August 2020, Week 2
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
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Okiedawn OK Zone 7
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February 2020, Week 2
Comments (84)dbarron, I'll probably have to start all mine indoors too. Then I'll build the plants little boats and they can spend the rest of the spring and summer floating downhill, slipping through the garden fence, slipping and sliding across the front wildflower meadow and sliding happily down the embankment into the bar ditch, and then they can travelthrough our creek until they end up floating down the Red River. Maybe they'll wave bye as they float away. That is how discouraging all this rain is. I already can visualize my plants floating away before I've even started seeds. Yesterday when everything was frozen solid, our soil looked dry. It looked so good from inside the house, though walking on it wasn't that great when I went outdoors. Then the frozen ground thawed out during the morning hours and turned back into mud. I'd start hoping for drought, but I've been watching the videos of the 400 million locusts destroying Africa and headed into Asia, and I don't really want a drought because that's when our grasshoppers try to turn sort of locusts. Although... I should point out that it was a couple of rainy years that have given rise to the plague of locusts there in Africa, and we have had more than a couple of rainy years here....and I saw grasshoppers hatching out and growing in both December and January. I haven't seen many lately, so I'm hoping they drowned in the rain. It is just so wrong to have grasshoppers here in the winter, and in previous years when they were hatching out in the winter, we had a horrible problem with them all summer long. Those usually were drought years though. Jen, There have been years I've grown too much basil and I'd say you're about to have one of those years! The good thing is that it is a great companion plant and if you truly have too many plants taking up too much space, you can cut them back relentlessly....and they'll grow right back. If you have more than you can use, and more than you can dehydrate or make into pesto, you can use basil as fillers in bouquets, or tie together a lot of sprigs artfully to form a swag to hang up in the kitchen...and it will perfume the kitchen for ages. Larry, The wading pool idea sounds like a winner to me, but wouldn't work here because the 4 kittens would think it was just a big kitty litter box. I already have trouble keeping them out of the houseplants. Nancy, I always had too much lemon balm, but I just pulled out excess seedlings or dug up excess plants. I figured I'd never be rid of all the lemon balm. Then, in 2015 we got around 79" of rain and the perpetually wet soil finally killed the lemon balm plants. I was not sorry---for once, having dense wet clay was an advantage. Every now and then a lemon balm plant will pop up here or there in a raised bed, but not in great abundance like we once had, and that is a relief. Chris has been building the raised beds for their potager garden in their back yard, and he's just had to work around the rain. He has it about half built. I think he'll get the other half built this week. He needs to---he has seeds started and tons of plants all over the place and they are going to outgrow his light shelf soon. We are praying for an early last freeze so he can get those babies in the ground. He is at a much higher elevation than we are, so he probably will be able to plant before we can even though he is further north. Microclimate is everything. This morning, the nursery delivered his dump truck load full of garden soil that he intends to use to fill the beds in the potager garden. He's already dug out and removed all the grass from the potager garden area, which wasn't too time-consuming since he has loose, sandy soil. Anyhow, his driveway is fairly narrow and slopes sharply uphill and they didn't think the dump truck could back up that driveway with the load of heavy, wet garden soil, so they dumped it at the base of the driveway, covering his driveway, the sidewalk and a great deal of the yard. Ooops! Wanting to clear the sidewalk off and regain use of the driveway, he and Tim spent a long, hard few hours pushing wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of heavy, wet garden soil up the steep driveway. That effort got it to the top of the driveway, but they couldn't wheel it into the back yard because it is incredibly wet (of course). So, they spread out the soil in heaping piles, covering up about half their driveway--the upper half, which leaves the lower half available to park their vehicles. Chris is hoping the soil will dry out quickly on the concrete, and then he can load it up again and wheel it into the back yard. The important thing to him is that the rest of their driveway is usable and the sidewalk is clear. The two of them went to lunch afterwards and had a nice father-son day together, and I predict both with be sore and achy