July 2020, Week 3
dbarron
3 years ago
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Larry Peugh
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agoRelated Discussions
January 2020, Week 3
Comments (50)I just got my first set of stainless steel straws. I like them so far, but there’s the transportation problem. I don’t usually carry a purse anymore, unless I’m out all day or will need to carry storage. I just grab my billfold and phone. Straws don’t fit all the way. Going to have to think on that one. Also, some of Audrey’s favorite toys are the red plastic straws from QT and Sonic. Amy, I still buy powdered detergent. I think it works better than liquid and doesn‘t gunk up the washer. Walmart and Target have Tide, Cheer, and Gain powders. Sometimes I pick up Ariel at the Mexican market. Mom used Cheer powder exclusively when I was growing up, so it invokes good memories here. I also use only hot water, because cold water doesn’t get anything clean. If it did, our dishwashers would run on cold water, and we’d shower in it. Nope, I’ll stick with hot. Grimy gardening clothes, you know. I‘m a terrible housekeeper, but I do like vinegar for cleaning. It also works well in the rinse aid dispenser in the dishwasher. I need my paper towels for cleaning up cat barf, and when she commits insecticide. I have major issues with cleaning up anything yucky with regular towels. Same with Kleenex. And toilet paper, actually. All messy, gross stuff should be disposable. I was making progress in avoiding plastic bags until last fall. I have plenty of reusable containers. I try to avoid containers that aren’t reusable or recyclable. I recycle a lot. I even recycle my winter sowing containers after they become too brittle to use. Audrey likes Arm and Hammer litter that comes in cardboard boxes, so I recycle those too. Although, I often wish I had the plastic buckets for planting. I tried the recycled, green, environmentally proper litter, and all of my cats over the years have rather dramatically rejected it. Gardening: I have milkweed seeds in the freezer and I miss tomatoes....See MoreJune 2020, Week 3
Comments (62)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. The only time I've ever seen anyone write about leaving the onions until the foliage browns was when Jim Shreftler (I'm probably spelling that wrong) wrote about it here over a decade ago, and a couple of times in Bruce Fasier's Dixondale monthly newsletters a few years back. I felt like he was quite perplexed that he even had to tell people to slow down and harvest later. I have found that 99% of people harvest before their onions are really done, and then those same people bemoan the fact that their onions only store for 2 or 3 months, never understanding that the storage issue is primarily related to the onion type but also to whether the onions were allowed to fully mature. Onions that are harvested with fully green foliage tend to sprout much more quickly while in storage. I like to let them fully mature so they'll store well. They're usable either way, so it is just a matter of somebody's ultimate goals. My ultimate goal is to have home-grown onions for as long as possible for cooking. Some people are eager to get them out of the ground and replace them with a succession planting of something else even if it means their onions only will last half as long in storage. Dixondale has Copra every year. You'll find it in the long daylength area along with two other long-storing types: Highlander and Red River. In Red River I finally found a large-enough red onions because a lot of the short day and intermediate day types of reds just never size up nearly as well as the whites and yellows. In the years when I plant short day, intermediate day and long day types, my harvest usually is spread out from May through the end of July, and then the long daylength types store forever and forever. It is raining here this morning. 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...See MoreJuly 2020, Week 5....and Hello, August
Comments (44)Jen, Everyone here with big pieces of property seems to have utility vehicles of one sort or another. We don't. We just walk everywhere and consider it good exercise, but we can pull a cart behind the riding mower if we need to move something heavy. This evening I had to do a little hippity hop over a small non-venomous snake in the driveway, and I laughingly said to myself that I just got 30 seconds worth of aerobic exercise. Then, Tim had to act like a 6-year-old boy poking and prodding at the snake, and I kept asking why he couldn't just leave the poor little thing alone. Why does seeing a snake turn a 60-something year old man into a little boy again? Jennifer, Poor Juno---wishing your kitty a fast recovery. It wasn't exactly chilly here but it was nice---in the upper 60s before the sun came up. It warmed up fast and Tim started telling me how hot and miserable it was, and there I was thinking it was pretty nice out there. Perhaps the difference is that he