May week 4 2023
HU-422368488
10 months ago
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May 2019, Week 4
Comments (40)Nancy, I saw where they were advising some folks in Wagoner to evacuate, and that kind of surprised me, but then when you look at the rainfall map for the month of May, maybe the big surprise is that the whole northeastern quarter of OK isn't evacuated already. Yes, there's so many good people doing so many things to help the people, livestock, pets, wildlife, etc. It is touching....like fire stations offering their use of their 1 or 2 showers to people whose homes have lost power and/or water....and people who are just showing up with cases of bottled water, figuring somebody needs it for drinking water. Shelters popping up, volunteers coming to staff them, restaurants feeding the first responders, and on and on and on. That's the Oklahoma Standard, isn't it? Like you, we're on high ground, so while the Red River is on three sides of us, it never could flood enough to reach us. I had a few doubts in 2015 when we got 80" of rainfall and the river seriously flooded (including washing away two homes not that far from us--but at a much lower elevation--but water never got close to us. We could drive a couple of miles and sit in the parking lot of the McGeehee Catfish Restaurant and watch the incredibly high water go by, but then we drove back uphill to get back home. Everyone said the creeks might back up because they couldn't drain into the river, but they really didn't. They ran high after heavy rainfall, but they always do, and even then, the water would have had to rise 12-15' to make it up the hill to our yard. There was never any chance of that happening. Our road never has flooded at the creek, but there's been flooding to our south and to our north, so we might temporarily be trapped at home for merely a few hours. We almost bought riverside land at a much lower elevation, and I am so grateful we didn't---although we would have had incredible neighbors. (We also have incredibly wonderful neighbors here.) I paint that way....forgetting myself and ending up with a new set of painting clothes too. I don't think it is that I don't know I'll get paint on me, just that in my excitement about getting it done, I forget to go put on clothes that already are dotted with paint. Thanks for sharing the story about Russ. I'm glad he had the chance to get to know his father better. Jennifer, First, congrats on Ethan's high school graduation! That's such a monumental point in a young adult's life (and in the parents' lives as well). Everything eats seedlings. Caterpillars, snails, slugs, flea beetles, army worms, pill bugs and sow bugs (they are decomposers but I find them eating plenty of green plants as well), and I could go on and on and on. Most plants outgrow it, but the brassica family plants need to be treated or the cabbage loopers and cabbage worms will destroy them. There's just too many of the little caterpillars and they munch until they become big caterpillars. Bt 'kurstaki' is the answer. Many of the pests that will eat kale, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower really, really prefer collard greens or mustard greens, so often I grow those on the edge of the garden so the pests will flock to them and not bother my other crops so much. That works pretty well. The non-organic gardeners spray with synthetic pesticides. I have friends who do that. Their plants always look perfect. They use stuff like Bug-B-Gone and Liquid Sevin, and in the olden days used all sorts of heavy-duty stuff like organophosphates like diazinon and malathion. I'd probably give up gardening before I'd ever use those, but using them doesn't bother some people. Guess what is missing from their gardens though? Lady bugs, green lacewings, butterflies, dragonflies, hover flies, flower flies, bees, and often....anything that anyone would consider a pollinator, so they end up having pollination issues. The organic gardeners often spray with organic broad-spectrum pesticides too. I'm not going to fault people for doing that because it is their garden and their choice, but I just do not like spraying a broad spectrum pesticide all over everything. I feel like it isn't worth (to me) the risk of running off or killing all the beneficial insects. Still, I'll never say that I absolutely, positively never would use these products because some day something might happen that pushes me to that point. There are many broad-spectrum organic pesticides available---Spinosad, Neem, Organocide (soybean extract, fish oil and sesame oil), PyGanic (pyrethrins, so can be deadly to felines), Safer Insecticidal Soap (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids), Safer Tomato and Vegetable Spray (Potassium Salts of Fatty Acids + botanical pyrethrins), Take Down spray (Pyrethrins and canola oil), Hot Pepper Wax (more of a repellent) and Garlic Barrier (also a repellent), Zero Tolerance (herbal oils like rosemary, thyme, cinnamon and other oils), and Beauveria Bassiana (when you need to bring in the big guns---it is a mycoinsecticide that is a fungus in a Liquid Emulsifiable Suspension used to kill soft bodied insects and a few hard-bodies ones as well). I bought Beauveria bassiana last year when I