tomorrow. I was home with our animals, letting them in and out as it pleased them, and doing housework and stuff. I didn't really want to shovel and haul dirt uphill so was smart enough to stay home. The cats and dogs were happier today, but we still have a ton of puddles and mud. Amy, I'd be happy if I only had to go to one store, but since we occasionally drive all the way to the metroplex to go to Costco and Central Market, I make a list and we stop at every other store we need to visit so we are getting the most bang for our buck after using all that gas to drive down there. It drives me crazy, though, and I cannot get out of the metroplex and back home quickly enough. It doesn't even matter if we only go to Gainesville or Ardmore, I've still had 'enough' of it after one store and just want to rush through whatever else we need to do to get home. Rebecca, Your poor nephew! Tim was about the same age when he slammed, face and teeth-first into a tree while sledding, and much expensive dental work ensued. I'd say an early Spring definitely is happening overall, even though we still have occasional nights in the 20s. All our Spring birds came back around 4 weeks ago, and everything here is sprouting, budding and leafing out, including trees. We went from sort of 0 mph to 60 mph overnight. I am sure more cold nights, and the threat of snow, will keep Spring from plowing ahead too enthusiastically, but she definitely is here. I noticed today that trees along the Red River are really leafing out now, though ours here at the house are a bit further behind and are only either flowering or budding. For those of us with allergies, I am sure the pollen counts are about to go off the charts. Jennifer, You do have a long list! I have a perpetually long list as well. The Stone Barn at Blueberry Hill surely will have blueberry plants, won't it? Otherwise, why the name? Some people have success with blueberries here, as long as they amend the soil to very acidic levels and put in an irrigation system to pamper those plants through our long, hot summers. The further northeast a person goes in this state, the easier it is to succeed with blueberries. Regardless, whether they have blueberry plants or not, I'm sure it will be an awesome place for a wedding. Hopefully Diana will adjust in the long run. She just may need time. Some cats take a long time to relax and calm down and become comfortable. We have a busy day planned tomorrow, but Monday I plan to be out in the garden at least doing some garden clean-up and weeding. I may have to carry out a sheet of plywood to put down in the pathway to kneel upon so I'm not soaking wet and muddy, but I've done that in the past and it has worked pretty well as far as keeping me above the mud. The next couple of days will be nice, but then the rain comes back. Honestly, can we not have one single week without rain? I'm so over it! Dawn...See MoreJune 2020, Week 2
Comments (57)That was hilarious, Larry. That one's in our playbook, too. Nope, GDW and I weren't raptured. We were out on the fishing boat. Figures. I'm amazingly UN-frustrated with everything this year. I think our potatoes are going to be a bust. I don't care. Which means that NEXT year, if anyone here is planting potatoes, it won't be me. Bumper crop of garlic. Some are enormous. I can pick Contender beans in another couple days; otherwise, just waiting. Heidi--I've never seen so many tomatoes on one plant. Amy! What's Ron making the compost bin out of?? Pictures! Suzanne called yesterday--the milkweed plugs from Monarch Watch arrived. I'll go over this evening to plant them. Where I'm going to plant 32 plugs. . . . that'll be a good trick. lol. I haven't been there in a few days, so it will be fun to see what the plants have been up to. We had so much fun fishing yesterday. Previously we hadn't been finding hardly any shad--hard to catch fish when you don't have bait. Thursday we were out for a while, but we didn't get out early enough, so it was hot and not that much fun. We rectified the situation yesterday--got out earlier, saw shad EVERYWHERE, and we caught 13 perfect-sized catfish in 2.5 hours. First successful fishing trip in 2 years. Actually only one of about 4-5 fishing trips in 2 years. I am so lazy today! I look around and don't see anything that HAS to be done! lol Guess I'll go pick the rest of the garlic and harvest some kale, do a walk-around the rest of the yard....See MoreAugust 2020, Week 1
