July 2020, Week 4
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
3 years ago
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Larry Peugh
3 years agoHU-422368488
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May 2020, Week 4, The Rainy Week....
Comments (100)Farmgardener, I am so sorry about your tomato plants. Being rural with lots of herbicide-loving people around, we get drift every year and, yes, it is heart-breaking and frustrating beyond measure. Some years we get it once or twice and other years we get it 5 or 6 times a year. So far this year, I think we've had it only twice, and only tomato plants were affected. One year they got virtually all our okra and watermelon plants, a lot of flowers and some of the tomatoes. I grow peppers near my tomatoes and they rarely get damaged. I don't know if it just luck on the part of the pepper plants or what, but they always come through it in much better condition than the tomato plants do.For years and years it seemed like we only got Round-up Drift because the people nearest us were using Round-up along their fencelines to control weeds. After about 5 or 6 years of that (and I don't know why), everything abruptly changed (maybe they were hiring someone new to spray) and the use of Grazon-type herbicides exploded here and everyone began using that crap and now we seldom see Round-up damage, but we get broadleaf herbicide damage several times a year. It is heartbreaking, and I now raise about a dozen tomato plants a year in large containers that I have tried to strategically place where no drift can reach them. They still were damaged last year, but so far this year, the tomato plants in containers haven't been hit like the ones in the garden have. There's just a couple of hundred feet between them. Jennifer & HU, The survival garden looks great! Y'all are going to be getting some great harvests out of that. Y'all know that you can grow lettuce indoors on the same light shelves where you raised seedlings, right? Or microgreens. Or sprouts. With all the heat we have here, that's about the best option for fresh, home-grown summertime salad greens. HJ, Lilies are fascinating and we grow more and more of them every year because our granddaughter, Lillie, believes we should. : ) I am amazed at how much further ahead were here this year with the blooms of the lilies, but perhaps it is because ours bloomed really early considering far south we are. They finished blooming here about a month ago. I think the warm of days in the 90s in late March or early April set them off early, and once we returned to cooler weather, it didn't matter---they already were set to bloom early. We have them in a lot of different colors, including white, pink, red, yellow and peach, and I have to grow them either in containers or in tall, hardware cloth-lined beds because voles will come out of the woods and into the garden and eat all the lily bulbs if the bulbs are not well-protected. There are not many types of bulbs that voles won't eat (mostly allium, garlic and daffodil) so I'm limited in what I can plant. Well, also crinum lilies never have been bothered, and neither have cannas, and daylilies. I think they can and sometimes do eat daylilies but just haven't done it in recent years. Nancy, I've always gardened for the pollinators as well as for us, but we have ample sunny space, plus we never wiped out the native plants that existed when we bought our land, so that made a huge difference. All I had to do was plant to supplement what was here to begin with. In our first handful of years here, the old farmer crowd gave me hell for growing "weeds" (i.e. herbs and flowers) in my garden, telling me that Tim and I couldn't eat those. I just had to point out that the pollinators could and would eat them. Those guys meant well, but were trying to turn me into a row farmer with monoculture rows of veggies and no herbs and flowers and I wanted to be a raised bed gardener with all of it mixed together. So, in that sense I won....but it was, of course, the pollinators who won. Later on, I had more of a monoculture row garden in the back garden after we built it in 2012, but then the voles are a terrible plague back there, so that area is not utilized as much as I'd like---it depends on how much I want to fight the voles. The girls and I spend endless hours outdoors when they are here, and they love the butterflies and moths as much as I do, so much so that they hate to see bad caterpillars, like army worms, put to death. Now, I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of the seemingly dozens of kinds of bees we have here, while also teaching them to respect the hornets and wasps and give those guys a wide berth. Yesterday when the kids were out of the pool for a snack break, a butterfly came and sat on Lillie for about a 15 minutes and she was so mesmerized by it. It sat on her bare skin part of the time and on her neon bright bathing suit the rest of the time and was in no hurry to fly away. Jennifer, I think that if the only flowers we had were the front wildflower meadow, the pollinators still would be deliriously happy, particularly this year. Between the overseeding of that area with a wildflower mix from Wildseed Farms last spring and the abundant moisture, we have the best mix of wildflowers in there that we've ever had. It is starting to drive Tim crazy---usually he can mow the wildflower meadow down after the Spring wildflowers have gone to seed and before the summer wildflowers are coming on strong but this year the spring flowers lingered a bit longer than usual and the summer wildflowers started up already, so his need to control the meadow by mowing is dead in the water, and the wildflowers and I are delighted. He had to content himself with mowing only the yard and the back pasture yesterday, where there were not nearly so many wildflowers this spring, perhaps because of drainage issues back there and all the standing water. Perhaps I need to overseed that area back there with wildflowers next fall. Would that be too diabolical? It might interfere with him mowing in that area if we got a better stand of spring wildflowers back there. I would think just the acre around the house would give him enough mowing to keep him happy, but he could be happy mowing all day long. He starts twitching and practically breaking out in a rash when I discuss our plans to replace lawn around our house with hardscaping and raised beds. He is afraid I won't leave enough for him to mow, and I keep telling him that