felt like the grasshoppers were winning the war over who was going to harvest from the garden, but then they disappeared (I think birds were eating them) and I never used it. I probably wouldn't have sprayed it on my garden plants but was going to spray it in a 10-12' wide band all around the exterior of the garden fence in the hopes that the grasshoppers would make contact with it there and would get sick and die. Every time that I think that I could and would and will and am going to use a broad-spectrum pesticide to combat some horrible thing in my garden (hmmm....leaf footed bugs or squash bugs or stink bugs, for example), I think about all the living creatures in my garden that I like seeing there, and I just cannot do it. I guess I am a total failure as an organic pesticide user because I cannot use the above products. I will use some narrow-spectrum ones---like sometimes Bt on the brassicas or Semaspore for grasshoppers (it is a bait) or Slug-Go/Slug-Go Plus (a life saver when you have a heavily-mulched garden full of pill bugs and sow bugs), but cannot bring myself to use the broad-spectrum ones. If holes in your kale or cabbage or whatever do bother you that much, then why not find the right product and spray them? Bt should take care of most. Little tiny grasshoppers are just now beginning to hatch out here, though I have not yet seen that many, and they eat holes in everything. I don't think I'm seeing enough of them to make me worry though. Not yet. I usually have a bottle of Take Down spray in my shed so I can spray it directly on hard to catch things like leaf-footed bugs, but I've been out for a couple of years and just haven't bought another bottle yet. It is your garden. If the thought of holes in things bother you, spray with whatever pesticide you're comfortable using. I've just gotten away from doing that and hardly notice the holes in leaves any more. dbarron, Ha! I have had to water my containers the last 4 days. That's what we get for having a combination of strong winds all day long and temperatures in the upper 80s, sunshine (finally) and no rain (oddly). I won't complain and say the rain is missing us, but we aren't getting anything close to what everyone else is getting and May is barely above average rainfall at all compared to other months over the last year. Our ground is starting to dry up some (woo hoo!) and there's no rain in our forecast until Tuesday. I'm glad you're safe from flooding. That's one less thing to worry about anyhow. Eileen, With regards to your pepper seedlings, yes, birds will do that sometimes. Usually it is mockingbirds and they do it only to tomatoes and peppers. I have no idea why. They don't eat them. They just cut them off and leave them lying on the ground. It could be something else---there are some climbing cutworms that will climb a plant stem a couple of inches and then cut it off. I have no idea why. They always seem worse in wet years. I hope your house will be okay. There are some limited 100-year flood zones directly alongside some of the creeks in our neighborhood, but I've only ever seen the creek come up into the yard of one house on our street, and it sits quite a bit lower than us---I think they are actually in the 100-year flood plain while we're well above it. Of course, we had the good sense to build on the highest point of our land, not down in a low area beside the creek, and that helps too. Out closest neighbor to the north put a mobile home way back in the woods right beside the creek. Perhaps they should have taken a clue from the fact that the old farmhouse on that property was built on its highest point of ground but apparently they did not. Still, that house didn't flood in 2015 either. I am sure that if I lived up there in your general area, I'd be feeling anxious about all the rain too. The images of all that water everywhere is mind-boggling. So is the forecast. Rain keeps falling and falling and falling, mostly over the watersheds that can least handle more rain. I feel pretty good about the Red River near us and Lake Texoma right now. They've been releasing water from Texoma for several weeks now, and it is to the point where they're finally releasing water from it faster then new inflow is coming in, so the lake held steady yesterday and should be dropping beginning today. The Red River is high and running fast, and absolutely wall-to-wall (i.e. bank to bank is full) which is not all that common here, where it often is so low you can pretty much walk across it---and, sometimes, in the summer you can walk across it without touching water, but as of this morning, it still was within its banks. We had the unexpected pleasure of a weekend with our oldest granddaughter, so today was kid stuff--shopping for summer clothes, going to the playground, to the movies (Aladdin) and then home for pizza night, playing games and watching some TV. We tortured her by forcing her to watch two episodes of Gunsmoke (in black and white) with us. She thought it was funny---especially because it was in black and white. One guest star was Kurt Russell, playing a kid about 12-13 years old, and she asked me if he was Elvis. I told her no, but that later on, after he grew up, Kurt Russell played Elvis in a movie about his life. She thought