October 2020, Week 3
dbarron
3 years ago
Well, a good discussion was had by several of us last week.
Colder air came in and I had a frost Friday morning, that didn't appear to harm anything. Actually the frost mystified me, I was out prowling to pre-dawn to see what was going to be zapped. I only found the magic frost on the car (solid layer of frost) and on my rudbeckia maxima leaves (very large, slick leaves). Usually things very low on the ground get protection from the radiant heat from the soil, but the rudbeckia seemed to grab and hold that frost. I dunno? Frost is weird.
As an aftermath, I have indoor plants out on the back porch everywhere that I've been too lazy to get to their winter homes. I hope today to do that, because they're gonna need some watering quite soon. I also have my potted blueberry out there, because my sky blue vine (thunbergia grandiflora)
is wrapped in a stranglehold around it. Unfortunately that vine is a lot like clematis and very brittle, so I really didn't want to break it trying to untangle it quickly. I'll try again today so that the blueberry can go back outside for the winter.
I noticed yesterday that the first fall crocus (not exactly sure which species..just that it's in the same group as the saffron crocus) had pulled a surprise flowering...I love surprises.
Still no rain, and I've been watering trees, shrubs, and perennials all. It might rain Monday and/or Tuesday, but doesn't look like much (less than .3 inches)..but I guess that's better than absolutely nothing, which may be what we get? I would really like to see 2-3 inches over 2-3 days..that would help a lot.
Like Larry, something is eating my tomatillos usually just about the time I'd pick them, so I'm picking them a bit early now. I am not sure if we're talking birds or rodents? They usually only eat enough of it to spoil the fruit :( Not that I'm much better, I then let about 1/3 of them sit on the counter and decay vs using them. Not enough ripen at once for me to do much productive with them. I really should have just got a quart freezer bag and sliced them into the bag, then roasted them when I accumulated enough to make it worthwhile or when I wanted to use them..but that made too much sense, so I didn't do that.
Tomorrow is my eye exam, and I'm so looking forward to new glasses and being perhaps less blind.
My absentee ballot arrived Friday, so I guess I should fill it out and get it back soon. Our county clerk complained at me, when I asked where mine was on Wednesday. She said that they normally mail out about 2K ballots, this year over 16K and still sending. I do encourage everyone to do whatever they need to do to vote this year, but stay safe doing it.
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dbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoRelated Discussions
October 2019, Week 3
Comments (35)Larry, I probably would use a small tractor for a while as we redo the landscape, but I'm not sure we'd use it after that. Our property is a strongly sloping creek hollow with very little level land (the house, southern side yard, back yard, detached garage and greenhouse pretty much fill up all the flat land), and once when Tim tried to mow with a friend's tractor and brush hog, it was a disaster because the land was too hilly and rough and the tractor didn't do well on the high spots or the low spots. We'll probably never have a tractor for that reason. I'd love to have one that made the tough jobs easier, but it doesn't seem like a practical tool for us unless we hire someone to come in and level the unforested parts of our land, which I doubt we ever will because of soil compaction issues with red clay. Now, if a tractor fell from the sky....we'd take it! Don't give up until you're ready! My plan for old-age gardening is a container garden, and I may start converting the back garden to a large container garden area this Spring. I will lay it out with really wide paths so it can work for us without modification later on in our lives. I couldn't do it all at once, but perhaps bit by bit over the next few years I could add more containers until the garden space was full. When Fred first gave me molasses feed tubs for growing tomatoes, he thought I was nuts to go to all the trouble to fill them up, etc., and to use them, until he saw how well the plants grew with so little soil-tending and weeding. His son lined up 4 or 5 molasses fed tubs for him the next year on an elevated surface of old tables so Fred, who had perpetual back trouble, could garden at the waist level instead of bending over, and Fred was so happy he stopped giving me molasses feed tubs because he began using them all himself. I was thrilled for him. He still had traditional row crops in the ground like corn, beans, melons, peas, etc. but his tomatoes and peppers too, I think, forever after were grown in molasses feed tubs. This allowed him to garden all throughout his 80s and into his 90s, though his son increasingly took over all the