January 2022, Week 3 ALREADY... where does the time go?
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January 2018, Week 4, The January Thaw, Warmth, Wind, Fire, Seeds...
Comments (101)Jennifer, The first time I saw a BP truck at our Wal-mart, which was just last week, it was only delivering wooden shipping crates of BP onions, but then it was back this week delivering a few cool-season herbs and veggies. I'm thinking of those poor little plants right now because our OK Mesonet station is showing a current temperature of 20 degrees and that's pretty much borderline too cold for some of the plants I saw yesterday, especially given how small they are and the fact they are in small containers and not in the ground where soil temperatures could help insulate them from some of the effects of the cold. I hope the garden center employees covered up those plants last night or moved them indoors. While the very early transplant arrivals often do not freeze or have damage at 20 degrees, sometimes they do....and sometimes the damage is invisible and can result in later problems like early bolting or buttonheading of brassicas....and no one links that bolting or buttonheading in March or April to the fact that the plants were exposed to excessively cold temperatures while on the garden center shelves in late January or early February. I'm sorry your mom has the flu and wish her a speedy recovery. I hope whatever you're fighting is not the flu and that you can successfully repel those germs. I carry hand sanitizer in my purse, not that I am obsessive about it, but I hate touching anything in a grocery store at this time of the year for fear that flu and cold germs are lingering everywhere. I wash my hands constantly, and I do not understand how/why people would use a public restroom facility and not wash their hands. I just don't get it. Rebecca, Well, spinach is really cold hardy. Perhaps dew and/or frost have left enough moisture behind to induce germination. We're in severe drought, are awfully dry and have tons of tiny little green things sprouting everywhere now. In fact, the OK Mesonet's Relative Greenness for our county went from 11% last week to 21% this week, which surprised me, but then when I looked at the ground closely, I could see all the tiny green sprouts popping up in fields, and clearly the program (satellite? radar?) that calculates Relative Greenness for each county is 'seeing' that greenup as well. Are any of y'all allergic to cedar (which actually is juniper, but I cannot win that battle on getting people to correctly label it)? Because it is pollinating down here already and everyone who is allergic to it is having allergy symptoms already, including Tim and I. Just yesterday I was looking at cedars in our neighborhood and commenting to Tim how heavily they're covered in pollen, and Fran and I noticed the same thing while out at wildfires in northern Love County a few days ago. A lot of folks who recovered from the flu now thing they are having a relapse or have caught a cold or whatever, and I just wonder if what's actually happening is they are allergic to the cedar pollen. Nancy, We all are so proud of Amber. She's just an awesome person and her students are so lucky to have a teacher who loves them and works so hard to teach them. Everything she does is always for them and about them, so when she was named Teacher of the Year, she was totally surprised because she doesn't think about stuff like that---her focus is completely on her kids. The riding mower is dead.....or dying. It is around 16 or 17 years old and gets used a lot since we mow about 2 acres regularly. I think it really needed to be retired 3-5 years ago, but Tim is a cheapskate who doesn't want to spend the money to buy another one, so he keeps fixing it and keeps it limping along and just barely working. I just kinda wish he'd go ahead and buy a new one and have something reliable. Weekends are too short as it is and he doesn't get much mowing done if half the weekend is spent chasing down parts and fixing the mower. Jen, I bet it was a nice day to go to the dog park. Our dogs spent a lot more time outdoors today in their dog yard than they usually do in the winter, and they were so thrilled that it was mild, sunny and warm. They were exhausted by the end of the day which I always think is a good thing as it does cut down on how energetic they are in the evening. I think Tigger is the perfect name for a dog! I assume the planters you're planting are your winter sowing? Have fun finishing it up. Nancy, That bermuda grass is such a nuisance, and it creeps into the east end of my garden every year in late summer once it is too snaky for me to hand-weed it out. Johnson grass does the same, and it essentially is bermuda grass on steriods. Since I don't use chemical herbicides and since the presence of the rattlesnakes and copperheads makes weeding too risky after a certain point, that sort of invasion just cannot be avoided. It drives me mad. Even if I could hand-remove it, I'm willing to bet that at some point the summer weather would get too hot and I'd decide I wasn't going to spend all that time out in the heat removing it. I'll be removing all of it this week (I hope) that I can as long as the wind stays down and I am able to spend more time at home in the garden instead of being away at fires. I think on Mon and Tues, the wind will be low enough that I'll be home in the garden. I'm not so sure about Wed and Thurs because the stronger winds are expected to return then. I have been watching for snakes this week on the warmer days because last January they came out here in southern OK on the warm winter days. A little girl in the Austin, TX area was bitten by a rattlesnake at Longhorn Caverns State Park a few days ago on a warm, sunny day when the family was excited to get outdoors and have fun after being cooped up by cold weather, and that certainly caught my attention. Undoubtedly it generally is warmer in Austin than it is up here at this time of the year, but not necessarily that much warmer, so I took her mom's warning about snakes being out to be a serious one. I think your soil will be fine whether the stuff is broken down enough or not. We have gazillions of things that sprout and grow just fine in some pretty awful dense, red clay.....although I'd never expect my precious garden plants to survive and perform well in that stuff. It is merely that as the soil gets better via amending, the plant performance improves year after year. I've always been in it for the long haul---not expecting to totally turn around the soil in 3, 5 or even 10 years, but just dedicated to continually improving it slowly over time. There's places in my garden that probably never get as much compost as I'd like, but the plants grow well there anyway. I do look at the improved soil