April Week 4 2023
HU-422368488
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slowpoke_gardener
last yearI have been spending quite a bit of time prepping for planting. I have a lead on neighbor, so I spent some time running a siphon hose to a new area we are planting.
This is the down hill end of my 700' siphon hose. I am not getting a lot of flow, but if I let it run 24/7 I should catch a lot of water.
The above picture is yellow squash and zucchini patch. This latch was planted in seeds, we have another that had plants planted in it.
We are trying to be wildlife friendly also. Note the brush pile we are building and letting the brush grow up around the field. We hope to start some small grain plots soon, hoping we can encourage quail to hang around.
The gardens are doing okay, but need rain.HU-422368488 thanked slowpoke_gardenerRelated Discussions
April 2020, Week 4
Comments (67)Now that the two little granddaughters are sleeping, I'm trying to catch up....and there's so much to catch up on. Jennifer, We took the girls shopping at Wal-Mart in Ardmore today so they could buy Mother's Day gifts and cards to give their mom next weekend. It was the first time they'd been out to a store since all of this began. We tried to maintain social distancing, and told them to touch things as little as possible (and they were really good about that) just to be as careful as possible, but really, it is hard to imagine a much safer location to shop in Oklahoma right now since Carter County has only had a grand total of 3 virus cases. We felt pretty comfortable there. Not many shoppers were wearing masks, but all the employees were. And, since we were there, we let them pick out new swimsuits to keep at our house, new pool floats and beach towels. I grabbed a few groceries while Tim helped the girls choose just the right card for their mom, which always takes them forever. I was only looking for a few specific food items, like fresh fruit and canned cat food and dog food, but didn't even notice any particular shortages of anything---even the toilet paper and paper towels were fully stocked and, in fact, piled up everywhere. I would have enjoyed plant shopping at Lowe's, or anywhere else, but have heard so much about what a huge mob scene it is that we just skipped it. When we drove by on our way home, the parking lot was awfully full so I was glad we weren't planning to go there. I went through about an 8 or 10 year phase of trying to have a 3 Sisters Garden. I particularly wanted it to work to keep the coons out of the sweet corn, and it really didn't. It can work if you are very careful with plant selection. Like Amy said, the native people grew field corn or flour corn so their corn stalks were very sturdy and tall compared to the corn stalks of most modern-day sweet corns and that makes a big difference. If I was going to do it again, I'd choose an heirloom flour corn or field corn. I did it with Seneca Red Stalker one year and that worked pretty well. Most pole beans were rampant enough growers to completely cover the corn stalks, but I found that half-runners, like State or Mountaineer, were perfect. They still climbed a lot more than all the plant descriptions said they would, perhaps because of our long growing season, but they were more contained and controlled than the average pole bean. The squash was the hardest part. In the years before the squash vine borers found us, I just grew pumpkins and they did great. They did not really keep the coons out of the corn though. The hardest part with the pumpkins, or with the C. moschata type winter squash that I replaced them with after SVBs showed up here in our eighth year of gardening here, was that the corn finishes up first, and you have to carefully step over all the squash vines in order to harvest the corn. That can be tricky. The native tribes tended to wait until the corn was dried, like we would do if growing popcorn or flour corn, so they weren't harvesting until they could harvest all their dried beans and dried corn together. I am sure they harvested some of their corn at the milk stage to eat as fresh corn, but they didn't discuss that much since it didn't involve much preparation for food storage, and Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden was all about the whole process--from soil preparation through food storage and cooking. Then, with the squash, they harvested it and mostly dried it for long-term storage too. You can read about some of the Indians' food storage methods in the book Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden. Harvesting beans to use green as green beans is a bit trickier, and if the beans are too vigorous, they bury their corn ears beneath their growth and that makes it hard to find and harvest the ears. I always grew tall sunflowers as the fourth sister. The Three (Four) Sisters Garden always was a glorious mess, but harvesting was difficult, and in our snakey location, sort of nerve-wracking. I finally gave up on the concept, but still sometimes grow corn and sunflowers side by side. One thing that helped with the corn was to let the corn plants get 2 or 3' fall before sowing the bean seeds beside them. That way the corn stalks had a head start and were able to gain some height before the bean plants began trying to strangle them. One of my prettiest Three Sisters Gardens, strictly grown for fun, was the combination of Multicolored Broom Corn, purple hyacinth beans and Collective Farm Woman melons instead of a squash. I grew these together at the east end of the garden to try to block herbicide drift. I suppose it worked the two years I did it, but it was more for fun than for an edible harvest. The purple hyacinth beans were very vigorous growers, but so is the broom corn, which often got 10 or 12' tall, and the combination stopped traffic when the beans were in bloom. People wanted to know what the purple-flowered 'trees' were. Larry, Just do what you can do now, and don't judge