacon grease (rendered bacon fat) as an official product! I think it was called Bacon Up, and they had small containers and really large ones. 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With family still down in the DFW metro, I follow the news from there closely, and panic buying made everything a big mess, especially at all the big box stores. Desperate metro shoppers were venturing into east Texas from the east side of Dallas, and driving as far as 80 miles without finding what they were looking for. Others drove north up to Sherman, and found a lot there, although I don't think Sherman residents were very pleased to have their stores invaded and raided. : ) Really, adventuring today just reinforced two things: I'm glad we prepared in advance and weren't out frantically searching for a lot of different products. We easily could live without sour cream and Blue Bell Ice Cream if we had to. And, there's lots of plants in the garden centers and the rain is keeping me from seeing them, enjoying them and maybe buying some. Then we came back home to the land of mud and puddles, and I started hating on the rain all over again. Our driveway is a river and more rain is coming. Tim picked up and then dropped a flat of tomato seedlings on the floor. I was not amused but resisted the urge to kill him. I always tell y'all that he is a plant killer---when he comes into the garden, plants die, which is why he stays out of the garden at last 99% of the time. Now he has expanded his killing to innocent seedlings growing under lights indoors. I scooped up everything and saved what I could. There is a reason I always start more than we'll need to plant. Despite the broken and dead seedlings, I should have enough to plant since I wasn't planning on having that many this year anyway. Marleigh, Your husband has my sympathy. I cannot imagine how frustrating all this panic shopping is for people in his industry right now. I saw lots of reports today of many grocery retailers cutting back their hours, even 24-hour stores closing down at night, to allow employees to clean, disinfect and restock and I think that's a great idea. I hope it makes the situation more manageable for the store employees. Here's your book at the website of used book reseller, half price books online: How To Cook A Wolf Larry, Your nutrients do look high, but your soil pH is great. I hate soil tests. Trying to decipher them makes my eyes cross and my brain explode, so I haven't had one done in years. I figure if something is deficient in my soil, I'll be able to see signs in how the plants do or don't perform, and the plants I grow look fine each year and produce well so I just don't worry about it. Your area is like mine---high in minerals. That is the one good thing about clay soil---we are having to scramble and add various nutrients to the soil. Nancy, Are your freezers full of a lot of fish? (grin) That would be my guess. Our freezers are so full after we crammed in the ice cream that we cannot buy another single thing that needs to be in the freezer, but we will eat well without shopping while the coronavirus rolls through the region and makes going out increasingly risky. I did think twice about not going to Gainesville today, but I think this could be our last good weekend to be out rather fearlessly, so wanted to do it. The whole time we were out, I never heard a single cough in any store except in Wal-Mart where one woman was hacking up a lung just outside the lady's room, near the water fountain. Her coughing was so hard and painful it scared me for her. I hope she isn't walking around in public with pneumonia or bronchitis. The cases of coronavirus in the DFW metro are rapidly expanding although I haven't seen reports of any deaths from it yet, as they are similarly expanding in various other major Texas cities, so I think we'll avoid Texas after this weekend and just go north to Ardmore. Tiny is such a garden cat! I used to grow valerian for our cats, but it was such a garden thug that I really didn't want it in the garden and eventually dug it out. Sometimes a volunteer valerian plant still pops up in the yard outside the garden. Valerian has a pheromone that affects some cats the same way that catnip does, and our cats seemed pretty fond of it. They'd walk on it, lie on it, roll on it, etc. just as they did with catnip. Graham crackers with milk was a favorite childhood snack of mine too, and one I still enjoy occasionally as an adult. Rebecca, I am glad you grounded your mom. I'd be doing the same if my mom were still here. I worry about you being around all the sick people that come into the store, so please take good care of yourself too. I've never had anything from High Mowing Seeds that didn't sprout, but I've also not grown zinnias as winter-sown seeds or started them this early since they are true heat lovers. 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While the fruit tree blooms are fading as tiny fruit begin to appear on the trees, the native redbuds are blooming everywhere around us now, and a couple of days ago the first Indian Paintbrush in our wildflower meadow began blooming. While both of these plants will jump the gun and bloom before the end of the freezing weather, they usually don't get too terribly far ahead of the weather either, so seeing the paintbrush blooms made me think that maybe the cold weather is behind us now. Oddly, the redbuds are blooming just about right on time, and not a month early like the fruit trees were. It is interesting that they didn't jump the gun and bloom far too early. Look how much I wrote y'all! I practically wrote a book tonight. (grin) There's no one awake but me. The grandkids aren't here, the pets are asleep and Tim is upstairs, presumably asleep although his phone keeps ringing so I think he is half asleep and getting crisis calls from work. 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Jennifer, We have been having more fun than a barrel of monkeys with the girls. It has been the most wonderful 3 days, and today will be the fourth. Then, everything gets back to normal again as the work week/school week start up again tomorrow, but at least we got to spend some time together. The girls have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. Tim and I have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. See a trend there? lol. Having their youthful exuberance around just seems to infuse the house (and us) with more energy. When the girls get home, they are going to have a big surprise this afternoon and I'll tell y'all about it later. I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise by having one of them walk in and start reading over my shoulder. All of you who are looking for seed: buy what you can now, and save what seed you can save from open-pollinated varieties. 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In instant freak-out mode, I ran to the store and bought whatever tomato plants I could find. It was pretty late in the season, and I didn't have a lot of options, but I figured any tomatoes were better than no tomatoes. I did the same with pepper plants. Then, I came home, cut off the frozen plants at the soil level and planted new tomato plants in between the old, dead plants....so they alternated, dead plant, live plant, dead plant, live plant, etc. Lessons I learned: 1) It is good to not pull up dead plants by the roots because if they were old enough and well-rooted enough, they may resprout from the ground. My tomato and pepper plants both did, and because the root systems already were pretty large, they outgrew the newly purchased plants. 2) Any tomato variety you can find and buy is NOT better than nothing. We had a lot of hybrid varieties that produced reddish, roundish, baseball-sized looking things that claimed to be tomatoes. They had horrible texture and firmness (hard) and mealy flesh (yuck) and poor flavor. Their skin was tough. They were roughly the equivalent of grocery store tomatoes despite being grown in an organic home garden. Clearly they were bred for people who think any red round thing is a passable tomato and they weren't bred for flavor. They were bred for something else....and I suppose shelf life was that something else. To our picky palates that were used to eating a huge variety of open-pollinated tomatoes, those things were just horrible. They were fine, though, for making home-canned paste sauce or salsa because you add enough to those cooked products to make up for the poor flavor. Oh, and lesson number 3 was to never really trust the forecast, and to buy and use tons of frost blankets. I haven't lost a crop like that since then. Larry, I need to go for a long drive in the worst possible way. I think it would be great just to get out of our little world here and go somewhere, anywhere, for any reason at all. Tim doesn't feel the cabin fever burning like I do, likely because he "gets" to drive to work in Dallas 5 days a week, but I haven't left our little area in more than a month, not even to go to someplace a close as Sherman or Denton Texas, which are maybe 50-60 miles one-way, depending on where we're actually going in those cities. Maybe next weekend we'll do that because the girls and I have science experiments and other fun already planned for today. I'm pretty sure Tim is going to mow the lawn while he has the chance, if it isn't raining. The last time I looked, we had a 20% chance of rain for today, so I think the odds are that he'll get to mow. It was sad to realize it was Spring Fling day, but Tim and I had planned from the beginning to skip it so we wouldn't potentially carry Covid-19 germs from him, because of his work at an international airport, to y'all, so it wasn't that tough of a day for me....since I didn't expect to be able to attend it this year anyhow. There's always next year, so let's think positive and hope for the best. Kim, I'm glad your green babies are resprouting. I started my tomato seeds super late because we were continuously under water for months, and then Tim dropped a whole flat of them while they still were pretty small in the starter flat. Many of them lost their labels at that point, so now I truly have no idea what I have. I saved all the ones that were salvageable, potted them up, and have plants that are a decent size now but most have a ? on the label where the variety name ought to be. I hope when I plant them that I don't plant only cherry types. lol. Mine are ready to go into the garden except they aren't hardened off. I will start that today. I had started it a while back and they were up to 3 hours a day when the cold came back. Since I already had so many other flats of other plants outdoors that needed to be carried back indoors on the cold nights, I stopped carrying out those tomatoes and figured I'd just start over with hardening them off after the cold weather was done with us. So, I think the cold weather is done with us now, and I'll start hardening off the tomatoes again beginning today. The hardest part, though, is that we are staying mostly cloudy, so they are going to be hardened off more to cloudy/partly sunny weather than fully sunny weather. I bet you are having fun gardening with the kids and grandkids. I'd love to do that, but am very hesitant to have our granddaughters out in our garden with all the timber rattlers and copperheads that we have around here. I'd rather be out in their garden with them in their city yard where apparently, so far, there are no snakes. We'll go into our garden to look at everything, but I spend my whole time out there watching their feet to make sure they don't step on a snake. If there was such a thing as truly snake-proof fencing, I'd pay any price to have it so I could make our garden safe for the grandkids. I cannot imagine what your little man did to wear himself out enough that he needed 3 naps! I hope you enjoyed your 12-hour nap, especially since he gave you permission to take such a nice long nap. Rebecca, I'm glad your plants survived the cold snap. Thanks for the report on Lowe's. I'll continue to avoid it a while longer, though perhaps our country one wouldn't be as busy as one in the city. On the other hand, the Lowe's in Ardmore is the only one around for several counties. so people from some counties close to us (where there's a lot more coivd-19 cases than in our county) might be driving to it, so a person cannot just assume everyone there is safe to be around. When I'm finally able to step foot inside a big box store's nursery/garden center again, Tim's not going to be able to drag me out of there until I have a cart so loaded down with plants that I cannot squeeze in one more thing. Texas is trying to reopen stuff as early as next week, so I'll be watching their news to see if another round of new cases starts appearing 2 or 3 weeks after they reopen more stores and such. Jen, It sounds like the folks running your Lowe's had done a lot of preparation and planning and were ready to make safe shopping as little of an ordeal as possible. Kudos to them for that. 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My daughter-in-law works at the hospital in Ardmore, although not on the floor where they have Covid-19 case, if any, or even the suspected Covid-19 cases they're waiting for tests to clear. I worry about her but she's doing fine so far. Your poor daughter---my heart hurts for her too. She is too young to have to see all that she is seeing now. I cannot imagine being able to handle that when I was 20. The toilet paper thing is mind-boggling. We haven't had any trouble though. We shop at Costco, so as soon as I was aware of this virus, back when it was running through Wuhan rapidly in January, I started picking up an extra package of Costco's toilet paper here and there....maybe twice a month. I think I had 4 big packages of it stored away back when the panic buying/toilet paper drought set in. I gave one of them to our son and daughter-in-law for their family in March when the panic buying began because they couldn't find any then, and we still have plenty. 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Thanks, Jennifer. It has been sort of a tough week around here. You always hope and pray for the best for someone with cancer, as you know all too well yourself, but things just didn't work out for our friend. His sweet wife and family are hurting so much, and my heart goes out to them. For me, PA Dutch crookneck was not nearly as rampant of a grower as Seminole, but then not much else is. I have had some butternuts grow that rampantly, and many pumpkins that did so in the first 7 years here when I could grow any and every squash variety I wanted (and, boy howdy, did I!) before the squash bugs and squash vine borers found out garden. Congrats on ordering the tomato press. You'll love it! I don't have any special feeling about winter. I'd love a cold one, but we haven't had a good, cold, snowy one for so long that I have little expectation we'll have one now. I'd be happy if we did though. 