Comments (60)I haven't read this in days and am trying to catch up, so I'm going to go backwards. If you are making a Cowboy Candy that is not made from an actual, safety-tested, safety-verified recipe with carefully measured quantities, be careful. What you're making if you throw stuff in a jar and put it in the fridge is the equivalent of refrigerator pickles, and most refrigerator pickles (other than those made following fermented pickle recipes) fell from favor years ago because the CDC discovered listeria would grow in refrigerator pickles after only a few days in the fridge. The latest recommendations I've seen for refrigerator pickle type products is that you should consume them within 3 days if you are in a high-risk group for listeria (which includes anyone aged 50 or over) or otherwise consume them within one week. The kind of candied jalapenos that became extremely popular on Garden Web about 10 or 12 years ago on the harvest forum are made using a standard sweet pickle (bread and butter) canning recipe (even the Mrs. Wage's mixes will work), and substituting jalapeno peppers for the cucumbers. Jen, I don't understand what is wrong with the tomato plants. It is so weird that they have stayed so small, but it seems fitting for 2020 which I guess we'll remember as the year when nothing much was normal. You know, when the Tomatoman's Daughter posted that they wouldn't have fall tomato plants to sell for fall, that puzzled me too. They said their seedlings just wouldn't grow. Why? That is the puzzle. Normally, since we can control the temperature, light and moisture of seedlings in flats, they are easy to grow. I am puzzled about why theirs wouldn't grow (I'm assuming they start the fall plants in the greenhouse) this summer but it is just another one of those weird things. Jennifer, Tim will watch YouTube repair videos to see how to repair the washer and drier, for example, and he likes them. I don't watch any YouTube stuff---there is so much out there and some of it can really lead brand new gardeners astray because they don't know who gives out reliable info or info that applies to our climate and who doesn't since they are brand new to gardening. I know lots of people like them, but I don't and I have too many other ways to spend my time more productively. I'm not much of a TV person in general though. I prefer reading books and magazines to TV time any and every time. I think August is the worst month to find stuff in garden centers, and I totally agree it is too hot to wear masks comfortably outdoors. I'll shop for plants in Sept or Oct. It isn't my choice when....it will depend on when the fall shipments of plants arrive. Lately, it has been so hot in September that the autumn plant shipments seem later and later every year. Sometimes it is October....and only October. Whatever hasn't sold before the end of October gets shoved aside to make room for Christmas products. I have to check the stores weekly in Sept and Oct to see when the stuff is arriving, and it seems like it takes forever some years. Rebecca, There is no normal for Oklahoma weather, is there? I totally agree that all that is typical, average or normal for us here is the kind of inconsistency that drives gardeners batty. When a meteorologist does a long-range forecast like that, I see a difference in how the material is presented by a met who is not a gardener compared to how it is presented by a met who is a gardener. Luckily one of our TV mets down here is a gardener, so in his forecasts he often mentions how the upcoming weather might or could or would affect gardeners. I really appreciate that extra bit of info. Larry, Mockingbirds seem to love gardeners. I usually have one that follows me around the garden on a daily basis. It just sits near wherever I am working and sings, all day long if I am out there all day long. If I move 30' away, it moves with me. It is sort of bizarre, but at least I have bird song all day long. Lately we have a youngish hawk sitting in the trees in our front yard just a few feet from the front and side porches, making that screaming cry they make, so it clearly is hunting. It drives me crazy. I yell at it and it doesn't even go away. I am not sure if it is hunting rabbits, chickens, snakes, frogs or feral kittens, but with thousands of acres of grassland and woodland on all sides of us, I wish it would find someplace else to go and sit. The only plants I have that seem to be bothered by spider mites this summer are the verbena bonariensis plants, which always seem to get them. The spider mites aren't on any of the veggies or on anything else. I think they popped up on tomato plants briefly, but the beneficial insects must have gobbled them right up because they were gone in the blink of an eye. Jen, I wouldn't plant pumpkins this late. Even those planted by late July often struggle to mature a pumpkin before the first frost which, if y'all remember last year (most people had sub-freezing temperatures on Oct 11 or 12), can come in early October some years. If that were to happen again this year, then we are only 9-10 weeks away from a potential early first freeze. In 1999, we had one the last week of September! I built a quick sort of redneck-style hoop house alone in two days to save my garden from the early freeze that year. It wasn't pretty, but 90% of my plants survived the first freeze. And, that July 30th date is the end of the planting range, so it applies to far southeastern OK and not to the rest of us. If I plant fall pumpkins or winter squash down here in southcentral OK I need to have them in the ground by mid-July in order to harvest anything usable from them and