yourself for it! I remember all those years when you planted and maintained several gardens for yourself and for others, and know you miss those days. I miss the days when I gardened harder too, but need to work at a slower, less-intense pace nowadays and I've learned to accept that. I'm happy to still be gardening. Amy, I dread the day we have to buy a new washer and drier. The ones we have were probably from some of the earliest generation of HE models, and were made back when Sears still made and sold good appliances, if anyone here remembers those days. They have held up very well, but I know all these newer ones don't and won't last for 20-something years like our original washer and drier did. Tim works with a guy who had to get a new washing machine two years in a row, and he was extremely unhappy about it and told Tim that all these new ones are similar versions of useless junk. They lowered our forecast high for Monday from 95 to 91, so that is some bit of an improvement. When that cold front comes at the end of next week, the nights are going to be sort of chilly for May, but our lowest night currently shows a forecast low of 53. Melissa, I'm glad to hear you're gardening, and would love it if we had something like the co-op here. I am FB friends with a lot of the people involved in that and love what they are doing there. When we went to HD last weekend, it was like you described but we were in and out pretty quickly first thing in the morning when they opened and I didn't really mind the way it was set up because at least I finally was able to stop in somewhere and buy some plants. Nancy, It is a shame the fish weren't biting but I bet it was glorious being out on the lake anyway. Jennifer, With onions, it depends on when you planted them and whether you're talking about short day, intermediate day or long day length types. When I plant in mid-February, the first short-day varieties usually start bulbing up in mid-April but aren't ready for harvest until mid-May. Some of the intermediate day length types bulb up at almost the same time, and others bulb up about a month later. With the long day length types, those don't usually start to bulb up for me until late June and aren't ready for harvest until mid to late July, and it depends on the variety because the three I grow---Copra, Highlander and Red River all bulb up at slightly different times. You'll be able to tell when onions are bulbing up because the bulb will be trying to push itself up right out of the ground. If your soil is nice and loose, the onions will literally pop up out of the ground a bit as they enlarge. If you are growing varieties sold by Dixondale, you can look at each product description and it should state the Days to Maturity for any given variety. The only time I spent in the garden today was just a short period spent hand-watering young plants and recently transplanted seedlings, and then I went up to the house and watered all the tomato plants growing in large pots. Some of those have been in those large pots for quite a while now, and.....one SunGold plant produced the first two ripe tomatoes today. They were very low on the plant, buried deep in foliage near the stem, and I might not have noticed they were ripe if I wasn't standing there hand-watering. So, Tim and I each popped a SunGold into our mouth and savored the first taste of a home-grown tomato in 2020. It will be weeks yet before we get the first slicing tomato, and it will come from the Better Bush plant that was planted at the same time as the SunGold. Both were purchased at HD and were Bonnie Plants, solely for the purpose of having early tomatoes as always, particularly since I started our seeds so late this year because of all the endless rain and mud. The first flowers and fruit now have set on some of those seed-grown plants though, so they'll be producing ripe fruit sometime in June, I think. I would expect the Better Bush, which has 8 or 9 tomatoes on it so far, would produce the first ripe one before the end of May, which is a lot later than usual so we are very impatiently waiting for that first ripe tomato and the first BLT sandwiches. It has been extremely windy down here, with wind gusts in the lower 30s for the last 3 or 4 days and that, combined with very little recent rainfall, is drying out everything quite a lot. I noticed the rhubarb plant's large leaves were trying to curl up today from the stress of all that warm wind. Even in morning sun and then shade for the rest of the day, rhubarb just isn't crazy about our climate. There were tons of butterflies out today, and lots of birds singing, and it was a nice day to spend 4 hours sitting and watching the girls play in the pool. Four hours. That's about as long as they can last in the pool (and I'm glad) before they're so exhausted they just have to give up, get out of the pool and come indoors. We coasted through the rest of the day and evening with pizza for dinner, and watching the movie Frozen II for the umpteenth time. I'm hoping to make a quick trip to HD tomorrow morning early in the day to pick up as much mulch as we can squeeze into the truck so I can spend the rest of this week weeding and mulching the garden. Well, maybe not on Monday. It might be mostly too hot for that sort of work except very early in the day, but then the weather will get better after that. I can't believe how warm it is already---part of SW OK hit 102 and 103 today, and I'm glad we were nowhere near that warm here, only 88 degrees. I'm looking forward to the cool front at the end of the week as it will return us to what should be close to normal temperatures for May. We spent a lot of time in April running 10-15 degrees above average and I'd rather not spend most of May doing the same thing. June heat is bad enough in June, we don't need it in May. Dawn...See MoreApril 2022 Week 4
