June week 1 is almost here
OklaMoni
2 years ago
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OklaMoni
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agodbarron
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Garden Pics - Week of June 1
Comments (6)Beautiful pictures! I am envious of how far ahead of me you guys are. Neither my fern leaf peony nor Alliums are blooming yet. Here are some that are blooming though: Assorted Darwin Tulips Bought as Double Flowering plum, but not really double, eh? Dwarf Garland Spirea Assorted Daffs King of Hearts Fern Leaf Bleeding heart Rose Glow Barberry just starting to bloom. I hope that the weather will soon warm up here, so I can have some more blooms! On the plus side, the cool weather has prolonged the bloom time of my tulips. Janet...See Morestart-up 1 week ago...here are my numbers
Comments (4)lsbarkley's suggestion to hop on over to troublefreepools.com is excellent. You should find various "stickies" and lots of water chemistry experts there to help you balance your pool's water and keep it balanced. But here are some starters. The good news is that your alkalinity is already on the doorstep of where you want it to be (70 vs. 80-120) and your pH is very good as well. Your pucks are supplying your water with both CYA and chlorine, although I'm not sure they can supply the CYA fast enough. Without CYA in an outdoor pool, you'll be losing your chlorine to the sunlight at a very, very fast rate and be a prime candidate for algae. Approximately 6#, 11 oz. of "pure" CYA will take your pool from 0 to 30 CYA. Do not add it all at once; add about half, wait a week, retest and add as needed. It dissolves slowly and can be placed in a knee high, knotted up and placed in your skimmer. You need about 30 or so for your CYA reading to help you hold some chlorine in the pool. You definitely want to increase your calcium to the 200-400 range to protect your gunite pool. If you're using powdered shock, check the label...it's probably calcium hypochlorite (cal-hypo). This product supplies BOTH chlorine and calcium and is actually a good product to use since you need BOTH calcium and chlorine right now. I was in your situation when our pool was built and we used cal-hypo exclusively for chlorination until our calcium was in range, then switched over to bleach for chlorination. BTW, in your size pool, 1 gallon of 6% bleach should increase your chlorine level by 2.1ppm. One thing you definitely need right away is a good testing kit so you don't have to run to the pool store each time you need your water tested AND you won't have to rely on some inexperienced kid doing the testing. I don't know where I'd be without my test kit! This link has a great one: http://www.tftestkits.com/index.php. Good luck....See MoreWeek 1, June 2017, General Garden Talk
Comments (100)I came back this morning and read all of this thread to try to catch up on everyone's news that I missed while we were without the internet. Y'all know I couldn't read it all without commenting at least a little, so here goes: Amy, Flea beetles are only an issue here very briefly, usually in the February-March time frame, but sometimes a little bit into April as well. Are they a problem for you in hot weather? I hope they don't find your eggplant, but your plants are large enough now that they ought to be able to withstand the flea beetle damage anyway. Jay, Without seeing the yellow striped bugs, it is hard to guess, but my best guesses would be one of the more obscure striped varieties of Colorado Potato Beetles, Cucumber beetles or blister beetles. Sorry to be so late to reply but our internet has been out and I've largely been cut off from the world. Lots of folks in OK are reporting various striped versions of pests that they normally do not see. Here at our house, it has been striped cucumber beetles in huge numbers. We normally only have the spotted ones. I have no idea why 2017 is the year of the striped pests. Amy, I wouldn't let my DH near a restaurant supply store! When we redid the kitchen, I planned a space for everything....but I did not plan a space for random impulse purchases from restaurant supply stores. Tim even has his own drawer for all his BBQ tools, which is a first. At least that way, his BBQ stuff isn't cluttering up the regular drawers of everyday kitchen utensils. Eileen, You can learn canning at the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This is the government-funded source for safe, approved canning procedures and it is awesome. Also, in the summer months, canning classes often are offered by local community colleges, the extension service and sometimes through other community groups. The most important thing to know about canning is that one must follow the canning recipes explicitly. You cannot make a recipe your own by changing things because any change you make can render the food unsafe when canned and can lead to illness and even death via nasty pathogens like botulism. When recipe changes are permissible, they are clearly stated. Not many canning recipes come with a lot of approved substitutions because of all the work involved in testing to ensure the safety of each approved substitution. Kim, I'm so glad you've been having fun with your little man. Man, he sure is growing and getting tall now! Rebecca, Even before I read down to George's post, I was getting a sinking feeling about your tomato plants. Verticillium normally is a cool-season disease and not seen here in OK nearly as much as fusarium. However, May did turn back cool for various