row crops while Fred tended the container crops. He was such a happy camper. I think we call be happy campers later in life if we just make the modifications that suit us and allow us to continue gardening in some shape, form or fashion. Jennifer, There's 7 birds: 4 Quakers: Arthur, Guinevere, Ducky (a male) and Sarah--they are two bonded pairs (A&G and D&S), and he's had them since about 2008 or 2009. He has two bonded parolets, Sunny and Leia, and one canary-winged parakeet---BeBe. He rescued Artie and Gwennie from an uncaring who left them in a cage and didn't interact with them---they were unsociable and depressed, but improved quickly under Chris' care. BeBe belonged to a sweet little old lady for many years, and she became Chris' bird after that lady passed away and none of her children wanted BeBe. While BeBe bonded slowly with Chris, she adored Jana from Day 1 and is Jana's bird now, practically speaking. Ducky is brilliantly smart and can carry on quite a conversation. I can ask him "where's daddy?" and he'll tell me "Daddy had to work today". It cracks me up. He will talk to you all day long if you'll talk to him and listen to his answers and respond to what he says. So, when we are taking care of them, we don't just uncover their cages and give them food and water, etc. We let them out of their cages and let them fly around indoors, sit on our laps or shoulders, play with toys, talk with us, etc. so we're up there for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening. They are great pets and can live for decades, so they are quite a commitment. Chris, Jana and the girls love their birds, and we birdsit for them several times a year. Each bird has its own personality and you have to know what it is in order to interact well with them---it has taken me years to get to know them as well as I do now. I still cannot find any cool-season annuals to plant. I don't know if I waited too long, or if they aren't in the stores yet, or if they had them earlier when it was in the 90s and the poor things burned up in the heat or what. I'm going to go plant shopping tomorrow and try to find something. We have worked so hard between trying to get the exterior of the house painted and the birds taken care of....and the house isn't done yet, but it is about 80% done and maybe we can finish it tomorrow afternoon after we do the weekly grocery shopping (and some plant shopping). If we shop too long (I really want to find some plants), I can work on painting Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. As far as I know, we are through with birdsitting. Chris, Jana and Lillie are on their way home---having rented a car this afternoon to drive home after their flight home was postponed at least 3 times and about 7 or 8 hours. Chris had a feeling it would be delayed even longer, since he works at an international airport and knows how these things go. When I talked to them they had a 7-hour drive ahead of them, so if all goes well they should be home pretty much any time now. I did notice that the dianthus plants in the garden are starting to bloom now---they must be liking the cooler weather---but I'd like to have some pansies and violas to go with them. They usually arrive in the stores here in flats in October and it is October now. I haven't seen those plants in the stores, but Home Depot is full of fake Christmas trees, fake wreaths, and real 'living Christmas trees' of various kinds in pots, and rosemary plants sheared into Xmas tree shapes, and such. They also still have lots of warm-season bedding plants, though I don't know who would buy those now that we are a month away from our average first freeze date and already have had a killing freeze anyway. There's still a lot of nursery stock, especially shrubs, on hand and, if I could make up my mind about what I want to plant in the Spring, I could buy them now and hold them over the winter until the soil is ready in Spring 2020. I bet I'd do a better job of keeping them watered and protected from the cold than the local big box stores will. So, I think a plant shopping trip is definitely happening tomorrow, and who knows what I might bring home. There's definitely some plants I know that I want for sure, so if I could find those, I wouldn't hesitate to buy them now even if I can't plant them yet. Dawn...See MoreMarch 2020, Week 3, Raining, Raining, Raining