Comments (58)If the wind is not enough ........... bout 2 years ago, I got a new neighbor. And he has a HUGE dog. The dogs name is Duke, as in Marmaduke, so ya get an idea how big it is. The back of the dog is probably waist high on me. But the dog barks incessantly. And he barks at me. I thought after 2 years the dog would be accustomed to me, but if he hears me when I'm on my patio he will starts barking. I can be grilling or smokng meats and he's barking at me. And he will stalk me. When I get near the fence he attacks me by jumping on the fence and barking . Startles the crap out of me. I'm still not use to it. If he ever gets through that fence, I'm in trouble. The entire fence shakes and rattles when he jumps on it. The quiet peaceful days of working in the garden are over with. I've been here 29 years without a problem. There's been four other people in that house and finally my luck ran out and I get bad one. And if he's not barking at me, he's barking at something in the area. Some times , it can go on all day. Day before last, the neighbors on the other side had air conditioning repairman in their yard and the dog barked at them for 2 hours. Sooo, I should go have a talk with them. Well, what are they gonna do ? They're not home in the day time. And I've let them know that I would appreciate them shutting the dog down if they're home and they're somewhat good about that. But they both work. So its me and Duke most days. Years ago, a dog trainer told me to spray the dog with the water hose when they bark. I use that on my dogs. It works. After a few times, all I have to do is pick up the hose. Well, I sprayed Duke and he stopped for a while, but then just ran over to other side of the yard and barked at me. And then the neighbor's wife complained about me spraying the dog. And there was drama. I love dogs. Always had a dog. And I would never ask someone to get rid of their dog. But the dog makes it hard for me to enjoy my back yard. And I really don't think the dog owner cares. But I also don't think there's anything they can do about Duke. So I got off my chest. I put up with the dog all day yesterday, along with the wind. Or maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. Or should've moved out of here, years ago....See MoreMarch or April 2023
Comments (48)Kim, we have too much stuff in the greenhouse. We need to start hardening off now and don't really have a place to do that. Our largest problem is getting a place to plant our plants. Kim, do you have a tiller? Lynn, I never had a light problem, I used a product called stretch wrap, I expect it was much like what you use. The stretch wrap was used in shipping, it was the stuff wrapped around pallets of products to keep them secure in shipping. The problem I had was not getting enough air flow, by not wrapping very high up the cage solved the moisture problem. I am also concerned about the moisture problem in the greenhouse. I am afraid the plant will be getting too thick and we don't have enough air flow. Our first patch of potatoes are breaking through the ground....See MoreAugust 2023 Week 4-Still hot and dry
Comments (30)Jennifer, my sweet potato crop will suffer greatly this year. I kick my self every day for letting my gardening flop. If I am able to garden next year, I have to do things differently, I have to work more on my garden, and stop spending so much time helping my neighbor with his market garden. I have already told him that I just had to cut back, but he says his doctor has told him to cut back also. Neighbor is having heart issues also. I will show you one thing not to do with sweet potatoes. I got some free hay, it was a clean up job that my renter did for a guy while he was at the guy's place bailing hay, so neighbor just bailed this field of Johnson grass and blackberries. I had told my renter that I would take any scrap hay he had, and would be happy to pay for the hauling. I normally compost the really bad hay, but I didn't this hay, I just used it as mulch last year, and you can see what a mistake that was. I mowed a 5' strip along this side of the tall Johnson grass, thinking that I might be able to pull, or dig the stubble out, but I was not man enough to do that. I sprayed the tops of the dead Johnson grass that you see, hoping I could kill it without killing the sweet potatoes. I guess I was a pretty good shot, I don't think I lost any sweet potatoes, and killed a good bit of the Johnson grass. The Johnson grass on the left side of the picture at the time I sprayed was too thin and short for me to risk trying to kill it with spray and not damage my sweet potatoes. I waited until a few days ago and took that stool, and the garden hose you see, along with a "stream" attachment screwed onto the end of the garden hose, and squirted the roots of the Johnson grass loose and pulling the stump out. I have most of that green Johnson grass tossed out to the end of the garden now, and my pickup, containing a 275 gal tote of water draining on the uphill side of the sweet potatoes. While I am boring you, I need to ask advice on how to use the onions. These are Egyptian walking onions and Lisbon bunching onions, they were overgrown worse than the sweet potatoes. I got them cleaned up and squirted a little water on them. I think they look pretty good for something that will, more or less, grow wild. It is a shame to make the best use of something that will last for ever. I am sorry if I have shown these pictures, and ask these questions before, but at my age you wake up in a new world every day....See MoreHU-422368488
last yearHU-422368488
last yearlast modified: last yearHU-422368488
last yearHU-422368488
12 months agoslowpoke_gardener
11 months agoTrying to clean out a spot to plant some tomatoes in the south garden and noticed the wind and rain had broken down some iris, so Madge cut them and placed on the dining room table. I like iris, but wish they would last longer, and if we don't stake them they nearly always break.
HU-422368488 thanked slowpoke_gardener
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