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For a few hours we got all the lightning and thunder and not so much rain while they were flooding on the Texas side of the river from persistently heavy rain, but then the rain finally has shown up on our side of the river and now we have a little over 2" in the rain gauge, and about 1.75" of that is new this morning. It is such a relief to get the rain. I was looking at the wildflower meadow yesterday afternoon and thinking that all the flowers were drying out and surely would be going straight to seed soon. Hopefully today's rainfall will push them back into a blooming cycle and we'll get to enjoy the flowers a bit longer before they burn up in the heat. I also hope the rain heals the cracks in the soil. It is a relief to think I won't have to water the veggie garden this week. I sure do need to weed it though. I went outside a minute ago to check the rain gauge and there's already new fire ant mounds popping up above ground. One thing about the hot, dry weather is that the fire ants retreat back beneath the ground and we are not, at least, stepping in fire ant mounds. Larry, I hate when deer do that. In the last year in which they could jump the shorter garden fence and get into the garden, they ate literally every pumpkin, squash and okra plant (and most of many other types of veggies) right down to the ground, big prickly leaves and all. They devoured whole sunflower plants that already were 3 or 4' tall, though they never eat the native sunflowers that way. They drove me crazy. I lost most of the garden to them that year, but life in the garden returned to normal after we put up the taller fence. I've never regretted having that tall fence, though I surely hated spending all that money to put it up. Tim's best friend calls it my prison garden fence because it is so tall, but I don't care. It keeps the deer out, and if having a prison-like garden fence is the price I have to pay to be deer-free, then so be it. I wish I had a prison fence around our whole yard and I'm never going to stop wanting that tall fence to protect the plants in the yard. I have a husband who hates fences though, so we're in our 22nd year here and I don't have a tall yard fence yet. I'd settle for one six feet tall, but I'm sure the deer would jump it so it wouldn't do what we needed it to do. It really is going to need to be 8' tall and it will be...if I don't die before we ever get a taller fence done. Amy, Your garden looks great and your red-headed garden helper in his Little Tykes Cozy Coupe is just so adorable! Nancy, Some years I have a great garden all summer. Some years the heat and drought dry it up. The very first year that I surrendered, stopped watering, closed the garden gate and just walked away kind of broke my heart. At the same time, it felt good to not be out there fighting the drought and heat every day. You can get to the point where no matter how much water you pour onto the garden, you just cannot beat the weather conditions. I no longer regret surrendering to the weather if I think that is what I need to do. Last fall I bought landscaping plants for the landscape renovation that heavy rainfall prevented us from doing in the winter/spring months, so they've been tucked into a "nursery bed" (formerly known as raised veggie bed #1) in the garden and look so good. It has been nice to see how they grow, bloom and perform in our weather before I actually put them in their permanent beds up around the house. I was telling Tim yesterday that I'm tempted to go on a buying binge right now (because the stores near us just got huge new shipments of plants like they normally get in late May) and fill up more raised beds in the fenced garden with plants-in-waiting for the new landscape. If I did that, I could have everything growing and getting larger in nursery beds while awaiting the sod removal and soil prep in the permanent growing beds that will be needed when we take out the large mature hollies. We find ourselves in the peculiar situation where it is either much too wet or much too dry to rent a sod cutter and take out the Bermuda, and we never can catch the sod at just the right degree of soil moisture. I am watching this week's weather carefully, thinking we might get enough rain to soften the baked-hard-as-a-rock clay, and then maybe it could be dry enough by next weekend that we could rent a sod cutter. We are so lucky that we do not have Japanese beetles down here. I have seen maybe 4 or 5 total since we moved here as they apparently have not yet migrated this far south and west. I kill every single one that I see because I never want for them to have a chance to get a population established. I like all the summer squash, and the Korean ones ended up having better flavor than I expected. I still think yellow summer squash has its own special and unique flavor, but the Korean varieties all are close seconds. Honestly, when I cook them, no one call tell which is which in any given recipe. I like to grow yellow straightneck or crookneck early in the season before the pests hit. Once the pests arrive, I just yank them out. I can get locally grown yellow summer squash (I am sure it is not organic) all summer long at the grocery store/meat market we frequent in Muenster, TX. We were just there yesterday buying steaks for Father's Day and Lillie was entranced with the locally grown veggies which she said looked just as good as something from the garden---she could tell the special display of local veggies was different from the regular produce section and seemed excited to see it. At a young age she already is learning a love for gardening and appreciating that they are harvesting their own produce from their potager garden and bringing it into the kitchen to prepare it. I try not to hate on unruly plants that are butterfly host plants because at some points their caterpillars show up and do all the pruning needed and more. Our bronze fennel is getting awfully tall and wide, so hopefully the swallowtail cats show up soon and do their thing. Yesterday afternoon we were out with a To Do list and a desire to just get everything done and to get back home so Lillie could swim, so I didn't plant shop since it was our last day with her. I did notice there were tons of new plants in the HD garden center when we stopped there to get a new water filter for the refrigerator, and Lillie and I walked through it briefly while Tim was indoors getting the filter. They had all the usual hot weather type plants they normally get in the stores in late May, so I guess they are late this year, but better late than never. Tim and I agreed that today would be all about planting shopping and nothing but plant shopping, except for the fact that we plan to grill steaks for dinner. Even I cannot imagine I'd shop for plants the entire day, but maybe for a significant portion of it. Well, Mother Nature has a sense of humor, so we still are as dark as night here at almost 9 a.m. with intermittent heavy rainfall and thunderstorms. I am going plant shopping today even if I have to shop in the rain wearing muck boots, but now we need to wait for the flooding on the Texas side to end before we drive down to Gainesville. This year it seems like it always is something. Yesterday afternoon, after we got home it was endless wrecks and fire calls including two separate wrecks that shut down part of the Red River bridge, and Tim had to leave to go some of them but he didn't go to all of them because he wanted to spend time with our granddaughter while she was here. Yellowstone, the TV series, returns tonight and there is a marathon of last season's episodes running all day today, so I can get my fill of western drama if it rains most of the day. I'm determined to get my fill of plants too though. I have been patiently waiting to buy plants long enough. I intend to come home from shopping with the back of the SUV fully loaded with plants, which probably is Tim's greatest fear. lol. I need to get him hooked on watching Yellowstone. He'd love it if he ever could stop what he is working on long enough to watch it. Oh, and Covid-19 plagues Tim now at work and follows him home from work, metaphorically speaking. His first employee tested positive and went out sick with it about a week ago. Then a second, the work partner of the first, became ill at midweek, has been tested and is awaiting his test results. That was Thursday I think. Now, after a phone that wouldn't stop ringing yesterday, last night and this morning, Tim thinks his group is up to 7 potential cases. In fact, there are so many on a particular shift that the lieutenant in charge of that shift cancelled her vacation and came back to work, planning to vacation later in the summer instead. I admire her dedication. With every potential case you have, you have to do contact tracing to be ready to notify everyone at work if a person's test results come back positive, and that is time-consuming for the supervisors because they don't know every other employee a person might have made contact with on any given day, so there's a lot of research and investigation involve. I think I would have gone ahead and gone on vacation, but she also is conscious of the fact that she may have been exposed, might be an asymptomatic carrier, and doesn't want to travel and give it to anyone else. She's a really good person. This morning Tim said it might be as many as 9 cases. They will have to wait for test results, but it is hard to work around that many employees out on sick leave on one shift so they have challenges ahead I betcha I know how the plant shopping will go. We'll go to the store. I'll get a big metal nursery cart and Tim will be pulling it along behind us while I fill it up with plants. His phone will be ringing nonstop and finally I'll send him to the car to handle his calls while I plant shop. You know, if you are walking through a store and you're on your phone discussing who seems to have Covid-19 symptoms and who needs to go for testing, people look at you in fear and almost flee from your presence, so he is better off just going out and sitting in the vehicle where people cannot overhear his work-related conversations. I am almost positive this is exactly how our day will go! Dawn
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June 2020, Week 4
Q
Comments (53)
Jennifer, We don't usually buy tomatoes in any form except I'll buy organic sauce and organic paste if making/canning Annie's Salsa in large quantities because they are part of the recipe that makes it the best home-canned salsa ever. They give it a texture like popular purchased salsas and I never was truly happy with home-canned salsas until I found Annie's Salsa. Hopefully, my days of canning large quantities of salsa are behind me now because I burned out severely on that in the years I was making almost 300 jars per year so Tim could give them away at work at Christmas time. Now I just make it in small quantities for us, so the canned organic tomato sauce and paste I have in the pantry now will last us forever. I no longer make and can catsup, bar-b-q sauce, pizza sauce, etc. either, and I have no regrets. It was great doing that when I grew gazillions of tomatoes and had to use them up, but now that I grow significantly fewer, I no longer feel like I have to slave away in the kitchen all day every day during peak tomato season and I'm more than okay with that. Been there, done that, over it. lol. If I'm not making salsa, I don't use purchased tomato sauce or paste because it is just so easy to cook down preserved tomatoes and make pasta sauce or tomato soup from scratch. I was just looking at the tomatoes on the kitchen counter last night and thinking I might make La Madeleine's tomato-basil soup this weekend. It is a very popular soup from the bakery/sandwich shop of the same name in Fort Worth, and I suppose the recipe has been around since at least the 1980s. It is so simple to make and so tasty. The local Fort Worth Star Telegram food writers use to publish the recipe every year in the newspaper because people couldn't get enough of it and wanted to make their own. So, having raved about how good it is and how simple it is to prepare, here's the recipe: La Madeleine's Famous Tomato-Basil Soup A great way to have this soup and to use up more of those tomatoes piling up on the counter is to pair it with BLT sandwiches or wraps. We really don't like grocery store canned veggies either, much preferring frozen or fresh ones. In general I don't like the texture of home-canned vegetables either other than pickled products, so that is why I don't can veggies except for some tomato products. Every now and then, like maybe twice a year, we'll buy a can of Rotel tomatoes/peppers and Velveeta cheese because Tim is craving Rotel dip. We don't make it often enough that I think it is worth my time to can our own Rotel type peppers and tomatoes, but there are canning recipes out there for people who want to make their own. If we made our own Rotel style peppers and tomatoes I guess one batch would last us about 3 years. I do remember the mama cat and kittens. I don't know what it is like in your neighborhood, but in our rural area, the smart cats learn quickly to hide and stay put up at night. Those are the ones that survive. The ones, whether feral or pet cats, that stay outdoors at night tend to live short lives. I have tried and tried to tame the feral cats and kittens and get them to sleep in the garage at night and they just won't do it. The mama cats will keep the kittens in there for a few weeks, but being feral in nature, they abhor human things and don't like being closed up. In our area, it usually is the coons that get the cats. Coons are horrifically vicious killers, and I hate having them around. I'm sure bobcats and coyotes get their share of outdoor cats, but they don't openly hang out in your yard trying to catch them all that often. The coons will be out there every night, and sometimes during the day. Our pet cats are taught from Day 1 that they have to be indoors before dark. The yellow canna with orange speckles could be Yellow King Humbert or if it is a dwarf variety then maybe Golden Lucifer. There are a ton of cannas that look like that and nowadays they have been corrupted and lost their original names and often are sold under various other names, which makes it all so confusing. Nancy, I hope that Jerry makes a quick recovery. There are some upper respiratory infections that cats get that are highly contagious and spreads quickly among cat families. Most upper respiratory infections in cats are caused by either feline calcivirus or feline herpesvirus. Most healthy cats recover just fine but it can take them a way to get over it. Larry, Groundhogs are one thing we do not have this far south and I am glad. I hope yours doesn't do too much damage. When we visit Tim's family in PA, you see dead groundhogs along the rural roadways and highways everywhere just like you see dead armadillos alongside roads in TX and, to some extent, OK. I understand that groundhogs can be very destructive. Tim said they had to fight them hard to keep them out of their garden when he was a teenager. I'm getting ready to head out into the garden in just a minute in an effort to beat the heat/heat index. I thought I had a bad day yesterday with all the heat and such, and then Tim came home from work where they had had a bomb (unexploded) in a vehicle, long story, and he had the phone glued to his ear all night long as the ATF and FBI continued to deal with that car and a second bomb found as they were attempting to deal with the first one. It really had nothing to do with the airport, other than the fact that a stolen/recovered rental car from some other city was towed to one of the rental car lots there because it belonged to that rental car company and that set off the whole chain of events. Every time he got off the phone, it rang again....and his division doesn't even include the bomb squad, but his patrol officers were assisting. On a day like that, it is like his job is 24/7 and he cannot even enjoy a nice dinner at home followed by a walk with the dogs. In other news, y'all know that last year was horrible with so many of our neighbors in particular, and a handful of relatives, getting very sick and dying, one after another after another. All of 2019 has a big black cloud over it that we'll never forget. Now 2020 is trying to make a repeat of that year. Just last week we lost our next-door neighbor/friend after a brief battle with stage 4 cancer, and now another dear friend/neighbor is hospitalized with double pneumonia and the phone call we got last night said they were calling in all the family to come see her while they still can, so that sounds a bit ominous. We all have to enjoy our good health, y'all, and not take it for granted because as long as you have decent health, you have everything. In horrible local news, Covid-19 cases in the Texoma region comprised of counties along both sides of the river are up 50% this week over last week (but not in our specific county). We'll be staying home more than ever while this new surge is happening. In our part of Texoma, it seems worse on the Oklahoma side while a few counties further east and still in the Texoma region, it seems worse on the Texas side. Tim must love this pandemic (not really, I'm being silly) because it is keeping me at home so I'm not out gallivanting around spending money shopping. I'm glad we were able to get out and plant shop last weekend because I don't know if I'd want to do the same this week. Well, I might. At least plant shopping can be done outdoors where you're not confined in a enclosed air space, so I feel safer at an outside garden center, for example, than inside a grocery store. Dawn
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hazelinok
3 years ago
There's so much I want to respond to, but I'll just do my picture explanations tonight. I worked this morning and we had an early dinner with Mack's parents tonight. All good, but...