now and have trouble remembering how truly awful it was in the beginning---but all I have to do is dig down maybe a foot to get beneath the area of improved soil and there's my reminder of the awful red clay we started out with. We only eat out about once a week, something made easier by the fact that it is pretty much too long of a drive to go anywhere that we'd really like to eat, and eating out usually is restricted to the weekend anyway since Tim's long commute makes his day incredibly long as it is. By the time he walks in the door at night, he's been gone 13 or 14 hours and going out to eat is not on his list of things he wants to do....and I don't blame him. I am hoping for a better week this week than last week when we had fires virtually every day. Having said that, we're off to a bad start, with the fire pagers going off for a vehicle in the roadway on fire about a mile from our house around 4 a.m. this morning. I am sure there's tons and tons I do not understand about motor vehicles, but I just do not understand how you're driving up the road at 4 a.m. and all of a sudden your car or truck bursts into flames. That must be a terrifying moment when you realize you're in a vehicle that is on fire. So, now that I am up and wide awake, there's no way I can fall back asleep. Tim, by contrast, can crawl back into bed after something like that and be asleep and snoring in 5 minutes. I wish I could fall back asleep like that, but it just doesn't happen---once I'm awake, I'm awake to stay. This is useful in summer because I just go outdoors at the break of day to get into the garden early and beat the heat, but not so useful in winter when it is cold outdoors. Dawn...See MoreJanuary 2022, Week 4: Out of the Deep Freeze
Comments (37)Well, I went through MY Evernote looking for a "Mother of a Hubbard" blog post about tying down row covers so you could raise the sides for warm weather. Couldn't find it. I am not pleased with Evernote. Periodically they have changed the format used, which in some cases requires me to go into settings to find the original post. If you're on the free version, you're only allowed a certain amount of space per month. The last update changed the home page, after 8 years of using it, and being familiar with it. It takes forever just to load and to load chosen notes. Be aware of these things before you invest too much time in it. I used to love it. When I tried to migrate it to a new note app, 99% of the notes were un-readable. I can't get excited about seeds. Of course, I'm doing a lot of napping since I got home from the hospital. Went to primary doc yesterday. He showed me with graphs just how sick I was. It was scary. If you haven't gotten the 2 pneumonia shots, DO IT. Apparently the Step P bacteria I had (not the same as step throat) is one covered by the vaccine and that means I rarely cough. I'm just tired. I've had pneumonia before. If they hadn't gone out of their way to prove it, I wouldn't believe I had it. They were treating me with steroids and Covid treatments at first (they were sure I had it at first). And heavy duty antibiotics. It seems everything they did un-balanced some other system in my body, like raising blood sugar and blood pressure and potassium was low. Happy tractoring. Make friends with some one like Larry. The local repair places will have a back log during certain times, like haying season. I don't think my collards survived the last cold spell. I should have told Ron to water them. Need to let the dogs out....See MoreFebruary 2022 Week 3- let's get this party started!
Comments (41)I had another Dr. appoint today and on the way home I had Madge stop at the Poteau Farmers Co-op. I can hardly drive through Poteau without stopping to check on their seed supply. I bought an ounce ea. of three different cucumber seeds ( just what I need, more seeds ). I also bought a 50# bag of 13-13-13. This will give me more than enough fertilizer for my two house gardens, and the wildlife garden. I use mostly compost in the house gardens. The fertilizer $24.08 with tax. The seeds were $1.00 a pack. The fertilizer was a little more than I have been paying, the seeds are the same price. I guess I may be hording, but I want to make sure I have fertilizer and seeds on hand just in case the supply chain messes up. Of course all of you know that fuel has gone up, and expected to even go higher, but groceries are going up also, which makes it worse on the ones that try to live on a fixed income. Madge just told me that someone was calling me ( it's the donkeys ). I can hardly hear, but the donkeys tell Madge, knowing that she will tell me. Yesterday when I went out into the pasture to find the stock to feed them a little. The donkeys were across the creek, about 3 or 400 yards from the house just running like crazy ( you don't see donkeys run like that often ). When I got back to the house, Madge ask me what was wrong with the donkeys? I told her that they were telling you that the weather is changing, she had never heard that, but when I was a kid, we never had a tv, and sometimes we did not have a radio. When the hoses were running like that, my dad would always say that, it seemed to have some truth to it. Dad would also say that a horse would turn its butt to the wind if it could not find cover. I never did pay much attention to that one, if the weather was that bad, I had already found cover and the horses were the last thing on my mind. All I had to worry about was having plenty of coal busted up and in the house, or by the door so we could easily carry a bucket in to keep the fire going. Well I am rambling and the donkeys are telling on me....See More3rd week of March 2022
Comments (60)Productive day for me, too. I cleared out the overgrown stuff around my outside water pump so I can use it for the garden. Much easier than fighting through dogs to get to the faucet in their area. Planted the elderberry I got from Bruce at SF a few years back. It was one tiny stick then so I put it in a bucket until I decided what to do with it. Then we started talking about moving so I left it to plant at the new place. It was still small, but I have 3 or 4 little twigs instead of one. Threw out some lettuce, cilantro, and a few other seeds. At this point I'm not sure what I have planted. I try to snap pics so I can reference back but I'm pretty sure I missed some. And got my lawn mower tire back on track, thanks to Bruce. It went flat & popped off the rim, so I went looking for ways to fix it. Nothing worked so I posted in the local facebook group & he offered to fix it for me. Looks like tomorrow's another nice day here, so maybe I'll get a little more done. Or the husband will be feeling up to tackling that center bed so I can start planting it....See MoreHU-422368488
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