Comments (93)Jennifer, Thanks for the seed report on SESE. About 6 or 8 weeks ago I saw the handwriting on the wall with the coming pandemic and ordered my seeds for both the 2020 and 2021 garden from them. I'm glad I did. And, see there, I am being optimistic and believing I'll survive the pandemic or I wouldn't have ordered seeds for next year. I'm glad you're seeing signs that people are being proactive, and I hate that churches may not be able to have their usual Easter-related services and activities. We have to remember that a pandemic is such an incredibly danger public health risk and daily life, as we know it, is changing a lot. I know that people are not used to quarantining, and I'd rather be out and about than stuck at home all the time, but I truly feel the time to stop going out as much as possible and to stay home as much as possible is now. The new cases in Texas are exploding now, and many of them are community-acquired, meaning that the patient had no known contact with anyone else who has been diagnosed with the disease, did not travel anywhere outside the local area and, thus, obviously became infected from someone in their local community. I expected the numbers to move pretty fast in TX once I saw the initial reports, but they're increasing probably a little more quickly than I was thinking they would. At least we are not in the same condition here yet as a few other states like Washington, California, New York, New Jersey, Florida and Louisiana. Texas was ahead of OK by only a couple of weeks in terms of COVID-19 cases spreading, so we still have a chance to react quickly here and maybe have it not get as widespread as quickly. I am not going to violate anybody's privacy here, but want to say that our family knows some people who are ill, have been tested and are awaiting their test results. It is shocking when you hear news like that, and that is especially true when it is people just like you who have been pretty careful, only going to work and back home again, and just grocery shopping or buying gasoline as needed---no travel, no going to the mall or the gym back when those still were open, no obvious crossing paths with infected people as far as they knew, etc. I think for most people in north central TX near us, the time to stay home and stay away from people probably was about 2 weeks ago, and now that they have community spread, it is almost too late. Their governor is issuing new directives and restrictions almost daily, so maybe they can halt the virus' spread. In OK, if we all start being as proactive as possible now, maybe most of us can avoid the virus as it makes its first official round through our state. OK hasn't had too many cases yet, but I've noticed that as soon as one case pops up in any given county, a second or third one is not far behind. We need to change our mindset now, if we haven't already, to avoid becoming one of those cases. I just hate this, but at least we all can retreat to our gardens and keep ourselves busy at home. I just want to add that Tim and I have one set of rules to keep track of on the south side of the river and another on the north and it is confusing. We'll want to go somewhere, so we'll say to one another "is it safe?" and then we have to figure out if that sort of place is open on the Texas side or the Oklahoma side, or both, or neither. It wears out my brain to the point that I think it is just easier to stay home. I am very concerned about small businesses all across the nation. Here in our county, one guy made a list that since has been forwarded around via various apps and FB, telling us which small businesses are still open, what their operating hours are now, whether you can call ahead and order what you need, etc. We need to remember to patronize our local, small businesses so we don't lose them from our community for good. Nancy, I am angry about all the coverups too. I have been tracking this beast since mid-January and was just beside myself with frustration from early February onward because I thought that was our nation's best chance to stop it in its tracks, and there stood all the politicians implying or even stating it was basically the flu, which it is not, and that it would go away as the weather warmed up, which also is false. The only thing I knew for sure at that point was that the government wasn't going to act in time to protect us, so we had to do everything possible to protect ourselves. I think Tim and Chris thought at first that maybe I was a little too obsessed with it, but then they got on board pretty soon thereafter as they watched it spreading across the world. One of the things I thought was heartbreaking was when Jana told me that she and Chris were going to go ahead and take the girls to the Texas Gulf Coast last week so they could make memories that the girls would have to hang on to "in case anything happened". That told me that Chris and Jana both clearly understand the front-line risks they face in their careers and know that tomorrow or next month or next year is not guaranteed for any of us. How I wish their vacation could have been just a normal vacation with the kids, not marred by fears of what comes next in this pandemic. Both of them expect to be exposed and quarantined, a concern heightened by the lack of proper PPE to keep them safe. No entity---no city, state, county, hospital, fire department, police department, nursing home, etc. has enough PPE stockpiled to deal with this crisis. Since most of it is made in China, and China has been shut down production-wise since early January, there's no quick