parts of the state, so I think it certainly could have happened in this case. Normally, it would be more likely to be fusarium wilt here. I hope these plants are in containers so it cannot spread. I wouldn't reuse that soil. Well, maybe you could if you pasteurized it in the oven (which will stink up the house). Or, put it on a hot compost pile and cook it to high temperatures this summer to kill the pathogens. There now, I feel a little more caught up on what I missed last week. My week, especially without the internet, was an endless round of mostly harvesting tomatoes, squash, peppers, and onions. I'm glad I dug all the potatoes before the heat arrived. I haven't weighed them (who has time?) but there's more than we ever can eat before they all sprout. I'll likely dehydrate and freeze some. The frozen ones can be used to make quick mashed potatoes over the next year. The onions still standing in the garden (one intermediate daylength variety, all of the .ong daylength variety Copra, and most of the other 2 long daylength varieties, Red River and half of Highlander) need to hurry up and flop over so I can harvest them. It is an epic onion harvest this year thanks to the lack of cold weather in February and March. I'll be able to chop or slice about 3 years' worth and freeze them, and then still have enough long daylength types in dry storage to last us through next year. I'd like to get something else growing in the onion space before we start hitting 100 degrees again. Dawn...See MoreWeek 3, June 2017, General Garden Talk
Comments (103)Nancy, I used to wonder aloud, even here on this forum, how it was that 10 of our 14.4 acres are heavily wooded and yet we rarely saw a squirrel. It wasn't that I was complaining, but it just seemed odd. I suppose the dogs we had in our early years scared them away. Well, the old dogs don't scare them and this year we have tons of them. I agree they are just rodents with bushy tails. I have been ignoring them in the yard, but if they start getting in the garden, they are going to be in trouble. Long, long ago we raised a baby squirrel using kitten milk replacer and the tiny bottle that comes with it. We never knew what happened to its mother, but had had a vicious thunderstorm and this baby probably fell out of a squirrel nest and she didn't come find it. It was so small that Chris, who was probably 13 or 14 at the time, walked around wearing a pocket t-shirt with the squirrel riding in the pocket. It spent the rest of its time in a hamster cage or being bottle fed. Later on it transitioned to a nut/fruit/seed blend meant for birds. Finally, when it seemed large enough to release, he'd put the squirrel outdoors in the morning for ever-lengthening periods of time (just like hardening off plants, lol), but whenever he went outside to check on it, it would run to him and come back indoors. One day, it didn't come back and we knew it had successfully gone back into the wild. That was a relief. I didn't want to have a pet squirrel in a cage in the house forever. Nowadays, I don't know if anyone in this family would want to get up at night to bottle feed a tree rat. Y'all do seem heavily overpopulated by squirrels this year. If the nut-bearing native trees up there produced as heavily last fall as they did down here, that's the reason why. We had so many acorns from the oak trees that walking in the yard was like trying to walk on marbles or golf balls, depending on the oak variety. We swept and raked up and composted acorns by the thousands all autuman and winter, and those were just from the yard, not the entire woodland. If the hickories, walnuts and pecans produced as heavily in the woodland as the oaks did, I'm surprised we don't have 1 billion squirrels. I'm afraid your battle with the voles and moles (and do you have gophers too?) will be constant, but I'm glad you're seeing fewer of them. I haven't found much vole damage in the garden yet, but they've been in there. Every now and then Pumpkin catches one and brings it out of the garden to play cat-and-mouse with it in the yard (endlessly) and I rarely see a dead vole, so I'm worried he is doing catch-and-release when we gets tired of playing with it. The good thing is that vole populations cycle up and down in roughly 2 to 5 year cycles, so some years will be better, though other years may be worse. Kaida sounds absolutely so precious and it touches my heart so much that she clearly adores you and trusts you and will sit and open her heart up to you and share all her thoughts, dreams, feelings and more. Someones when somebody remarries later on in life, the family is not so accepting of/loving towards the new spouse, but clearly they all have embraced you as their own and that is special too. Kaida herself sounds like she is such a precious gift and I know you surely treasure her in your life. I'm glad you're a sucker for kids. I know you will not regret one moment spent with her this summer and, hey, now you've got two more hands available for weeding! You certainly inherited a fine bunch of folks in the younger generations when you married Garry, so surely your life overflows with many blessings. I know it doesn't make you miss your son and his family back in MN any less, but it is nice to have the new kids, grandkids and great-grandkids geographically closer to you, isn't it? Millie, I didn't know that. What a horrible thing to use around edible plants! I do know that many, many products that once sold and widely used have been banned. When I was a kid, they sprayed DDT as the solution to everything. I