So, the onions were all standing upright EXCEPT the Red Creole until Thursday night when the wind came through (without rain unfortunately). Now, most have fallen over. I suppose I'll harvest them next weekend.

But, Hailey, you can see how they sit on top of the soil. I plant very shallow.

Kitchen Garden is KG.

The first KG picture is the dwarf tomatoes in the concrete block bed. The other bed (to the left) is the cherry tomatoes--several varieties. Then straight ahead is the Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck. It's a winter squash.

The next pic is the cherry tomatoes.

Then, the Pennsylvania Dutch squash with a few sad PEPH peas. (All the junk wood and tile is to keep Finn from using the beds as litterboxes). Behind that bed is 4 tomatoes and some basil. Juliet is there. She is the big one, of course.

Then the pepper plants. They are looking a little wilty in this picture. It was HOT yesterday and they were thirsty. They look better today with the slightly cooler temp and some hydration.

Then, the last pic is just some herbs and flowers in the corner of the garden. The Roman Chamomile is struggling. The one in the ground in another area is doing well, though. It all looks prettier in person--to me. And this garden is a work in progress. Tom priced how much it would cost to fence it the way I want, but I'm in no hurry. I haven't completed the inside just yet. I have a few adjustments to make to it...especially with the new Survivalist Garden.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago

will try a picture again.

My garden is a long ways behind all of your gardens, but it has been a bad year for me.

This is the south end of the south garden. All you can see is my damaged onions, sweet potatoes and beans. Behind the beans are 8 cantaloupe and 8 butternut, that were planted today.

I am trying to learn to post a picture from my computer, and not doing very well at it.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years ago
The jury is still out on the freezer on the bottom. A friend of mine had one years ago, and she loved it. Ron and Trav brought the fridge in and left me to put the food in it while they took our old one to my daughter. The fridge part is ok, but I'm not crazy about the shelves, especially on the door. I tried to put the freezer stuff in and I had an apple crate and a half left over. We always put little stuff on the door and I had baskets to organize things. Ron was able to tetrus things in, but no baskets. The dividers are hard to move. The other thing is, when you open the "drawer" the ice is on a second drawer you have to pull out. There is no grab some ice quick about it. On the other hand it seems to stay sufficiently cool. I didn't want ice or water in the door. The freezer drawers are wire baskets. This is a whirlpool, there is a GE just like it, but it's drawers are plastic. When my friend had hers...45... years it was just a big deep drawer. We will make it work. The other problem is the door opens the wrong way. I know it can be changed, but Ron is resisting because he says the last time he did that the door was never the same. I think he'll get pissed one day and change it.

I mentioned on Facebook we put all the fabric pots in a kiddie pool yesterday. He's decided to put the pools on pallets, so he moved everything this morning, is mowing and will put the pallets down. He hopes it will make it easier to keep the grass controlled around them.

XOXO
luvncannin
3 years ago
All is well over here. The heat is sickening. I am letting snow peas go to seed and that pot looks pitiful but everything else looks great. Peas are growing so fast I swear I can see the growth. Melons are right behind them. The soil is pure sand so I will probably need to fertilize at some point.

garden at my daughters is amazing. The soil is so good I haven’t had to fertilize. I planted a bunch of herbs and more roselle last week. And some more Chinese red noodle beans. Supposedly they can really take the heat. I watched a video on what to plant in June from baker creek and they were mentioned As a heat lover. I lost my red okra I just bought. I will find it today. I emptied the car into the house. Picture the size of your bedroom or smaller.

i have been getting free lumber from my brother he’s building a house. I have enough to all my projects and then some.

so my messy house is on the radar today and I have to tear my wall open because...... I am getting a window put in.

i can not wait. I will have light in the cave. I found 2 windows on the side of road yesterday. I may use one of those. they are 45x45. Quite a bit bigger than the one I bought.

i need a trailer for all the scavenging I do.

I wish we would get a little break from this heat
Marleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years ago
Does anyone have a fertilizer you’d recommend for when tomatoes are ripening? I have tons of fruit but they are taking a long time to change color. I usually fertilize with fish emulsion, but I’d love to hear about other options if they help!

Other than this blasted heat, everything is doing well. I put almost the last of the peas in the freezer today, and harvested my arugula seeds yesterday. My cucumbers, melons, and squash are finally starting to take off, and whatever beans the grasshoppers haven’t eaten are pumping out blossoms. Going to start some of my fall transplants this week, and I’m rooting a few of my large suckers for late tomato plantings. I’ve been watering a bit in the mornings, mostly around the edges of the raised beds where things dry out faster, but even with the heat the mulch is really keeping the soil nice and moist.

I have a hydrangea cutting I rooted this spring that is really ready to be planted, but I’m going to wait until Wednesday when it’s supposed to cool off 10°+ for us. I have some minor weeding that I’ll probably also put off until then, and a couple of late eggplants that I started to replace the cutworm decimation. Hopefully they’ll produce despite how late they’re going in. 🤞🏻

—Marleigh
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Marleigh, did the hydrangea root easily? I haven't tried, but need to for a friend who is moving and wants to take cuttings of her hydrangeas.