relief in sight either. I fear for all our first responders and medical personnel. Jen, I agree that modern-day technology offers us options not available in previous times of crisis. I'm glad you're finding a way to make it work for you. Larry, I totally understand how you feel. Tim and I said we wouldn't go out and about when the virus started getting close to home, and then he took a week of vacation and we went somewhere pretty much every day, even knowing we might be exposing ourselves to infection. Sometimes being bad is fun, and I'm glad we were able to eat at a couple of our favorite restaurants in Texas before the governor shut them down at mid-week last week. We do carry wipes with us everywhere, and have hand sanitizer in our vehicle and I carry a mini-bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse. I hope we've done enough to stay safe. We didn't hear a single cough anywhere for days, and then noticed a lot more coughing in public yesterday, so I take that as a warning sign. After a quick trip to the feed store and to Lowe's today, we are officially staying home. Well, except Tim has to go to work each day and that is just unavoidable, but I'll be cleaning and disinfecting everything he touches when he comes in from work. I suppose he won't let me stand at the back door and spray him down with Lysol before he enters the house, will he? I think Tim should pack a suitcase to carry in the car just like he does before a forecasted snowstorm and should be prepared to hunker down and stay in Texas if anyone issues a stop-movement type edict while he is a work, particularly if such an edict prohibits crossing state lines. I don't know if such an edict is coming on either a statewide or national level, but if it is, he'd be in better shape if he has a suitcase full of clothing,medication and toiletries. Remember the good old days when all we had to worry about with the garden was just weather and pests? Dawn...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 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 Moredbarron
3 years agodbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agodbarron
3 years ago
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
3 years agodbarron
3 years agodbarron
3 years ago
OklaMoni
3 years agoI have a friend... not telling where... because of the cotton... and the option for problems.... anyhow, she was trying to get different varieties and found out, she better quit inquriing.
Amy I know about the Y in Owasso. One of my friends used to live in Owasso, and she still drives up there to swim. It's just a bit far, since I live in OKC.
My pool, had been at the new senior center. I don't like their swim option at the moment.
Here are the beans, I finally finished shelling:
and have you ever seen Castor Beans THAT big?
dbarron thanked OklaMonidbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoslowpoke_gardener
3 years ago
Madge wanted to go to the wildlife garden to get 3 or 4 pumpkins for decorations. Here is 6 of the 4 she picked out, there are 4 more not in the picture. I am not sure how she did in math, but we don't count the same. The way I was taught to count, I would say "Jill picked 10 pumpkins", not 3 or 4.
dbarron thanked slowpoke_gardenerdbarron
3 years agolast modified: 3 years agoOklaMoni
3 years agodbarron
3 years agodbarron
3 years agoOklaMoni
3 years agoAnyone know??? Will a tomato plant be viable/can I keep it going once it makes roots and I plant it (indoors)?
I made a BIG mistake back in April, or maybe even May.... I lost track of which plant was which.
I planted both.
One gave me 3 tomatoes... the other a WHOLE bunch. I don't know, which to start in February... sooooo today, when I picked the last tomatoes I cut a few stems off, thinking I will let them root, and see if they will be worth it to plant in the spring next year.
Then I found this stow away on my basil I brought in:
of course, I have no idea what it is...
and this was all I harvested today:
The tomatoes in the white tub came from the mystery plant. The BIG tomatoes are the Mortgage Lifter variety, the okra has some extra big pods... they were missed by Barbara when she harvested okra while I was gone at the beginning of the monthexcept for the peppers that were already hanging in the garage....
I am hoping the coolness in the garage is best for my tomatoes... cause that is where they are now.
At first, I was sorry I hadn't done all this yesterday... but in the end... I got to do it (including ripping out the mater and okra plants) without sweating... guess that is worth something too. :)
Moni
dbarron thanked OklaMonidbarron
3 years ago
hazelinok
3 years agoLarry, I keep meaning to tell you that zinnia seed you sent to me has finally bloomed. And I’m thrilled that most are yellow. Of course, they won’t make it much longer but I’m soaking up their beauty while I can.
dbarron thanked hazelinokdbarron
3 years agodbarron
3 years ago
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