having less to mow as we age will be a blessing and to just wait and see. Nancy, We live in what is usually a dry grassland area, so I've never wanted a weed torch. I think they can work for people in some situations, but am not convinced I am one of those people. Maybe it is because we spend so much time fighting grassfires in our county in the summer, winter and autumn...and sometimes early spring in the dry years. We also don't have stone pathways to maintain and I can see where one would come in handy there. Marleigh, You've got to kill whatever you've got to kill to keep your garden going. Over the years I've found I have to kill less and less because all the beneficial creatures take care of a lot of it for me. There is a huge difference in wet years like we've had in 2015-2020 so far, and the dry years that mostly plagued us from 1998 when we still were clearing our land prior to building the house all the way through 2014. In the dry years, the pest level rises along with the drought and I spend far too much time and effort on killing excess damaging pests. The way I grew up was that you planted about four times as much as you wanted/needed so that the wild critters could have what they wanted and you still had enough left for yourself, and that seems about right here in OK. The only area where planting extra for the wild things doesn't work is with fruit---they want it all, no matter what, and you have to fight them so hard for every bit of fruit you grow. I have gotten to where I grow less and less fruit as the years go on because I get so tired of the endless fruit wars with the wild things. Our cats have become much more indoor cats than outdoor cats over the years. As they age, most of them have seemed content to sleep in the sunroom, where the sunshine and views of the great outdoors are endless, and now are happy most days just to go out for a quick hour or two and then come back indoors. They don't bother wild birds much because I trained them (with a water gun....everyone needs one Super Soaker to blast cats away from little wild birds) to leave the wild birds alone. Now, when I am out and the cats have done the brief tour outdoors and want to come in, they come and find me and meow for me to come up to the house and let them come inside. This year's perpetually wet, puddled ground probably has contributed to that a lot. Tim and I joke that our cats have become too conditioned to the great indoors---dry "ground", no snakes or annoying biting insects, no bobcats or coyotes chasing them around, and perfect climate control so they're never too hot or too cold. There's a lot of truth in that though. Even Pumpkin has become very much an indoor cat even though he's not as old as they others. When our cats are indoors and the coast is clear, the feral cats, neighborhood barn cats, etc, come over to visit and hang out. As long as I grow catnip, we'll never be cat free. We were outdoors more than we were indoors yesterday and the weather was just perfect---clear, sunny skies, not too much wind, and neither too hot nor too cold. I think most of this week will be that way, but our highs are moving into the 90s by the end of the week, so it looks like June weather is arriving right on time. I was looking forward to mealtimes as a way to use up a lot of tomatoes---BLTs for lunch, tomatoes on hamburgers at dinner time, chopped up in salads, etc. but then I harvested more tomatoes and brought in just as many newly harvested ones as we had used up in our meals so the pile of tomatoes on the counter is the same. I haven't even harvested the cherry tomatoes yet this weekend, but I'm going to do that today. You know that the tomato harvest is going well when we're looking at the tomatoes on the counter and hoping we can hurry up and use them up before I bring in more. lol. That's a change from looking at them longingly on the plants and wishing they would hurry up and ripen. We're probably about to get to the point of needing to make salsa in the next couple of weeks just to stay caught up on the harvest. The tomato plants in pots are doing great, and the ones in the ground that were planted much later because of the nonstop rain are coming along pretty well. Mosquitoes are a huge issue now, and I am sure that will continue for weeks until we get good and dry. It is the end of May and we all survived it, with a lot less weather disruption than we have some years. Well, the heavy pounding from the rainfall was disruptive, and so was the hail when and where it fell, but it seemed like we had a lot fewer tornadoes statewide than usual. The nights still feel kind of cool to me for this late in Spring, but I bet that's going to change in June. Dawn...See MoreJune 2020, Week 4
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...See MoreJuly 2020, Week 2
Comments (86)Hi y'all. Is today a flashback to 2011. That's how it feels. Just not fun today. I hope this is the worst of it. We had a heat index of 115. I saw that Okmulgee was heat index of 117 at one point. We still are at 102 heat index. 2011, right? Looks like rain/storms are heading for the metro, but mostly the northern part of it. More than likely we will not get any. I've come to expect that here. I have fans blowing into the 2 chicken nurseries and the main coop. I can't seem to get a good angle for the main coop. In other chicken news, Stormy laid an egg in her little chicken nursery brooder box. She was clucking and carrying on. She is ready to go back to the main coop...which is good, because last year she did not want to give up her babies. She finally went into the brooder box with the babies. The babies are so confused when their mothers are no longer interested in them. So...tomorrow I'll put Dolly and Stormy back with the main flock and put all the babies into the old coop/nursery. It's always so dramatic and I don't enjoy the process. However, I have 2 more broody hens. I'm hoping I can find some blue or green egg layer chicks at Atwoods to give to them. The garden...I didn't hang out there today. I had several other things to do. I did go to my neighbors' house around 7 am. They have a field behind them that has crazy amounts of wild blackberries. I didn't know that was back there. It's lovely. As a child I would have taken my dolls back there or read or whatever. It was so nice. As an adult, if it was behind my house, I would probably take a book and read. I only got 2 quarts of berries. She had picked it pretty good already. If I had a partner, I could have gotten more. Someone to