Dawn had recommended Espoma's Tomato Tone, so that's what I've been using the past couple years. (3-4-6) I know she also cautioned about not giving the tomatoes too much nitrogen, or all we'd see is vegetation growth, not fruiting. I'm sure she'll check in and comment for you.

I also took cuttings and am currently letting those grow.

Thanks for feedback, Amy. Keep us posted.

dbarron. . . lol point taken. Somehow I can't think long-term nowadays. Like so many others who are getting older, I can't see taking care of this place 10 years from now.

Kim--what a blessing all that lumber must be. Excellent. About the window(s). Can you put it in yourself? So impressive.

And, Larry--I think your onions look good! What's the damage? In fact, think all your stuff looks good. I planted a lot of things late (including onions). I'm not expecting much from them--but will be glad to have them no matter what size they are. If they're not big enough to suit me, I'll dice and freeze like I did 2 years ago.

Sometimes it's no problem at all loading photos here. Sometimes can't load one to save my sould.

HJ, thank you for posting pictures of your beds and walkways! I wanted an idea for what we're going to do at the school. Did you put cardboard down under the wood chips?
Marleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years ago
Nancy—Yes, I have found them to be very easy to propagate! I take greenwood cuttings in the spring (you can do it in winter too, but I haven‘t tried), strip off all but the last 2-3 sets of leaves, dip it in rooting hormone, and set it in sterile seedling mix under lights indoors. If the leaves are large, I cut them in half to prevent stress. I have lost a couple that didn’t take, but more are successful than not. I’m not sure of the variety because it came with my parents’ house, but I know it’s a macrophylla with gorgeous, deep purple-blue blooms. Not sure if other varieties of hydrangea are as easy to start, but it’s much easier than, say, rosemary. Grrrrrr, rosemary!

—Marleigh
hazelinok
3 years ago
Finally! I'm going back to re-read y'all's posts now. Had to take care of outdoor stuff first while it's...cooler? Although not cool.

Dawn, did you find any heat loving plants? Did you enjoy your day out?

Jacob, I would love to have your weather forecast! You have a near century old asparagus?! That is so cool. I hope one of my kids/future grandchildren keep my stuff going. Those garden cats! Mine is fine company in the garden, except when he uses a raised bed for a litter box.

I really love how you experiment with different growing methods in your garden. I tend to be that way too--always wanting to explore and try new ways of doing things. Although, I do like to keep some things "tried and true".

Nancy, my red bee balm is beginning to bloom too! These are great grandchildren of the plant I got from you. That always makes me happy---thinking of each of you who have given me plants that are still living or have seeded and made offspring.

Basque peppers! I'll have to research those!

Larry, I think your garden and onions look fine.

Amy, we have a freezer on the bottom. It's fine. I like it well enough. It's hard to believe it's been 4 years since we started the kitchen remodel. The deal with refrigerators is there isn't one that is perfect for us. I'm sure of it. We each need our own refrigerator. And I'm hoping to have that once we no longer need dog crates in the utility room. I'll even take the utility room one and he can have the kitchen one.

How many fabric pots to y'all have, Amy? I seem to be missing some. Maybe they blew away in one of our crazy winds. I haven't tried putting them in a kiddie pool, but I've seen other people do that.

Kim, be careful out there in this heat. You continue to inspire. Have you started your videos yet?

Marleigh, the tomato cuttings I took a couple of weeks ago failed. Not sure what went wrong. I'll try again next year. Nancy, how are your cutting doing?

I worked outside this morning and finally have the SG watered deeply. I don't have enough soaker hoses to do it all at once, so have to move them to the next row over. It worked well enough. Also, HU wants to use the mantis between rows for as long as he can...and we don't need soaker hoses in the way.

We're starting to harvest stuff now. Some of you probably saw the Garden Monday post on FB. I harvested the first bush beans. Didn't want to leave them to get too big. In my experience, they are tender when they're not left to grow too big....but this is my first time with Contender. There's still a ton of small beans on the plants though. More than likely I'll just freeze these. The thought crossed my mind to pull out my pressure canner and do a large jar for fun. I've pressure canned beans one other time, but it's been 5 years ago. I want to wait for HU anyways....and we should have another harvest by Friday.

Also, I'm planning a "complicated" dinner. It's not really complicated so much as time consuming. It calls for sweet potatoes, but I'll use Seminole pumpkin instead (do y'all ever replace sweet potatoes for winter squash?). I've done this a few times this year because I have so many Seminoles left. Actually, only about 12 now. The house has a delightful smell of fall because I've already baked them. I'll get to use several items from the garden in this recipe and y'all know how much I love doing that.

Anyway...I don't need to mess with canning AND a time-consuming dinner.

Mr. Snow Dwarf tomato---anyone grow that one? It has what looks like full sized fruit.

The chicks continue to do well. Mother hens really are the easiest way to do chicks. Much less work for me. The chicks aren't as friendly, though. Except for Jorie.. She is very friendly. She hatched from one of our eggs last year and Rosa raised her. Her father is of course Jean Luc Picard....I think she may have hatched from Sweetie Pie's egg. This makes me happy because Sweetie Pie died in February and I have her daughter. Sweetie Pie was a friendly hen...and Jean Luc is a calm rooster. Anyway...

Dawn, I wonder if, once your hen and 2 roosters pass, you could get just a few hens who do well being confined? There are some breeds like that. Maybe just 6 or so for a few fresh eggs....if you and Tim like eggs.

I think I'll work on freezing the asparagus and beans now....and stay inside until the late afternoon. What are you all doing today?
hazelinok
3 years ago
Nancy, yes, I put down cardboard the first time. Now, I just add wood chips every year.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
3 years ago
Jennifer, I thought about that, but I just don't like keeping them confined in a chicken run when they just want to be free, so I don't think we will get more. We just have too many predators here and they seem to get worse and worse every year, so we'll go chicken-free for a while. Even when I have had them confined in their fenced chicken run, we still have had feral dogs dig under the fence and get them and kill them or have had snakes get in there and kill the chicks. Even a fenced run is no guarantee of safety.

I did not find any heat-loving plants I wanted, which is sad. The stores don't have much---they still are really pushing plant stock of annuals and not-so-heat-loving perennials that they seem unable to get rid of. Usually by now they have a huge supply of heat lovers, so I'll just wait for those to come in. I feel like the stores are running behind the season now. I did see tons of shrubs and things I want for when we redo the landscape, but didn't want to buy them now and have to water them all summer long while we work on hardscaping, removing the old plants, and improving the soil in order to have a nice place to plant them, so I didn't get any of them either. I really didn't have a lot of plant shopping time as we were looking at material to build a backyard deck....just seeing what they have. We actually are going to order all the materials online and let Home Depot deliver them to our house because there's going to be too much of it to haul home in our pickup, but we did want to look at what they had in the store, get a feel for its quality, check out the prices etc. I also was shopping for new patio furniture for the deck and found several items that we both liked, but we didn't narrow it down to the specific one we are going to buy. Our current patio furniture is about 20 years old (yikes!) and has held up fairly well, and even looks pretty good with a new coat of spray paint a couple of years ago and new cushions....but I want something new, and then the old patio furniture can move to the house's wraparound porch on the south or east side of the house.

I went outside early to water the garden and do some outdoor work. The weather felt great at 6:30 a.m. so I'll try to make it out that early again tomorrow to do some weeding. It is too bad the weather did not continue feeling great for a lot longer time. And, phooey, I just remembered I forgot to harvest tomatoes while I was out there, so I need to go back out these evening and do that harvesting.

I grew Dwarf Mr. Snow the first couple of years after it was released. I thought it was okay but not really anything special in terms of flavor or productivity.

Nancy, It is precisely because I cannot foresee us doing the current level of yard and garden maintenance a decade from now, for example, that we are going to redo our landscape, starting soon I hope, to make it a lot lower-maintenance with a lot less mowing. I was trying to tell Tim just yesterday that even though he loves mowing now, he might like it less when he is 70 or 80. I "might have" made him see the light by sort of reminding him how hard outdoor chores were for our fathers once they were in their late 70s. He is leaning towards wanting to build a smaller deck as step one of the new back yard, and I want a bigger deck that wipes out a more substantial lawn area so we'll have less mowing later. He might have just been a tad cranky because he was on call all weekend and his phone rang day and night, and by night, I mean pretty much all night long. He might as well have been in his office at work.

Remember when I was trying to back off from making Annie's Salsa for 250+ of his closer friends and co-workers for Christmas every year and he got that scared deer-in-headlights look every time I brought up the topic? (He did eventually accept that this salsa practice was going to cease and it has.) Well, that is the look he gets in his eyes now when I mention that my ultimate landscape goal is to have less grass to mow. So, I can see he is going to be slow to accept that this is a good thing. We're going to have to take baby steps.

Marleigh, I normally use Espoma Tomato Tone but also like Dynamite Mater Magic. Both are organic and contain not only NPK but some of the micronutrients as well. They do not contain enough nitrogen to make excessive leaf growth or to promote BER. Tomatoes don't color up when a gardener is watching them and waiting for them---they wait for us to go out of town for a few days and then they all color up while we're gone, sending us into a hurry-up-and-harvest-frenzy when we return. Maybe you could lie to your plants and tell them you're going out of town on vacation. Then, wait and day or two and check them to see if the ripening kicked into overdrive.

Y'all know that the first ripe tomato takes forever and forever to ripen. Here's the timeline of a tomato cluster ripening that I often use to illustrate this point:

Timeline of a Tomato

Kim, That's wonderful that you are getting so much lumber from your brother! I wish the heat would break too. I think it breaks on Wed for a day or so, but the people further south, like you and I, won't get as much of a break as the folks further north. I feel extreme heat and drought setting in. I'm not saying it will be another 2011 because we haven't yet seen real evidence of that, but Gary McManus hinted a little by mentioning 2011 himself on the Mesonet ticker......so.....at least where know where his head is at right now.

Amy, I hope the new fridge works out well. I am not fond of all the bending over you do with a bottom freezer. The older I get, the less I like it.