even then that only happens if the first frost isn't until mid-November or later. For fall gardening, even planting two weeks later than what is ideal for your part of the state can give you a total fail on warm-season crops. Remember that fall crops grow more slowly as daylength, temperatures and sunlight intensity fall day after day. That's why we always have huge numbers of people working frantically the night before the first freeze to cover up and save their tomato plants loaded down with green fruit---because nothing has had time to ripen yet in fall's cooler weather. It happens almost every year. Kim, I hope the convention was wonderful, and I'm glad you like and watch YouTube, but it is not for me. Even if I sit down to watch TV deliberately, I start multitasking...reading a book, using my computer or phone, etc., and miss 90% of what is on the TV screen. When I finally tune back in and glance at the TV, I ask Tim what I missed and he just sighs and rolls his eyes because he knows I caught the first 3 minutes of whatever we were watching before I got busy doing something else. For me, I guess the TV is just on for noise while I'm doing something else. Nancy, I'm glad you got the rain. That must have been awesome. I wonder what became of that oakleaf hydrangea? New neighbors can be awesome. We had one we thought would be, but he refused to control his dogs and keep them on his property, and they caused issues around the neighborhood....so he turned out not to be so wonderful after all. Most people in rural areas know that it is imperative to control their own dogs and keep them on their own property because everyone else has chickens, goats, cows, horses, cats, kittens, etc. and don't need any of them, and particularly the babies, harassed by dogs that run free. Most of the new neighbors we have moving to the country nowadays seem mostly interested in growing a certain 'medicinal' plant and I really don't want to have anything to do with that process either, as crime often follows when some less savory types want to steal those growers' plants. Jennifer, I find watermelons incredibly easy to grow but I only grow the smaller icebox melons. There are multiple reasons for that, and the main one is that I can trellis them so they take up less space and seem less vulnerable to soil-borne diseases and pests. We also get a ton more little melons, especially from Yellow Doll, Yellow Baby and Tiger Baby, spread out over a longer period of time so the harvest comes in amounts that are easy to eat quickly. When we grew larger melons, we often had more than Tim and I could eat that were ready to harvest all at once. You also do not get many watermelons per plant when you grow full-sized watermelons. We've never had coyotes get ours because we've always had a fenced garden. Fred had terrible problems with coyotes when he grew Black Diamonds on 2 or 3 acres of sandy soil at the old home place (not the same place he lived...this was down on the river NW of us). Sometimes the coyotes would get most of his watermelons before they were ripe, even though he grew acres of them. It drove him mad. Even our four foot fence kept out the coyotes, and of course, the 8' fence keeps out everything except the frogs and snakes. In a typical year, I plant half of one long bed with trellised muskmelons, and half with icebox melons. The icebox melons mature earliest (some in as little as 60 days), and the muskmelons mature a bit later, and then there's more icebox melons after the muskmelons, so the two combined keep us in fresh melons for several months if I've done a good job of choosing a variety of DTMs so that everything doesn't mature at once (desirable with foods we can, but not desirable with food only grown for fresh eating). One year we had so many melons that I dehydrated some, which made the melons almost too sweet to eat because dehydrating them down concentrated all their sugars in pretty small pieces after all the water was removed by the dehydration process. I also have made melon balls of both muskmelons and icebox watermelons some years and frozen them. We like to eat them half-thawed because they are less mushy they way. I don't remember if I grew more melons in those years (I think I had two beds of them instead of one, and my beds were about 35' long) but we have had some great melon years here. While melons prefer sandy soil, they do great in well-amended clay as well. I get higher yields in the sandy soil in the back garden, but the plants in the front garden produce larger melons, even if I have the exact same varieties planted both in the front and back gardens. Sweet potatoes are sort of the same way---they prefer sandy soil but also produce well in well-amended clay, and the quality of the produce varies depending on the soil in which it is grown. In general, sweet potatoes grown in poor sandy soil will give you lower yields of smooth and pretty but high-quality sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes grown in heavier but still well-drained soils will give you higher yields