is in a climate-controlled office all day long every day during the work week so he doesn't experience/perceive the heat the same way those of us who are outdoors do. Even later in the day he told me it was too hot, and it was 82 degrees. When I pointed that out, he said it must be the heat index, so I checked that and it was 84. I thought it felt really good and he didn't think that at all. Maybe his Yankee blood is betraying him...after almost 4 decades of living in TX and OK. Falling asleep would have been okay---sometimes a person just needs a good nap! Larry, Those little pop-up showers always miss us. I watch them fly by on the radar and sigh. I've given up wishing and hoping for one to hit us. We had great rainfall back on July 1st or 2nd, but then everything missed us until this week so we were really dry. It felt good to get some rain again, and I'm sure it won't last long. I still had to hand-water containers this morning. My garden is weedier than usual. I plucked a few weeds while hand-watering nearby containers this morning, but it is so snakey that weeding is risky now, and I'm not going to risk my safety by doing hard core weeding. With a garden surrounded on three sides by trees, we just have too many snakes slithering into the garden for me to let my guard down. Every time I hear a conservationist type person proclaim that timber rattlers are rare and endangered, I just roll my eyes. Here at our place, I see them more often than I see any other type of snake most years, so the timber rattler population seems plenty healthy to me in this part of the country. I'd be happy to see a lot less of them. I think Tim's next mower will be a zero-turn. I notice he is looking at them a lot nowadays, probably just waiting until the old mower finally dies. We have a dear friend who was a John Deere repairman for several decades, and he was the busiest person I've ever seen---he literally could have worked 24/7 and never, ever caught up on all the repair tickets, and he was busy year-round, not just in the traditional growing season. That made me think twice about buying a John Deere. We had a John Deere push mower and it was the absolute worst piece of garbage in the form of a mower that we've ever had---it was constantly broken and we bought a different mower to replace it after less than 2 years. Kim, That looks nice, but when I look at those in stores and compare them to where my body would be if seated on one of those in my own garden, I think I'd have to bend over so much, like it would put me higher than I needed to be if I was weeding or mulching or planting in the raised beds or, even worse, at grade level. It wouldn't be bad if I was harvesting from plants 2-3 feet above the ground. You'll have to let us know how yours works out for you. Larry, I bought all my seeds for 2020 and 2021 back in February and March since I wasn't sure what the Covid-19 supply chain issues would mean for gardeners since most seeds are grown overseas nowadays. I'm not sorry I did that either. I don't have to worry what the stores do or don't have in stock. The fall seeds always seem to show up in the stores here in August, so maybe they'll be in stock soon in the stores near you. I haven't seen any at the stores here yet, but then, with Covid-19 around, we aren't in the stores as often as usual either. Kim, I'm glad being a granny nanny is working out for all of you and for the garden too. It seems like a win-win situation. Larry, I think they'll hold until whenever you did them. I've had them pop up early like that some years, and I just throw more dirt over them and ignore them and harvest them at the usual time. You can get some big monster potatoes the longer they are left in the ground, so if you don't want them big, harvest them whenever it pleases you to do so. Lynn, Cilantro bolts once temperatures hit 85 degrees, so it likely won't be growing much in summer, especially on the south side of the house where sunlight may reflect off the house and onto the soil and heat it up more. It will grow great in spring, fall and part of winter. If you can cover up your cilantro in winter when the temperatures are dropping below 20 degrees at night, you can keep it growing for quite a while into winter, especially warm winters. A lot of folks here in southern OK sow new cilantro seeds successively every 2 or 3 weeks from fall into winter so they always have new plants coming along to give them a constant supply of cilantro. Cilantro's leaves will need some sunlight in order for photosynthesis to occur in order to fuel plant growth, but I've grown it in as little as 4 hours of morning sun, and then in shade the rest of the day in the warm season. I didn't really garden today, other than going out very early just after sunrise to water all the container plants. The hummingbirds were at the feeders before the sun came up. When I was opening the drapes and raising the blinds at the dogs' favorite window where they like to sit and watch the world go by, we had 3 