Today when I was pulling meat out of the deep freeze to transfer to the kitchen refrigerator for this week (some, for the next couple of days is in the fridge compartment and some, for later in the week is in the freezer compartment), I couldn't figure out why the deep freeze still is so full. It's like we haven't eaten anything from it since we filled it up in January and February as Covid was making its way from Asia to the USA. So, I started digging around, and found two one-gallon jugs of ice beneath a bunch of packages of meat. They were milk jugs filled with water and frozen. Grrr. I didn't want those taking up space that could be holding food. I took them out and rearranged stuff to fit into the sections where they had been. I don't think I put those in there, but I bet I know who did, and I bet he doesn't remember doing it. Now I have space to put more things in that freezer if I stumble across any frozen food bargains at the store. The other deep freeze had emptied out more, but we bought more stuff last month to refill it in case the food supply chain breaks. I think every house should have at least two refrigerators and two deep freezes, and they could be a His and a Hers as Jennifer mentioned. Tim is bad about buying things he says he will cook and that I absolutely will not cook (like fish with eyes or liver of any sort) and then he puts it in the freezer and forgets it exists. So, if he had his own freezer, I wouldn't have to look at frozen fish eyes staring at me whenever I open the deep freeze. I remind him almost every week that he has trout with eyes in the deep freeze and he needs to defrost them and cook them and that just goes in one ear and out the other.

Larry, Your garden looks great even though it is further behind than usual.

Rebecca, Fried green tomatoes?

Jacob, I hope what you are seeing is early blight and not late blight. They are separate diseases. Early blight is Alternaria solani and late blight is Phytopthera infestans. Late blight would infect the potatoes and cause them to rot and be worthless as a crop and there is nothing you can do to stop it once it sets in. It will wipe out all your potato and other nightshade plants in days. Late blight was the cause of Ireland's Great Potato Famine. Early blight just basically causes foliar disfigurement and loss, but doesn't affect the potato tubers and it is easy to slow down with regular application of a good fungicide.

Y'all watch your weather---tomorrow's combination of heat and high wind as the cold front blows through will be very dangerous for plants as it will be able to dry them out much more quickly than a normal hot day would. Many OK counties have either a High Wind Warning, a High Wind Watch of a Wind Advisory and I think more counties could get one later, depending on how much strength the wind maintains as it moves.

Dawn
Megan Huntley
3 years ago
Hey everybody! It's been a while since I've popped in here. As usual, I've spread myself too thin, and haven't been staying in touch. I'm still working from home and won't return to the office until mid-July at the earliest, even that's up in the air, but I've found that being at home all the time fosters reclusive behavior for me. All that to say - HI! I haven't fallen off the edge of the earth.

I'll have to come back and post tons of pictures but I have done SO MUCH stuff to the gardens this year. Potterville was redesigned and is home to only about 6 mineral tubs. I've repurposed some of the space to hopefully grow okra. I'm attempting to do it in completely unamended clay so I know okra production will be stunted but I've done it before and the okra can take it even if it doesn't produce fantastically.

The huglekultur meets terraced berms garden is 100% in use this year. It was built in sections as we took down more trees and one section is struggling. I knew it would. There is a lot of wood down deep but there's a deep layer of Christmas Tree mulch on top that continues to tie up nitrogen. It's not as bad as last year, but I intentionally planted green beans there and they struggled. Part of the issue was that I started the beans indoors because we had that April cold the same time I was ready to start beans. My green beans hated it. My black beans transplanted fine. I've already sewed partridge pea in between the greenbeans because I know they'll be done soon with the heat and I've harvested about 5 beans. (BOO) And a few sunflowers self-sowed from last year. DD sowed a bunch of black-oil sunflowers by intentionally scattering birdseed and I've been selectively removing those, but these appear to be one of the heirloom varieties I grew last year.

Speaking of black beans... one of my quarantine projects was a 12' tall, trellis from repurposed tree limbs and macrame cord I got off Amazon. I would have never done it if Uhaul had been open. I would have rented a trailer and bought cattle panels. Now, I'm glad I did it. My garden is becoming more rustic and potager than intended but I'm in love with it. And the black beans are loving the trellis. It gets shade starting mid-afternoon and the must be just right for them because they're bonkers. Good thing because I ignorantly mailed the last of my seeds to my sister so if I want seeds for next year these better grow! LOL

I spent the weekend fixing driplines that Jill the big dog chewed last summer. It took SO STINKING LONG. Why does something so seemingly simple take so long!?! The hubs was smart enough to force me to stop and put on sunscreen but you can tell how hot it was because I'm sunburned on my back in a pattern that shows where the sunscreen wore off from sweat rolling down my back. I've had lots of strange sunburns and sunburns from missing a spot, but never in a sweat pattern.

Several of you were talking about thug plants. For the other native fanatics, be forewarned that tall coreopsis is trying to take over my microprairie like it's a member of the mint family.

The front of my house finally has some curb appeal this year. It's looked like a hot mess since I moved in - actually since before I moved in when the hubs decided he didn't want to maintain it and ripped out all the contractor grade foundation shrubs.

I've been here for 5 years now and have grown things of course but the beds were mostly experiments to see what I did and didn't like and nurseries for misc things I must have but didn't know where they would go. Plus light there is odd, but I finally figured it out and now, from the street, it looks like humans live here instead of goats. I'm not completely finished because a few months ago I got 3 boulders off facebook market and put them around the mailbox. This fall, I'll dig out the bermuda and make that another native flowerbed. Then the front is done.

I'm about to take cuttings off tomatoes for fall starts and I don't have fruit set yet on some. They're in bloom so I'm really hoping for some luck with the cool spell tomorrow and Wednesday. If I'd been thinking I would have used some bloom booster but it's too late now.

Oh, I accidentally found a way to combat cabbage lopers. I have quite a bit of kale still growing in mineral tubs because I was busy working on the huglekultur in early spring. I put tomato cages in the tubs because Jill learned I grow sweet potatoes - one of her favorite treats - in the tubs too and frequently tries to dig them up. The cages slow down her digging but now, with the kale off the ground and something to land on, the cardinals are LOVING cabbage loper lunches, and dinners, and snacks too I guess. :)

The suburban wildlife has discovered that even with the dogs, my yard is like a mini small animal refuge thanks to the abundance of insects. And I think the dogs keeping neighborhood cats away helps too. Some days though it feels like I AM running a refuge. A few weeks ago, Keegan and I rescued 3 newborn bunnies after Jill found their nest in a very poorly selected location in my garden. I did this begrudgingly because this year for the first year ever, I had issues with early spring plantings being eaten to the ground by bunnies. We've also seen baby birds in a couple places around the yard and have the fattest, happiest toads I've seen anywhere since the ones found living under the outdoor lights at the RV campground we used to visit every summer as kids.

We do have 1 Mississippi kite who has chosen one of our trees as a favorite perch. We were concerned that it was going to nest in the tree - which would mean us and the dogs being dive-bombed every time we went outside - but we don't see signs of a nest. I'm pretty confident it's nesting in a tree not far away. If I'm right, our tree is a good lookout point that wouldn't give away the nest's actual location. I keep monitoring the nextdoor app for reports of being dive-bombed by birds but haven't seen them yet.

I need to go make dinner, so calling it quits. I owe you lots of pictures and I'll make time to come back and do that soon.

Miss you all! Take care.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Nancy, my onions were damaged by a hail storm. The leaves never did heal, but most of the new leaves look okay. I never did get a proper spot to plant them because of so much rain. I just mowed the Elbon rye cover crop, and then drug my Mantis tiller backwards through the stubble and planted the onions. It was not long before the rye overgrew the onions smothering most of them out. When it got dry enough I started looking for the onions, pulling the rye and tossing it down to where the sweet potatoes are now, most of the onions were stunted or rotted. I tried to nurse them back to health, some did fair, many did not. Madge has been using the onions for a good while. They do fine in her cooking, and if we have to we will chop and freeze the rest. I have some of the same bunch that I did not think would live when I planted the others. I took those and placed on the light shelf for a good while to get a little size on them. Those onions are in the north garden doing well, but still small and damaged from the hail.

I think everything I have was planted late, except my sweet potatoes. Last year I could not get sweet potato slips on time and just planted small potatoes rather than slips in one of my two rows. This year I placed small potatoes in a flat of very damp potting soil, and placed the flat on a heat mat. It was not long till I was up to my ears in slips, much sooner than I needed them. I gave away a lot of slips and have 46 plants in my garden and 12 plants in my wildlife garden. I have 11 Seminole pumpkins planted around the log pile. I also have between 10 and 15 Old timey cornfield pumpkin plants, sun flowers, zinnias, PEPH peas, 3 moon and stars water melon plants, about 6 each of straight neck and crooked neck squash. I made a place about 20 feet wide and 200 feet long to plant something this morning while I was over there working. The rain chased me in, so I expect to be out the gardening business for the rest of the day.

What do you container gardeners use to stake the plants in contains with? I have tomatoes and runner beans in containers that need to be staked, or, have some kind of trellis. I want to be able to move the containers from one area to another.

Nancy, I expect I will always have trouble posting pictures. My granddaughter came over and was helping me, I am not sure she knew for sure what was going on, plus she talks so fast and low I cant understand her, her wearing a mask did not help. My hearing is very bad.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago

My Roselle have been blooming for a few days. It seems too early, and the plants are too small. Did I start these plants too soon? Is the blooming near the end of there life cycle? I have about 8 or 10 babies ready to plant. This is something new for me. These plants sure did not like cool rainy weather that I have had this spring. They seem happy now, but they are very small.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago

Above are some peppers I started from seeds planted the last half of Feb., they are called Orange Mini Bells, none of them have grown well, and were sickly until warm weather got here. If you notice the plant about where the wood handle meets the metal on this hoe shank is so heavily laden with fruit that it cant stand. I need to stake the plant, or put a cage around it. I had the same problem last year with jalapeno peppers, the plants were smaller than normal, but the peppers hung on the plants like grapes, they were very productive.