of rougher-looking and somewhat lower quality sweet potatoes. If you grow sweet potatoes in really poorly drained, dense, heavy soil, then you get sweet potatoes that often are cracked, somewhat misshapen and sometimes have some pretty rough skin that just doesn't look good. And, if you grow them in containers with a soil-less mix that is too rich, you get copious amounts of leaves, and smaller sweet potatoes that are thinner and sort of stringy. I've grown sweet potatoes every which way since moving here and have gotten a crop every year I've grown them except for one exceptionally wet year when the slips just kept rotting off at the ground level, and that was long ago when the clay beds were not as well amended as they are not. It seems like no two years are the same here, so every single year, the garden is an entirely new adventure. Dawn...See MoreOctober 2020, Week 2
Comments (76)Hi all. I haven't done anything in the gardens here this past week. Oops. When I saw the mention of garlic, I thought, "AHH. I need to get the garlic in," followed by the realization I have nowhere to put it. So out I went. I got the stray peppers and the monster watermelon plant out of that bed. Then decided to tidy up by removing squash plants and a few tomato plants. Got some watering done for container plants. Picked a few aji dulce peppers and Chile peppers, a few lingering tomatoes. I marveled at all the skipper butterflies on the salvia in the raised flower bed. There's not much left out there for the pollinators--the two enormous lantana, cosmos, the salvia. . . some variety of zinnia no one's all that a thrilled about. Glenda. . . I made a note of your real name! And made a note of Vit. D3 to look up. Yep, I water bath can tomatoes. Speaking of green tomatoes, Amy, dbarron. I do like fried green tomatoes. (And I do like tomatoes that are really really tasty --to me, that'd be juicy and on the sweet side.). But three years ago, I made a bunch of "green tomato mincemeat." I think it's delicious, but I'm the only one who will eat it. (It was water bath canned, also.). I guess I'll break open a jar and see if it's still tasty. We DO need rain. SAYS 80% chance tomorrow. The lake is down 3 feet now, so there will be no more fishing unless it comes up a foot. Larry, I love all the room you have to play with! It made me think of a big blank canvas just waiting to be brought to life. I'm not big on greens, either. But I love butter crunch lettuce and spinach. I have Malabar out in one of the beds, and not crazy about it either. I pulled all the kale and look forward to having some more. It is SO windy today, running 20-25 mph. Not a good day to water, but the containers desperately needed it. Kind of sad here today. Missing Dawn, of course. And they're having the annual chili cook-off at the marina today. We wouldn't dream of attending a big crowded event right now. But sad about the whole big darned pandemic deal. We did drive by and there were an insanely CRAZY number of people there. Or maybe jumble some of those words a bit. So in honor of chili cook-off day, we're having the good grocery store pizza tonight. I have no idea why that would work, but somehow it does. I am so sorry you had another bout of vertigo, Amy--are you better today? dbarron--I think you surprised us all with your pronouncement about cannas being edible. Well I have a big ole patch of them out back and may just jump into action tomorrow, just to say we did it. Googled them a little while ago. Three months ago, we contemplated getting 1/4-1/2 beef. We called our meat shop and he advised us to wait 3 or 4 months. There was a sort of panic buying at that time. Since then, we've decided if we do buy a bunch, we'll just go with one of their various "bundles." Jen, I am sorry about your "girl." WHAT do you think it was? So sad! But I perfectly get jumping right in with another one--he's a cutie. We did the same thing when my little Daffy cat died 3 years ago--she'd been with me 15 years. Garry cried, I did not. But it was very sad. I had told him a few days earlier, "You know, living out here, we really do need a cat." He agreed. So the day after Daffy died, Garry asked me if I wanted to go see if the vet had any kittens. I was astounded, but we went. And after thinking about it, went back the next day to pick up Tom and Jerry. YES--a new one right away DOES keep one busy and diverted. HJ. So today's the big day. Hope it all goes beautifully! Wednesday was a long long fishing day. Good, though. Thursday I worked hard at Lincoln with a new helper, a great 16-yr old young man. It was fun. John and helper and I pulled out all the sweet potatoes. Then because John and Suzanne had other stuff to do, helper and I picked all the okra, peppers, tomatoes. Then we began tearing out bad or dead-looking plants. Just generally kind of tidying up in places. And finally we sowed lots of frostweed and more milkweed. So a good productive day. So that's where we've been the past few days....See Moredbarron
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