it was cool that she picked up on his resemblance to The King. Everyone has gone to bed now except me and one cat, and she's lying here beside me trying to sleep. The house is quiet. It is a nice time to reflect, and Nancy's beautiful description of how Russ reconnected with his dad has me thinking about cancer. A few weeks ago we lost one of our neighbors to stage 4 cancer of the nervous system. He went so quickly after his diagnosis that it was mind-blowing. Today, we found out that a family member of his to whom we are quite close was diagnosed with stage four cancer in his spine. This is such devastating news. He soon will begin a very long chemo regimen. It is hard to understand, sometimes, why some families get hit again and again by diseases like cancer. I didn't work in the garden today, but expect to be able to do a little work out there tomorrow afternoon, and possibly on Monday. It has been so wet that I've largely stayed out of there, except to water stuff in containers. I did a little deadheading and weeding the other day, but not nearly enough. I am keeping up on harvesting. We are very far behind on mowing. Neil Sperry had a great reminder in his newsletter this week that it is chigger time. I'm glad he reminded me. I've been walking through the taller grass in the yard without insect repellent on (I hate spraying it on my skin!) and am sort of surprised the chiggers haven't gotten me already. Am I the only one wondering what happens to the insects in the heavily flooded areas? Like the areas along the Arkansas River where floodwaters are 3 or 4 or 5' deep in neighborhoods, cities and homes? Do the insects get swept away in the floodwaters? Do they die? Do they fly away or crawl up high into trees and survive? What about the earthworms? How about the crawdads? Did they get enough warning to flee to higher ground like they did here in 2015? I mean, I have no idea what does or doesn't survive in this sort of flooding. I do know that mosquitoes become a huge problem even before all the water recedes, but what about everything else? It is something to ponder, is it not? Dawn...See MoreMay 2020, Week 4, The Rainy Week....
Comments (100)Farmgardener, I am so sorry about your tomato plants. Being rural with lots of herbicide-loving people around, we get drift every year and, yes, it is heart-breaking and frustrating beyond measure. Some years we get it once or twice and other years we get it 5 or 6 times a year. So far this year, I think we've had it only twice, and only tomato plants were affected. One year they got virtually all our okra and watermelon plants, a lot of flowers and some of the tomatoes. I grow peppers near my tomatoes and they rarely get damaged. I don't know if it just luck on the part of the pepper plants or what, but they always come through it in much better condition than the tomato plants do.For years and years it seemed like we only got Round-up Drift because the people nearest us were using Round-up along their fencelines to control weeds. After about 5 or 6 years of that (and I don't know why), everything abruptly changed (maybe they were hiring someone new to spray) and the use of Grazon-type herbicides exploded here and everyone began using that crap and now we seldom see Round-up damage, but we get broadleaf herbicide damage several times a year. It is heartbreaking, and I now raise about a dozen tomato plants a year in large containers that I have tried to strategically place where no drift can reach them. They still were damaged last year, but so far this year, the tomato plants in containers haven't been hit like the ones in the garden have. There's just a couple of hundred feet between them. Jennifer & HU, The survival garden looks great! Y'all are going to be getting some great harvests out of that. Y'all know that you can grow lettuce indoors on the same light shelves where you raised seedlings, right? Or microgreens. Or sprouts. With all the heat we have here, that's about the best option for fresh, home-grown summertime salad greens. HJ, Lilies are fascinating and we grow more and more of them every year because our granddaughter, Lillie, believes we should. : ) I am amazed at how much further ahead were here this year with the blooms of the lilies, but perhaps it is because ours bloomed really early considering far south we are. They finished blooming here about a month ago. I think the warm of days in the 90s in late March or early April set them off early, and once we returned to cooler weather, it didn't matter---they already were set to bloom early. We have them in a lot of different colors, including white, pink, red, yellow and peach, and I have to grow them either in containers or in tall, hardware cloth-lined beds because voles will come out of the woods and into the garden and eat all the lily bulbs if the bulbs are not well-protected. There are not many types of bulbs that voles won't eat (mostly allium, garlic and daffodil) so I'm limited in what I can plant. Well, also crinum lilies never have been bothered, and neither have cannas, and daylilies. I think they can and sometimes do eat daylilies but just haven't done it in recent years. Nancy, I've always gardened for the pollinators as well as for us, but we have ample sunny space, plus