These plants are in my north garden, which is the wetter of the two gardens I have in the lawn, although the soil test of both garden are about the same. The Phosphorus ( P ) of this garden tested at 158 PPM, with 35 to 50 PPM being optlmum. The Potassium ( K ) tested 224 PPM, with 131 to 175 being optimum. I have no idea if the high mineral count is causing the plants to be stocky, or it is just type of plant I am planting. Last year I just staked the plants with 1/2 rebar and boards I had ripped from treated fence boards, which worked fine, but I dont bend well and had to set a stool beside the plant to harvest the fruit. If you have any idea on how I can get more standard sized plants, please feel free to suggest something. The stocky plants are not all that bad because they seem to hold their fruit closer to the main stem and not breaking quite as easily, but they are harder to harvest because the plants are shorter and the fruit more tightly packed
jacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
3 years ago
I did have a fairly long post written up last night, but it disappeared! I‘ll get back later.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Well, I have been chased in by the rain again. When I went out I thought the computer said " 0 " percent chance for rain today. It was last night when I checked it, maybe an update since last night.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
3 years ago
Meghan, It sounds like you've been really busy and have accomplished a lot! We have had Mississippi kites nest near us and not dive bomb us, so I think maybe some of them are a little more chill than others. They will dive bomb every snake that moves, and I don't mind that as it alerts me to snake movement.

Larry, The way I stake plants in containers largely depends on how large the container is. If it is larger in diameter than my tomato cages, I put the cage on top of the soil in the container and use a 3' wooden grade stake, or sometimes 2 of them, to stake the cage to the soil in the container. If I have any plants that are getting extremely tall and I'm worried the wind will blow them over, container and all, I hammer an 8' tall metal t-post into the ground beside the container and use zip ties to attach the cage to the t-post. I've also, some years, lined up the containers in a row alongside the dog yard fence, which is just woven wire fencing, and use tip ties to tie the tomato cages inside the containers to the fence. With containers that are smaller than the tomato cages, I can put the cage on the ground, completely encircling the container, and stake it to metal t-posts or the fence, whichever is closer. With shorter plants in containers, I don't stake anything and just count on the fact that they are in a wind-sheltered location to keep them from being blown over.

Roselles planted very early can sometimes bloom early, but that doesn't kill them. Mine always produce until the first frost no matter how early they started so I'd expect yours would do the same. Roselles are very tough, resilient and heat tolerant and nothing really slows them down or stops them except cold weather.

That rain just can't seem to leave you alone. We are dry now and having occasional fires. (sigh) I hate the way conditions seem to switch on a dime. You get used to one thing and are coping with it, and then Mother Nature flips a switch and gives you something else.

The wonderful news about today, and y'all just hang in there if this miracle hasn't reached you yet, is that the cold front blowing through the state is bringing significantly lower dewpoints. It moved through here a little while ago and dropped our dewpoint from 69 to 48 so now our heat index actually is 3 degrees lower than our air temperature. It is amazing how good it feels out there today when we don't have a dangerously high heat index. Unfortunately much of the state is plagued with high winds, wildfires starting up early today in those areas, and blowing dust storms. None of that is really predicted for our area since we are so far south, but you never know what the wind will do when it comes up. Here's the current dewpoint map, below. I don't know how much lower dewpoints will fall or how long they lower ones will last, but we'll enjoy this for as long as it lasts:

Dewpoint Map

Dawn
robert_higgins_okc
3 years ago
It looks like we have been a busy bunch of gardeners!

The garden here is mostly good, some weeding needed, AS ALWAYS! Ha!

Getting a few bugs now, my resident praying mantis seem to be dropping the ball. ONE JOB, mantis, sheesh. I have a few spots that always hatch mantis for me, but next year I may spend the $15 to bring in more.

A few images. Overall progress, and a shot of the cucumbers, green beans and snap peas....trying to corral the cucumbers UP, with little noticeable progress!
Larry Peugh
3 years ago
Robert, thanks for sharing your pictures, your garden is beautiful.

Dawn, thanks for the info. I do not have any tomato cages, and all my containers are mineral tubs, I would guess them to be about 25 gallon, but they are not completely full. They are wicking tubs with 4" french drain tubes coiled around the bottom. This container growing is completely new to me, but so far they seem to be doing okay. The tubs I am most concerned about have cherry tomatoes in them and I expect them to get large enough for support.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
What a non-productive day so far! I am having a nightmare trying to get the Dell (Microsoft) to work with my Apple devices. I thought I had it fixed, but it either unfixed, or I didn't.

Jacob, wanted to show you Garry's pride and joy. 1994 Ford f150. 4-wheel drive, roll-up windows. Pretty standard, no frills. I think he's replaced everything on it.
luvncannin
3 years ago
Nancy that is a great truck. I need one very similar. No frills just basic runs good.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
Holy mackerel! From 97 yesterday to 69 at the moment. I had to put shirt jacket on because of the cool breeze. Well it appears that a lot of you had high winds yesterday, as the cold front blew in. It was windy here, but we are sheltered by trees surrounding us, so nothing like, say, in town at the school. UGLY winds. I was there for a couple of hours. The tomatoes are the only things big enough to have taken a beating--and they did.

I see five small Meot Jaeng summer squash on the volunteer plant growing outside the fenced raised beds in the compost. Works for me!

I need to mow today but was waiting for a scheduled phone call--which won't come until I begin mowing, I'm beginning to realize. So have been doing chores that don't have loud noises involved--weeding, watering container plants. June 10 seems awfully early to be cutting back plants, but that's what's happening here today--nicotiana, lemon and bee balm, 4 o'clocks. I am seeing echinacea purpurea all over the place--that plant SPREADS. Does it spread for all of you? Also--the bronze fennel is over 6' tall in places and spreading everywhere, of course. You all had told me it would. I've had several people say they can't get it to grow. Crazy. I wish the veggies would be growing as crazy as the flowers and herbs are.

Okay, mowing up next. I hope you're enjoying the "cool" weather today.
Megan Huntley
3 years ago
Nancy, I stepped out last evening and was surprised at the drastic difference in the temp. It was 61 when I got up this morning to walk the dog which felt amazing.
Megan Huntley
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Oops, wasn’t ready to post. I do have a little wind burn to my tomatillos and tomatoes but otherwise the garden seems unscathed. I need to sweep up a lot of leaves and dirt that blew onto the patio.

Anyhow, I came back to share some of the pictures as promised. I need to get more but you can see the chair I recovered. I have the cover sewn for the other but haven’t replaced it because the grommets were on backorder then never arrived. You can see how well the beans are liking the trellis and my latest project a small birdbath from an ornamental stake for solar light that the light broke off of. I used a tart pan found at goodwill for the bath part, and just a wide view of my potager with DDs sunflowers going bonkers.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
Megan! Thank you! I love to see all the photos, all. I love your gardens. . . and the rustic look you mentioned. Did you lash the branches properly??? LOL. I just learned how to lash my twine for my bamboo trellis. It was fun, but I learned this: Amy, Robert, Larry (?), Joe Lampl are right. Cattle panels from this day forward. In fact, I may have to take GDW's 1994 Ford to town to get a couple.

Loved the praying mantis comment, Robert! I have a picture for you if I can find it. LOL--that's a baby on someone's hand. Also--how do you water?

You are a seamstress, Megan? The chair looks great. And I like the birdbath. Where'd you get it? I'd like one like it. Love the trellises.

Is your property finally dried out, Larry? I bet it looks so much better than you say.

My garden is quite a ways behind some of the rest of yours. So is the school's. S'okay--everything's good. I picked probably 2/3 of a pint of blueberries. Heidi is amazing!!! The tomatoes are still small, but I counted 16 on it to date. The SS 100 and Egg Yolks both look great. Giant Belgium and Homestead 24 both have a few--well, all of them have a few. I forgot to keep a Cherokee for ME. The one at the school is giant and lush. I'll remember to take cuttings when I'm there Friday.

I see small beans on the Contenders--and garlic will come out in another 4-5 days. I pulled one today and it looks good.

I got the lawn mowed today! Yay for me. Tomorrow morning we're going to go fishing. Yay about that, too.

The scarlet bee balm are in full bloom; the ones in bag of the bed are just beginning. They WERE both purple last year (light purple); one is pink this year! LOL. Speaking of reverting. The other patch looks like it's going to be light purple. Now I have to go back and see last year's orders to see if they're two different varieties. As I recall, they ARE. I was amused.

I cut back one large clump of 4 o'clocks and lay the cut ones right next to that clump, where I'd put down cardboard and grass clippings. I added another bag of grass clipping this afternoon; now will put on some straw, then a bag of garden soil, and maybe it will be ready for planting.

Hamburger steaks with mushroom gravy for GDW this evening. Mashed potatoes, and a nice tossed salad.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
3 years ago
We didn't get the wind a lot of y'all got. Ours only gusted up into the low 40s yesterday and the low 30s today, so we escaped the tree and plant damage so many people in other parts of the state had, and we didn't have power outages either. It was pretty windy here all morning, but the wind speed dropped all afternoon.

Robert, You garden looks great, and the weeding does seem endless this year. I'm hoping the June heats slows down the weeds.

Nancy, We bought our pickup right after we bought our land, and that was in the fall of 1997. I think Tim has replaced everything on it at least twice, but it has around 400,000 miles on it and gives us almost no trouble. It's a Dodge Ram and has been so incredibly reliable. I think the first transmission lasted almost 300,000 miles. I look at shiny new trucks, see the price tags on them, and hope our old truck lasts forever. They make the new trucks so pretty nowadays and we don't care about pretty---we want a truck that we can haul stuff in, one we can throw something into the bed of it without worrying we'll dent it. I believe that's what we've got now, and every dent and scratch in the bed tells a story. All the real farmers and ranchers here have beat up old trucks too that they use everyday. They may also have a nice pretty truck they drive more like a family vehicle, but it is the work truck that really puts on the miles. If someone would have told us back in the beginning that this old Dodge still would be driving and working in the year 2020, we never would have believed it.

Echinacea doesn't spread for me. It survives (just barely) in a raised bed that keeps its roots up above the clay, but doesn't like our dense, slow-draining clay soil at all. If it did, I'd have it growing in the pastures with all the wildflowers, and I don't.

We didn't really get cool enough for long sleeves. Our low only dropped to 60 here this morning and warmed up quickly from there, although the mesonet station dropped all the way down to 54 and I was envious of how cool they must have felt this morning.

We had a lot of fires and medical calls yesterday and today. Uggh. It is more like March here in terms of fire calls, which is just nuts considering it is June. I guess the heavy rain delayed the winter/spring wildfire season until now. At one point last night Tim was out on a medical call at the home of two of the very first people we ever met when we moved up here, and then got paged to go straight from the medical call to a grass fire. All of this was after dinner and kept him running until bed time. He likes being busy, but I think lately it all is a bit too busy. At least the weather is slightly cooler, but we're going to be up near 100 degrees in about a week according to our local TV met. I didn't want to hear that.