hummingbirds at one feeder and 2 at another and they were busy easy and zipping around. I don't usually notice them quite that early but they seemed hungry this morning. Perhaps they are fueling up for the migration south that will begin soon. The deer were out back waiting for me to bring them deer corn this morning. They are greedy and impatient, but if I feed them deer corn, they leave the wild birds' food and the hen scratch alone for the most part, so I feed them. We found more pressure-treated lumber for the new deck, so now we have about 75% of what we need. Tomorrow we need to remember to get all the hardware. The building supply section of Home Depot really seemed reloaded today, as if maybe they'd had some good deliveries since last weekend but most of what they had gotten in seemed to be drywall, tons and tons of drywall, and interior lumber, not the pressure-treated lumber. I was so excited about finding the long-sought pressure-treated lumber that I completely forget to go outside and see what was in the garden center which, in this particular store, is at the opposite end of the building. This particular store (the next closest HD to us is 60 miles away so we don't go that far often) is small and often doesn't have a very good selection, so finding anything has been challenging this year, but I also know that finding pressure-treated lumber for yard projects is an issue nationwide. I guess everyone who's been staying home more has been busy improving their yards and gardens. Today's weather was awesome. I hope it lasts awhile. Tim was not as impressed with the weather as I was, but he works in air conditioning all day and I think he forgets how awful the August heat normally is. It is hard to believe it is August. Dawn...See MoreAugust 2020, Week 5-September 2020, Week 1
Comments (63)Yay for the violets, Nancy! And...you still have summer squash? The bugs killed ours long ago. Even the C. Moschata. I am pooped. So tired. We shopped today and I don't have to tell anyone that shopping is very unpleasant right now. However, Dillards allows you to try on clothes and I found a dress. It's not exactly the bohemian/fairy princess dress that I wanted. But it fits nicely and its a forest green color...and it's Robin Hoodish (not really), so I bought it. Paid more than what I wanted to pay, but it's done. DONE! Came home around 3 and sliced, breaded and froze okra. Then figured out how to use my pressure canner as a water bath canner and pickled some okra. On my own. The lids sealed so hopefully we're good. My house is getting to the point that I am very unhappy. I know a clean house isn't the most important thing in the world....but I enjoy a clean home. It just feels nice to me. However, a clean house isn't anywhere in my near future. I am hoping the robot vacuums are cheap this Christmas. That will at least help. We are celebrating Mason's BD tomorrow and that will be fun. It's at a very good restaurant that I haven't been to in a long time. Then grocery shopping and then maybe starting more lettuce seed. In between all of those things is animal care. Lots of animal care. There's always one of them doing something they shouldn't be doing or somewhere they shouldn't be hanging out. One of the fat buff orpingtons has figured out how to get out of the chicken yard. And she isn't swift. She is dumb--beautiful but dumb and wanders over by the dogs. So, I'm constantly leaving whatever task I'm working on to catch her or entice her back to the yard. And everyone is always hungry all the time. The 3 young pullets mingled with the main flock today. It went very well. Having a good rooster helps with that. They're roosting in their own coop, though. It will be a gradual thing as always. Momma Blossom will be tired of her chicks soon and those two chicks will need to move to the pullet coop at that time. Although, at least one of those chicks is a cockerel. Tom may or may not start doing meat birds and these two could be the start of it. They won't be THE meat birds, but they might be the parents of. I've named the one I think is a girl. Her name is Gwendolyn, which is sorta funny because Gwendolyn (actually related to Jennifer/Guinevere.) means white ...and Gwendolyn is a dark cornish. I'm simply rambling now....See MoreHU-422368488
3 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agoHU-422368488
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years agodbarron
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agojacoblockcuff (z5b/6a CNTRL Missouri
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agodbarron
3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agodbarron
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3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agoMarleigh 7a/Okmulgee Co.
3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agohazelinok
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years ago
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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b