always hated that stuff, but we were stupid kids, and when the big tanker truck was driving up and down all our local streets spraying for mosquitoes in the 1960s, we idiot children road our bicycles behind in the mist coming from that truck. It is a wonder we aren't all dead. My dad never used many chemicals, and as he got older, he progressively used them less and less until he was almost to the point of being organic by the time Alzheimer's Disease stole his mind and he gave up gardening because he no longer remembered how to do it. The few chemicals he used, he kept in a chest in the garage and we knew we were not even allowed to open the door to that thing. Our government does a lot of crazy things, and I just try to ignore it and them as much as possible. The tobacco thing is perplexing, but it is what it is--a sign of how dysfunctional our federal govenment has become, not that our state government is any better either. Hazel, If I had to choose between garden time and internet time, the garden would win every time. Since I'm home all day, I usually have time for both. Peppers are prone to sunscald in our climate. The plants can produce more fruit than their foliage can cover. When I see that happening, I try to remember to give them some extra nitrogen and extra water to push more foliar growth. When you first notice sunscalded peppers, if you bring them inside, you can cut out the bad part and use the rest of the pepper. If you don't notice the sunscald until later on, often the fruit will begin rotting inside from the damage. I harvested a laundry basket full of peppers last week and threw away maybe 3 bell peppers that had sunscald so badly that they were unusable, but was able to salvage and use most of several others that were only mildly sunscalded. I'm sorry to hear about the SVBs. It seems to be happening a lot in your part of the state over the last week or two. I keep thinking every morning as I walk down to the garden that today will be the day that I lose my first squash plant to an SVB, but it hasn't happened yet. It will happen any time though. There's some squash bugs and I'm trying to control them, but it is an annoying and time-consuming task. Hand-picking squash bugs and drowning them is effective, but while I'm doing it, there's a little voice inside my head screaming "ain't nobody got time for that". lol. It is true, but I take the time and do it anyway. Right now the temperatures are cool enough that I don't mind spending some morning time on squash bug destruction, but the deeper we get into summer and the hotter the weather gets, I know I will mind doing it and at some point I'll just stop doing it. We just do not have enough good natural pests of squash bugs, leaf-footed bugs, blister beetles or stink bugs, so keeping a garden free of them is virtually impossible. Well, maybe people who use chemical pesticides can do it, but that's not me and I won't go that route. In my newly open spaces, I'm planting fall tomatoes and more southern peas. Always, always southern peas because we like them and because they tolerate heat so well. I've already got too much okra, winter squash, watermelons and melons, so southern peas it will be. Is there anything you want more of but haven't planted yet? If so, that's what I would plant in your newly available garden beds. You could go ahead and plant green beans now for a fall harvest. It is a touch early for them down here, but I've had good luck some years from a late June planting of them. At the worst, they'll start blooming in hot weather and not produce much until the weather cools in late August or early September, but if we get periodic cool and rainy spells, sometimes they will produce all summer long. I hope rain finds y'all soon. It is ridiculous how long your part of the state has gone now without meaningful rainfall. Here's the map that illustrates it pretty well: Consecutive Days Without 0.25" of Rain It is shocking that the month of the year that generally is the rainiest has brought central OK somewhere between nothing and next-to-nothing in terms of inches of rainfall. The end of May wasn't much better, was it? We slipped into Moderate Drought 2 weeks ago, then two good rainfalls brought part of our county back out of it and back to Abnormally Dry last week. Oops. I never did the Drought Monitor post last week, so here's the latest Oklahoma Drought Monitor map: OK Drought Monitor And, for forum members who live outside of OK, here's the US Drought Monitor Map: U S Drought Monitor Map Honestly, as a gardener, by the time that the powers-that-be show us as being Abnormally Dry, we already are so dry that I almost cannot water enough to make a difference so to some extent, it doesn't matter to me what stage we're in each week, because they're all bad and all challenging to the garden plants. However, once we hit Severe Drought I stop watering everything but the perennials because I can't water enough to push production out of annual veggie plants once we are that dry. Even in Moderate Drought, sometimes it feels like the watering is only keeping plants alive, but not really keeping them in production. The good news is that summer is actually here now, and it doesn't last forever, so we can start hoping for an early autumn cooldown and the return of more plentiful moisture. Keeping plants happy in July and early August in OK surely is incredibly challenging even in just a normal run-of-the-mill year, much less in a drought year. Dawn...See MoreNancy RW (zone 7)
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