Megan, Your back yard and garden look spectacular and I am so happy for you after everything you went through last year.

I hope the fish will be biting for y'all tomorrow. Some friends of ours went and stayed at a lake cabin a couple of weeks ago on a planned long weekend, and I think they didn't get a single bite until their last evening there. They were so disappointed. However, they took their daughter to Lake Texoma on a guided striper fishing trip a few days ago and all of them caught tons and tons of fish and decided they want to do this sort of fishing trip with a striper guide every year now. Based on the size of the fish they caught and the number they caught, their freezer will be full until next year, so I'm guessing it is a good year for striped bass on Lake Texoma.

I am in such a lazy mood this year. I'd rather cut back my garden or mow it down rather than weed it and water it all summer long, but I won't. I still feel preoccupied by the backyard landscape renovation that we aren't doing. At least the soil is drying up now and we can start, but Tim is so busy at work that I am going to have to fight to drag his attention back to the yard. They rotated jobs and he is in Patrol/Air Piracy now and I guess he has about 200 guys working for him, so a lot more than he did in the previous job assignment. He is thrilled---he had gotten bored with the previous assignment because, you know, everything was running so smoothly and all and they rarely had a crisis. That won't happen with this assignment so he should be as happy as a pig in mud.

I do feel drought coming on and, as in all years, if the drought drags on all summer, there will come a point where I think I'm spending more time and money watering than it is worth. We'll see. Tomorrow's drought monitor map will be interesting. I want to see how much drought has advanced across western and central OK over the last week. I've noticed the wild turkeys still are coming into the front yard and stealing the chickens' hen scratch. That is pretty typical but they generally do it more in Spring than in Summer.

Since yesterday was so windy, I stayed indoors and rearranged the furniture in Tim's office, otherwise referred to as the dog room because Princess and Ace prefer to hang out in there and watch the world through the bay window. Well, apparently the world ends if you go into the dog room and move their sofa. Neither one would even look at the sofa after I moved it, they wouldn't sit on it and since they wouldn't sit on it, they couldn't look out the window and bark. It was a very quiet day. Today they have gotten over their sulking and are back on the sofa, looking out the window and acting pretty normal. I guess I'm not in trouble with them any more, and Tim is just laughing about it all because he knows they do not like for him to move one single thing in his office. Apparently they resist change. I suppose we haven't moved the furniture around in the office since the dogs adopted us and came here to live in the fall of 2014, and it is unimaginable that I've left the furniture in place all this time. These are funny dogs, but if they so much as hear a possum walking across the yard at night, they'll alert you so they are great watch dogs. They even bark at us when we are out in the yard. I guess they are pretty territorial but it is all just so silly.

I need to harvest tomatoes and peppers again tomorrow. They are doing great, as are all the flowers and herbs. It isn't really the garden I planned on having, but after being under water for six months, it is the garden we ended up with this year. The kale is in really great shape, but Tim doesn't like it, so I have far too much of it growing. At least I can chop and freeze the excess.

I hope to be out in the garden early in the morning while the weather is so lovely and pleasant. It isn't going to last long, so we need to use that nice cool weather while we've got it.

Dawn
Megan Huntley
3 years ago
I realized I didn’t post pictures of the front, so I’m back.

Nancy, I’m no seamstress, but I pretend to be one. I probably break all the rules, but my grandmother taught me enough to find my way around a sewing room. Add to that growing up on PBS do it yourself programs in the summers when I Dream of Jeanie reruns got old, and I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Here are front garden pics. Btw - hubs is very proud of his demon satan Bermuda grass as you can see.

Pic of garage is to brag on myself. I painted all the trim, eaves, etc last weekend. We did the rest of the house in the fall before new gutters were installed but saved this for last and then early freezes arrived and it was backburnered. Custom house numbers have been ordered from a family that does metal work in Cresent. I met them last year at a garden festival at the myriad. Will be glad to have painting marked off the list.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
I hate sewing; love quilting, Megan. I had a lifelong friend who sucked me into quilting,, assuring me it wasn't sewing. LOL.

You all have done a wonderful job on the house and property. I love it and love your achievements. (I happen to adore painting, whether painting decks, walls, or paintings . . LOL)

Dawn. . . every single thing you say in your posts. . . Yes yes yes. What can I say in response? Nothing. Agree agree agree, appreciate appreciate appreciate.

Jennifer? Hi, where are you? dbarron? All of the rest of you? Gardens in limbo like mine?

Best.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
3 years ago
Megan, The house looks great, and that even includes the demon Bermuda grass.

Nancy, I hope yall are out on the lake and the fish are biting. I first went outdoors around 7:30 a.m. when our temperature here was a glorious 58 degrees. I am back indoors to eat breakfast and then will head back out to weed. It is so nice to have a pleasant morning and to be able to accomplish something in the garden in pleasant conditions.

I guess I need to spray myself with OFF before I go back out there because the skeeters are present and biting this morning. The only good thing about the impending drought is that we ought to dry up enough that there's a lot fewer skeeters.

Dawn
robert_higgins_okc
3 years ago
Nancy, that is a fine looking little garden helper!

As for watering, I have soaker hose under the straw that serves as mulch for the tomatoes. On the side in the pictures below, I have some in line emitters that I can select the spray pattern by selecting different apertures on top, I attach one hose to pretty much water that whole side. As things get taller, I am finding myself needing to reposition those to keep reaching stuff. I maybe will add another soaker hose over there to supplement one side or the other a bit better. So far so good, though. It is inexact at best. Ha.
hazelinok
3 years ago
I'm here, but probably won't be present as often for while. Trying to get to a new normal with work and an extra garden, among other things. Many changes and not just because of COVID 19. In fact, can we go back to sheltering in place? LOL. Not that I followed that rule very well the first time.

I haven't had much time to spend online. As it is, I'm usually not sitting down and eating dinner until 9 or so...which is fine. It's what it is in the summer. It's the season. And it's good for me to stay offline as much as possible because of all the ugliness and political stuff right now.

Just keeping up with work, house, laundry, gardens, pets, chickens, and now garden produce--there's just not enough hours in the day!

It's all good, though.

HU is heading over this afternoon to use the mantis and help out with stuff.

Squash bug eggs have appeared. Okra is about to bloom already...even being so short. Harvesting has started with some of the summer things.

Still lots of little worms/caterpillars chewing on stuff. The aphids and/or white flies seem to be getting better right now, but there's a lot of ladybugs out there.

Take care, Friends.
Rebecca (7a)
3 years ago
I haven’t said a lot because I’m trying to deal with repairs inside the house. Broken garage door chain and a plumbing leak, on a reduced number of, yet more stressful, hours at work.

I had to tie a bunch of stuff up after the windstorm. Lost some branches off a few tomatoes, too. Luckily the wind also provided lots of sturdy sticks to use as stakes, once I got more zip ties. Also have to tie up most of my perennials, especially the blanketflowers, because they insist on lying on the ground and then looking up. I don’t need them sunbathing lol.

This weekend I’m yanking the broccoli and peas, and replacing the peas with beans, and maybe the broccoli too. Not sure yet. And yanking the pansies and Johnny jump ups, hopefully replacing with mini zinnias and...whatever else I can find. No one has the cheap 6 packs of annuals this year. Guess they saw an opportunity to replace them with one larger plant that costs the same as 6 small ones. I have seeds, but the heat is making it hard to start them.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Rebecca, I planted a row if zinnia seeds across the garden and very few of them have come up. I never thought about the heat, I first thought that maybe old seeds, but they are from the same pack I planted a month or two ago, and they came up. I have a bed about 4 ft. wide and 50+ ft long.

I made my cattle panel trellis in the wildlife garden 16 ft longer today and planted 4 Seminole pumpkins under it. I tried to make a very good bed for the pumpkins to grow in. I took a bucket of compost over with the larger tractor, it has a 6' bucket on it. I tilled the soil and compost together very well, then pushed the good amended soil to each side, and then brought over a bucket of compost with the small tractor, it has a 4' bucket on it. I dumped the smaller bucket of compost into the ditch created when pushing the soil away to both sides. I tilled that compost and soil together, making my amended soil much deeper. My trellis in the wildlife garden is now between 90' to 100 ' long and has 6 Armenian cucumbers, 6 straight neck squash, 20 tomatoes, 4 Seminole pumpkins and 1 roselle on it. Some of these plants dont need a trellis, but at the time I had nowhere else to put them.

The soil here is really drying out now that the rains have stopped and hot winds have come in. I am going to have to fix a way to water the wildlife garden. It looks like the best way for me is to place a 275 gal tank in the back of my truck, and hook a garden hose to it.

That is not going to be a lot of fun when the heat really get here.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
3 years ago
Jennifer, It seems like a lot of folks have a lot of caterpillar issues this year. We have a garden full of wasps and they like to pick up the caterpillars and carry them away. The wasps stuff the caterpillars (no matter how big they are) into their nests to feed their young. So, I'm thinking we have enough wasps in our garden to deal with the caterpillars and that is why we are not seeing many. I'm not necessarily happy to see all the wasps, but I leave them alone and let them do their thing, unless doing their thing involves building a nest anywhere on our porches or near our exterior doors. In that case, we nuke them with wasp spray unapologetically.

Rebecca, Sorry about all the house issues. It is so annoying when stuff like that happens, and often it seems like multiple things happen at once.

Did they cut the hours at work because y'all aren't busy enough? I guess I thought y'all always were busy.

That whole thing with replacing six-packs with significantly larger single plants has been going on here for about a decade, and it gets worse every year. If there is anything I am going to want/need in 6-packs, I get them when they first hit the stores in March and early April, because by mid-April those 6-packs are gone and the bigger plants have replaced them. It drives me crazy. This year I hardly bought any 6-packs because of the ongoing rain and the fact that the big box stores were so hard to navigate when they were shut down for Covid-19. By the time I wanted 6-packs, they were gone. Luckily last year's zinnias and cosmos reseeded everywhere and those volunteers are filling in spaces where I probably would have planted other flowers from 6-packs, and that has helped a lot. I even have been leaving the little zinnias and cosmos in the pathways where they are about as thick as grass. I just weed out the grass that pops up in the mulch with them, and leave the zinnias and cosmos to do their thing. I'd like to see them all get big and bloom and just fill up the garden with flowers for the butterflies, but since they're growing purely in 3" of mulch on top of landscape fabric, I don't know that they'll survive. I thought it would be fun to find out if they do. I have seeds and am not using them now either. I think it would be hard to get them going in this heat too.

