Posted on 06/17/2011 5:12:35 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. My tomato plants are struggling to survive these hot brutal sunny days. Their leaves are all curled up trying to save water. Temperatures are consistently in the mid to high 90s. My winter and summer squash along with all of my hot and sweet pepper plants are doing great. It does not look like any of my Opailka or Viva Italia paste tomatoes will make it through so I have restarted some more seeds in the hopes I can get them transplanted in time for a late harvest. I have about 4 Marion tomato plants that are in the rear of my garden that are doing well for now. They get some shade in the late afternoon so I will put my new paste tomato transplants in that same area of the garden. I may be down but not out!
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I still have blisters on my hand from cranking that old crank White Mountain freezer. I really loved the rock salt most of all...
No home made icecream here, but I’m planning on taking them to Strawberry Festival in Cedarburg on Sat.
Right now, I have them vacuuming their own guest rooms because I got distracted with my laminating. ;)
My 5th grade teacher was Miss McGarry. We all adored her. She was a spinster who lived with her equally spinster sister on the family farm that they had inherited, and she drove a tractor after school. She was sunburned and wore a big straw hat. To city kids, she was a most interesting character and a good teacher.
It was her tradition that if we were “good” all year, she would bring her hand crank ice cream makers and we would have a party with home made ice cream. I don’t know what we would have had to do to be “bad” and miss that party. Nobody ever tried to find out. Only the boys got to crank the machine, and the girls were jealous. It was a wonderful time. God Bless Miss McGarry, whereever she is.
Is that how they used to freeze stuff? With salt?
My gardening book says to be careful about overwatering, too. I had Tom do it this morning, but he’s lazy and didn’t give them much. I’ll see how things look tomorrow. We have clouds piling up, maybe it will rain.
Rain water is the best.
Do you have a rain barrel?
In the 30 and 40s we had a oak “Ice Box” to keep some perishables for a few days and it used Block Ice as a cooling agent. To make ice cream my Mama mixed up cream, eggs, sugar, rennet and ??? Then she poured itto in the metal container of the crank “freezer”which went into a wooden tub with a mechanism to turn the paddles inside the container. My job was to chip the block ice with a ice pick and that went in between the container and the wooden tub and rock salt was poured over that to melt the ice. This cold water extracted the Heat from the mixture in the container until it was difficult to crank which seemed to toake hours, but it was a very short time until the paddles came out and we all fought over the first taste of the Ice Cream sticking to it. Then dad tossed wet burlaps sacks over it as the ice water continued extracting the heat and “freezing” the mixture.
Today we have a model with a electric motor to turn the paddles and the container is pre chilled in the freezer but uses the same principle and the recipe is basically the same as the good old days ...
We’re in the same fix in Texas. In central TX, we’re supposed to have some heavy rain tonight, hopefully it’s true. We haven’r had rain in over a month and we’ve had the hot winds to go with it. My poor tomatoes are just hanging on the vine waiting for a cool night so they can turn red. Of course my tomatoes are in a raised bed, so it may not help them much, even though they get lots of water.
My squash went belly up and it looks like my cukes are about to follow, my noodle beans are trying to put out beans, but they are so slim, they look anorexic. Next year the beds are going on the ground, the one long raised bed will stay, for herbs, but the rest will be plowed into the clay with compost, horse and chicken manure, and everything will grow on cattle panels with the tomatoes will grow ?. Oh, both of my watermelons split, it’s just too hot for them. They were so pretty.
That is not any Cosmos I am familiar with as ours are lacy and airy leaved. It looks like a perennial call Gay Feathers but The brilliant and Know it All Mrs Bender is fast asleep to confirm that. My FRiend and I spent another 4 hours at the Church and got all the conduit trench covered and the sod put back in place and I watered it in. Now we’re waiting for the wire loom to arrive and we’ll pull that through and then the lawn guys can install the new sprinkler controller and new valves to replace the worthless battery powered controller.
Your onions really look great and the potatoes have a good start. I have to hill up my second planting and install drip lines on them and the corn. I don’t know what I would do without our garden and the Church project to get me outdoors.
Great pictures. Good Idea about the laminating. I don’t have a laminating machine, but some times I cut up index cards just use clear tape to cover the whole label, but a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
The reason that I think that it is Cosmos is because I had Cosmos panted there last year. I had several varieties throughout. That was not my favorite, but it was pretty.
We had several downpours yesterday and a huge T storm and deluge last night while we were out eating at a local restaurant. We even had a short power outage at the R. They didn’t give us a free meal, though. I hope my gardens are not destroyed. The Restaurant had huge windows, and we saw it all. Don’t need no watering system here LOL
I can’t believe how fast everything is growing. I think I started planting around June 5 or 6. Those potatoes were shriveled with long, bare sprouts coming out, but they were not mushy, so I took a chance. The onions were just dry sets. They sprouted so fast! I did this last year, but I don’t remember things growing so fast. I’ll bet that if I’d planted earlier, I wouldn’t be any further along.
My daughter confirmed it is Greek oregano. She says that it can become a pest, but I think it is pretty.
I am so sorry about your weather and travails. :(
Your garden is looking very good. Congrats!
We are getting rain! And on the weather radar, it looks like most of central Texas is also. It appears to be a good rain front coming through for the next hour or two. Downside is my wife is driving to Houston through it.
Thanks.
Driving to, and around, Houston in clear weather is hair-raising.
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