use a cane or stick to pull down the branches while I pick. As it is, I got pretty torn up even though I wore long sleeves and gloves. I did pick the okra and water the back garden because it dries out so quickly. There's a ton more tomatoes and green beans too, I think. I just didn't get to them. Rebecca, sorry you're sick but glad your fever broke. Dawn, I hope you get to go plant shopping. And hope you're having fun with your little girls. Nancy, happy that you got rain! Larry, yes, we are insane. Amy, masks freak me out. I hate things on my face. I need to wear glasses, but they bother me so much, so don't. Even sunglasses drive me nuts. I had to wear a mask at WM in Norman the other day. It's like I can't function...can't find my debit card, can't work the CC machine. Can't bag my groceries at the self check out, drop stuff. I get why people wear them, though. But, we went to Moore to grocery shop today. They've gone back to one way in, one way out--but do not require masks yet. They probably will though, and I'll be the weirdo stumbling around into people because the mask throws me off in so many ways. And people are calling you out if you're going down the aisle the wrong way. It's all so disorienting...and people are scolding you on top of it. Moore WM was packed. I wonder if it's because people are refusing to shop in Norman.... I have work tomorrow. Start back to teaching class. Probably won't have many kids. Then canning more peas and possibly beans....See MoreJuly 2020, Week 3
Comments (45)Marleigh, Any and every garlic variety I've ever planted has performed about the same, so I am not convinced the variety matters other than each of us just picking one that appeals to our individual taste buds. I have grown a lot of the varieties available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, including Inchelium Red (which we really liked when I grew it), German Red, Italian Purple, Chesnok Red, and German Extra Hardy. I've even grown the plain old California White type varieties from grocery store garlic. If you want specific varieties, the time to order is now before they sell out, and they'll be shipped to you in the fall. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has some great mixed packs and samplers (their choice of varieties) that allows you to try more varieties at a lower price. Garlic stores a long time if properly cured, but I say that from the vantage point of someone who usually grows in drought and dry years and I do always grow it in raised beds, so our garlic never is that wet at harvest time. It might not cure well and store as long in those years with persistent rainfall carrying into the summer months. You don't have to store it all fresh. You can chop it and dry it or freeze it for use in cooking later. I do that a lot with onions and garlic, just because it streamlines cooking later on when I can reach into the freezer and pull out pre-chopped frozen onions and garlic. Freeze the garlic in the snack-sized ziplock bags in portions that correlate well to how much you use when cooking and put a ton of those little ziplocks inside a gallon freezer ziplock. I didn't plant any garlic last year because garlic-planting time fell in that time frame after Mom died when we were cleaning out her house and putting it on the market, etc., and I was preoccupied with family matters. Last year is just a blur now..... Be careful working out in the heat, even early in the day. We still have all that dreadful humidity hanging around. My morning work consists of feeding the animals and watering the containers, and I'm usually back indoors before the heat index hits 90 degrees....if I hurry. Jennifer, I had one rule when I was canning and I always stuck to it---I didn't go to bed until every dish was washed and the kitchen was clean. It just made a difference (in a bad way) if I had to wake up to dirty dishes and a dirty kitchen. I was not as obsessive as one of my sisters-in-law who always mopped her kitchen floor every single night before bedtime. Nope. Not that obsessed with a clean floor. Sometimes it seems like I barely fell into bed (lol, but with a clean kitchen) before Tim's alarm was going off to wake him up. One thing I don't miss about growing less and getting off the constant canning treadmill is wiping tomato spatters off the backsplash and countertops. I don't miss that at all. I didn't have a job outside our home though, so staying up late and doing dishes and cleaning was, in that sense, my job and I could stay up half the night if I needed to. It must be so much harder to try to cram all the canning and cleaning into each day when you have to leave home to go to your job too. Sometimes this summer I find myself with too much time on my hands and contemplate thawing out some of the tomatoes in the freezer and making salsa and canning it, and then I stop myself. We still have salsa in jars, so I don't need to make more yet. I can only fit so much food into the pantry and I've been keeping it full of long-term storage goods so I can avoid the stores whenever Covid-19 flares up too much locally. Rebecca, I'm glad you are conserving your energy (as if you have much of a choice) while you await your test results. There's no sense in pushing too hard to do other things when your body needs to have the energy to recover. There is nothing new here. Hot and humid, hot and humid, hot and humid. It doesn't rain here, no matter what we hear from other areas or see on the radar---the storms fall apart before they reach us. Yesterday, just to be clear, our local TV met said several times that there is no rain in the 7-day forecast. I guess he really wanted to drive home that point! lol Now, that is our typical summer forecast so not at all surprising, but also disheartening as a gardener to know that Mother Nature is not sending any relief in the form of rainfall. Dawn...See MoreNancy RW (zone 7)
3 years agoLarry Peugh
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3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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3 years agoLarry Peugh
3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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3 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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3 years agoRebecca (7a)
3 years agoLarry Peugh
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3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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Rebecca (7a)