I'm also hitting the it is hot and I don't care stage, so it is good the zinnias and cosmos are so tough and can tolerate a lot of heat and low water. I feel like we're headed into flash drought pretty quickly. It is shocking to look at the condition of pastures around us that were lush and green just a couple of weeks ago and look brown and dried now. They almost look like the stubble left after haying, but I'm not looking a fields that have been hayed recently. They're just really drying up. In fact, our fire pagers went off around 5 a.m. this morning for a grass fire a couple of miles from our house...a grass fire during the part of the night when our relative humidity is usually at its highest and our temperature at its lowest. This only happens when we're abnormally dry and headed into drought.

Larry, Based on the size and height of the zinnia volunteers in our garden, I'd say they germinated about 3 weeks ago, and nothing new has germinated since. I do think it is the heat. Oddly, our nighttime temperatures are below average and our daytime highs are above average. At least the cool morning air gives tomatoes and peppers a window of opportunity to set fruit for a few more days. My tomato plants in the containers, which were planted pretty much on-time, are loaded with fruit. The tomato plants in the garden that went in quite a bit later because of wet soil only have a few fruit per plant. I'm not sure those are worth the time and effort of watering them because they seem like they aren't growing as well as usual and certainly aren't as productive as usual. I hate late plantings. The heat always seems to arrive before they can do much.

Your trellis sounds awesome and I'm glad you've been able to get some planting done now that the rainfall has dried up some.

Isn't it amazing how quickly we can go from too wet to too dry? I don't envy you having to haul irrigation water in the tank in the truck.

Nothing special happened here yesterday. I weeded part of the garden. It got hot quickly considering how cool we were at sunrise, and once I came to the house to drink something cold and to cool down, I had no desire to go back out there. Today I'm just going to weed for a couple of hours, harvest tomatoes and then come inside before it gets too hot. I need to clean house a little before the grandkids get here.

Have a good day everyone.

Dawn
dbarron
3 years ago
I had two reminders of one of the reasons I do wildlife friendly gardening today. About 8 am, I went out front and flushed a small flock of goldfinches eating my coreopsis grandiflora seeds (which I mow around in the lawn..having now a pretty good area of them). I saw 3 males, I am sure some females, but they don't catch the eye as much as the males.
Then about 9, I went out back and found something that is rarely found in suburban back yards, a brown thrasher was gathering nesting materials and tucking into the honeysuckle (native not the japanese invasive) that's climbing up my chitalpa tree. I may be having baby thrashers in a month or so.

I love my plants, but I love to see them making a homes and feeding stations for the wildlife too. Whether it be birds, lizards, toads, or even non-venomous snakes.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Dawn, I had a good day yesterday. I am very slow and cant work long without taking a break, but by working like that I can now go most of the day and walk better than I have is years. I have some heart issues also and felt like I just had to find a way to get exercise. I go for test every 3 months. The last time at the Dr. I ask him about taking a pain pill and just doing my work around the house anyway just to get the exercise, he almost encouraged it, and told me that no more pain medication than I take everything should be okay. I feel so much better, until the cool rainy weather hits, which may never happen again.

The trellis in the wildlife garden does look good, its the best looking trellis I have. The 4' x

50' zinnia bed sits in front of the trellis, right along side of the bar ditch along the hwy. I dont thing I like the idea of planting wild flower seeds, I cant tell what I have, most of it looks like weeds with flowers. I spent $100.00 on seeds and am thinking about cutting them down. I think I like the clover better, and i am not sure that the bees dont like the clover also. I have been letting the lawn grow up with clover. We have a lot of burrs and I had rather not spray, so I am trying to smother them out with clover. I need to plant more clover in spots, but i think I will wait till closer to fall, and go ahead and plant a nurse crop with the clover.

My garden is just so so. Everything was planted so late that I am afraid ti will not be very productive. I have high hopes on the containers, but I have to rig some kind of stake or trellis for them. This is my first attempt at container growing and I know I will have to go through a learning curve. I still have some empty space in both gardens and the only thing I can think of is PEPH to put in those spaces. I also have 5 or 6 cucumber plants and close to a doz roselle that need a home. I really, really dont need more cucumbers planted, but I hate to throw away plants. Maybe I should just plant them in the wildlife garden, maybe something can get some use of them.

Well, I forgot to submit my post. I guess it is just as well. I am so frustrated, I just got back from the wildlife garden, and the deer are eating everything. I expect it was foolish for me to expect them to leave my stuff alone when I had cut down 3/4 of their's. I hate to till up even more space in my lawn, but that is cheaper than buying a solar powered fence.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years ago
I heard a bird singing yesterday while in the garden. I wondered if it was the oriole I had seen. Then I realized it was a brown thrasher. Mockingbirds mimick other birds calls 3 or 4 times, then do a different call 3 or 4 times, etc. Thrashers are mimicks, too, but they only do calls twice. Catbirds do calls once. I wish I knew what this thrasher was mimicking, it was a beautiful song. One almost sounded like parakeets.

I messaged Rebecca about Squashed Thumb's half off sale. Maybe she can find something there.

I haven't planted okra or cucumbers yet, is it too hot for germination? Do I need to shade and put wet burlap over it?

It pretended to rain this morning. There is some rain west of Enid, wish it would come here. I need to water.

I don't have enough flowers blooming. I need more dirt. I say this every year. We have a bunch of straw bales adjacent to "the lonely bed" (the other beds are 2 adjacent 4x8 beds. This is alone 4x8 bed. IF I can talk Ron into it, next year I will put a new bed where the straw is. If it's mostly tough natives it won't need exceptional soil. This bed is on the other side of the yard from where the old flower beds were, I won't have to worry about PSO spraying them or the city, and a long way from the poison bed that killed every thing. The lonely bed has kale in it now. I have a couple of perennial kale plants that will stay. They can eventually be moved with cuttings. Wonder if they could live with walking onions and stridolo? That is the only perennial bed I have. It's smaller, like 3x6 and partly shaded some times of the year. I have to designate a bed Ron won't tear out at the end of the season, lol.

We're discussing soaker hoses. Have a good weekend.
luvncannin
3 years ago
The garden at daughters looks amazing except I can’t get her to understand watering : /

she is so distracted so I do understand. I just don’t want to lose plants due to lack of water.

harvested about 8 cups of beans yesterday which we are so fast no time for pictures.

they coming fast now. Okra is about to bloom and I am ready for that. Cucumbers are producing slow but there tons of babies and blooms. Melons peanuts beans peas squash etc all blooming and have babies. Well I assume the peanuts do. My grandson want to Pick them so bad. As well as the potatoes. Patience is hard when you are seven. It’s hard when you are 55 lol.

i am excited to incorporate food from the garden into the meals.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Has the rapture occurred and I am the only one left? Just incase I want to send you away with a picture of my garden, because it will be too hot down here for it to grow.
hazelinok
3 years ago
Larry, I just lost a short post with pictures. and now I’m out of time to try to post again! Ugh!
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years ago
All the peppers are in the ground except jalapenos and one golden greek for my daughter. Also put in papalo. I still got hot.

I need to go soak cucumber and okra seeds. I didn't grow onions or garlic so I would have room to plant them earlier. Sigh. I was going to plant okra down the middle of the bush beans. In my mind they would be done by now. Maybe in a normal year. They're just beginning to produce and I don't think a baby okra plant would get enough sun.

Ron's project is a huge 3 binned compost thing.

He helped me set up soaker hoses. I have 2 on order from amazon just like the 2 we put out yesterday. That will cover everything but the walking onions.

We had a stir fry the other night with asian greens, our broccoli, our turnips and radish seed pods (Ron was not impressed with those).

The dogs think I should feed them.
Marleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years ago
Woke up to a lightning alert and was hopeful that the rain clouds would yield. They did not, so I hurried out to give everything some water before the heat pushed me back in. First beans were ready today, and I have the very first signs of color breaking on my tomatoes. 🙌🏻 Cukes and melons are flowering like crazy, and a gopher is after my zinnias and calendula. Strange gopher, ignoring the bean plants. waiting for my peas to finish drying on the vine for next spring’s seeds, then I’ll need to find a cool morning to cut those and free up room for my late tomatoes and fall crops.

Jen—I have had mediocre results with rooting tomato suckers this year, too, but I have started just taking the ones with really long stems and only 2-3 leaves. They seem more inclined to get planty.

—Marleigh
Nancy RW (zone 7)
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
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.
slowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Jennifer, I lost my picture also. I just got back from the wildlife garden. I am unhappy with the wildlife garden. The wildlife is eating everything. I told Madge that I was going to town to buy a solar powered fence charger, she looked at me and said, "that IS the wildlife garden, and you have been planting food over there for the critters some years now, How are they to know you have changed your mind"? I got her point and tried not to get so upset this morning when I was viewing where my pumpkin plants HAD been. I mulched around the last 3 hills, knowing that they wont be there long. I took a bucket of hay to mulch around the Seminole I planted 2 day ago. I am thinking that I might install some cattle panels about 1.5 - 2 feet above them, hoping to save some for next winter.
Rebecca (7a)
3 years ago
First one!
hazelinok
3 years ago
I’m going to try to post another pic for HU although he won’t see it until tomorro.w. If I don’t do it now, I will forget. did you see these the other day?! I just saw them today While trying to shade the tomatoes.

I’ll try again on the other ones tonight or tomorrow. It’s frustrating isn’t it, Larry?
hazelinok
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Caught up. Good to read your posts.

we have some fine things going on and some flops too.

here’s a couple of pictures:

the largest of the short day onions. I left the others.

nancy, here is your red bee balm.
HU-422368488
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
The bean pod looks to be "Supremo" shell bean. No I didn't see them the other day .They just now appeared. It'll be a while before they're ready to pick. They need to get very plump.

https://www.vermontbean.com/product/V01233/201

HU