we never wiped out the native plants that existed when we bought our land, so that made a huge difference. All I had to do was plant to supplement what was here to begin with. In our first handful of years here, the old farmer crowd gave me hell for growing "weeds" (i.e. herbs and flowers) in my garden, telling me that Tim and I couldn't eat those. I just had to point out that the pollinators could and would eat them. Those guys meant well, but were trying to turn me into a row farmer with monoculture rows of veggies and no herbs and flowers and I wanted to be a raised bed gardener with all of it mixed together. So, in that sense I won....but it was, of course, the pollinators who won. Later on, I had more of a monoculture row garden in the back garden after we built it in 2012, but then the voles are a terrible plague back there, so that area is not utilized as much as I'd like---it depends on how much I want to fight the voles. The girls and I spend endless hours outdoors when they are here, and they love the butterflies and moths as much as I do, so much so that they hate to see bad caterpillars, like army worms, put to death. Now, I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of the seemingly dozens of kinds of bees we have here, while also teaching them to respect the hornets and wasps and give those guys a wide berth. Yesterday when the kids were out of the pool for a snack break, a butterfly came and sat on Lillie for about a 15 minutes and she was so mesmerized by it. It sat on her bare skin part of the time and on her neon bright bathing suit the rest of the time and was in no hurry to fly away. Jennifer, I think that if the only flowers we had were the front wildflower meadow, the pollinators still would be deliriously happy, particularly this year. Between the overseeding of that area with a wildflower mix from Wildseed Farms last spring and the abundant moisture, we have the best mix of wildflowers in there that we've ever had. It is starting to drive Tim crazy---usually he can mow the wildflower meadow down after the Spring wildflowers have gone to seed and before the summer wildflowers are coming on strong but this year the spring flowers lingered a bit longer than usual and the summer wildflowers started up already, so his need to control the meadow by mowing is dead in the water, and the wildflowers and I are delighted. He had to content himself with mowing only the yard and the back pasture yesterday, where there were not nearly so many wildflowers this spring, perhaps because of drainage issues back there and all the standing water. Perhaps I need to overseed that area back there with wildflowers next fall. Would that be too diabolical? It might interfere with him mowing in that area if we got a better stand of spring wildflowers back there. I would think just the acre around the house would give him enough mowing to keep him happy, but he could be happy mowing all day long. He starts twitching and practically breaking out in a rash when I discuss our plans to replace lawn around our house with hardscaping and raised beds. He is afraid I won't leave enough for him to mow, and I keep telling him that having less to mow as we age will be a blessing and to just wait and see. Nancy, We live in what is usually a dry grassland area, so I've never wanted a weed torch. I think they can work for people in some situations, but am not convinced I am one of those people. Maybe it is because we spend so much time fighting grassfires in our county in the summer, winter and autumn...and sometimes early spring in the dry years. We also don't have stone pathways to maintain and I can see where one would come in handy there. Marleigh, You've got to kill whatever you've got to kill to keep your garden going. Over the years I've found I have to kill less and less because all the beneficial creatures take care of a lot of it for me. There is a huge difference in wet years like we've had in 2015-2020 so far, and the dry years that mostly plagued us from 1998 when we still were clearing our land prior to building the house all the way through 2014. In the dry years, the pest level rises along with the drought and I spend far too much time and effort on killing excess damaging pests. The way I grew up was that you planted about four times as much as you wanted/needed so that the wild critters could have what they wanted and you still had enough left for yourself, and that seems about right here in OK. The only area where planting extra for the wild things doesn't work is with fruit---they want it all, no matter what, and you have to fight them so hard for every bit of fruit you grow. I have gotten to where I grow less and less fruit as the years go on because I get so tired of the endless fruit wars with the wild things. Our cats have become much more indoor cats than outdoor cats over the years. As they age, most of them have seemed content to sleep in the sunroom, where the sunshine and views of the great outdoors are endless, and now are happy most days just to go out for a quick hour or two and then come back indoors. They don't bother wild birds much because I trained them (with a water gun....everyone needs one Super Soaker to blast cats away from little wild birds) to leave the wild birds alone. Now, when I am out and the cats have done the brief tour outdoors and want to come in, they come and find me and meow for me to come up to the house and let them come inside. This year's perpetually wet, puddled ground probably has contributed to that a lot. Tim and I joke that our cats have become too conditioned to the great indoors---dry "ground", no snakes or annoying biting insects, no bobcats or coyotes chasing them around, and perfect climate control so they're never too hot or too cold. There's a lot of truth in that though. Even Pumpkin has become very much an indoor cat even though he's not as old as they others. When our cats are indoors and the coast is clear, the feral cats, neighborhood barn cats, etc, come over to visit and hang out. As long as I grow catnip, we'll never be cat free. We were outdoors more than we were indoors yesterday and the weather was just perfect---clear, sunny skies, not too much wind, and neither too hot nor too cold. I think most of this week will be that way, but our highs are moving into the 90s by the end of the week, so it looks like June weather is arriving right on time. I was looking forward to mealtimes as a way to use up a lot of tomatoes---BLTs for lunch, tomatoes on hamburgers at dinner time, chopped up in salads, etc. but then I harvested more tomatoes and brought in just as many newly harvested ones as we had used up in our meals so the pile of tomatoes on the counter is the same. I haven't even harvested the cherry tomatoes yet this weekend, but I'm going to do that today. You know that the tomato harvest is going well when we're looking at the tomatoes on the counter and hoping we can hurry up and use them up before I bring in more. lol. That's a change from looking at them longingly on the plants and wishing they would hurry up and ripen. We're probably about to get to the point of needing to make salsa in the next couple of weeks just to stay caught up on the harvest. The tomato plants in pots are doing great, and the ones in the ground that were planted much later because of the nonstop rain are coming along pretty well. Mosquitoes are a huge issue now, and I am sure that will continue for weeks until we get good and dry. It is the end of May and we all survived it, with a lot less weather disruption than we have some years. Well, the heavy pounding from the rainfall was disruptive, and so was the hail when and where it fell, but it seemed like we had a lot fewer tornadoes statewide than usual. The nights still feel kind of cool to me for this late in Spring, but I bet that's going to change in June. Dawn...See MoreMay 2021, Week 4
Comments (42)Kim, I think I have an unhealthy thing about thinness and all . But only regarding myself. It's not an obsession any longer and I rarely notice other people's sizes. In fact, I couldn't begin to describe most of my friends' sizes--I just don't notice. (I'm only hard on myself.) But, for whatever reason Kelly stood out to me today. Maybe it was her cute jeans and top. I don't know. Yes! I love those black hollyhocks! For some reason I thought they didn't do well in my area. Maybe I should try them. Oh, and keep meaning to tell you that the little fig you brought to me is doing so well! I will be praying for you, Kim. I know how badly you want your own land. All of the SF plants are doing well except your milkweed, Jen. The mint is minty and growing. Do you remember the variety? The name is faded already. The only things I do not have in a pot or the ground yet is the soapwort, the feverfew and the cutleaf coneflower. Trying to determine the best places for those....See MoreApril Week 4 2023
Comments (21)The circle bed has some peas just barely sprouting, some potatoes, and the coneflowers I transplanted over there. But for such a huge space, it's pretty barren. I've tossed out a bunch of zinnia and have some gaillardia to put out there, and possibly can move some of the cosmos once they bounce back from the hail damage. I want a tree, or bush, maybe the elderberry I got at spring fling a few years ago. Then fill the rest with perennials that can survive mostly being ignored. But until then, I'll use it for annuals and anything I can get to grow to improve the soil. And aside from the tomatoes that pretty much all got wiped out, the rest seems to be recovering. My potatoes are doing ok. The sunflowers are still taking over the entire bed. The chamomile that HJ gave me has about tripled in size, the 2 little comfrey are starting to grow (the bigger ones didn't survive sadly) and I keep finding feverfew seedlings in everything. I didn't even plant feverfew last year! And my lone celery started growing new leaves. Doubtful it'll actually do much, but I just planted it as an experiment. Most of my wintersown containers have sprouts; only problem is the sprouts look alike in multiple containers so I'm pretty sure they're weeds. Or sunflowers. Down side to recycling your dirt, you don't know what you'll get. Next up is to start planting cucumber and squash. My neighbor asked about squash so I told her I would start a few for her, even though I've never had good luck with squash....See MoreHU-422368488
10 months agolast modified: 10 months ago
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