Cukes are going crazy! Oh yeah - 105°F In the Texas Hill Country. Durn! That's Baghdad HOT!
Hubby harvested the winter wheat yesterday. It is sitting on the back patio to cure. He just threw some plastic over it. My advice was to clear a space for it in the garage or hang it from the ceiling out there, but he swears, he has figured out how to do it better this year.LOL.
I planted some ancient corn this week, and they are just beginning to push through the ground. The Country Gentleman is around 4 feet tall, and should begin to tassel soon, I think.
Potatoes are in full blown bloom, lettuce is still available (cooler temps mean it doesn't bolt so quick). Peanuts are looking good. Have some peppers ready to transplant.
Hubby has been harvesting cukes. We are enjoying lot of refrigerator pickles, and hope to get a bunch soon for making dill pickles. He reports that the tomatoes on the back forty are doing great. We had a serving of fresh dew berries for breakfast this week.
Leaf Amaranth is doing well, grain Amaranth very slow and not much germinated. Lavendar is still blooming.
Alls well on our little acre, hope you are all doing well too. Have a great weekend. God Bless.
Pinging the list. I can’t remember who pinged me, but I thought I would mention that their was an article posted last week regarding the dangers of composting, and I thank whoever it was that pinged me.
Someone located their compost pile too close to a wooden deck, and the pile got really hot and caught the deck on fire-so there’s a warning.
Question from a not-very-knowledgeable gardener - For the past several years we have had great luck growing spinach from seeds. This year, the plants are straggly, small, with some yellow leaves. I think overall, temp. and watering/rainfall is comparable to past summers. Do you know what could be causing this?
Maybe somebody could help Ben Stein with his jacarandas? His never seem to bloom.
The only plants growing well in our garden are tomatoes and pumpkins. Beans are surprisingly not even leafing out. Peas were a bust. Onions — heck I don’ even know where they went.
We never have problems growing beans.
Finished digging the garlic and onions this week. Tomatoes are about done for the season. I started several more tomato plants this week.
I also saved onion and garlic seed tops. My dad had great luck getting them to sprout every year. It’s 102 here now, so I am inside until later.
I’ve been so busy with work and stuff that I barely had time to look at my garden this week. I intend to rectify that over the weekend. The garlic is ready for harvest and I probably ought to dig a few potatoes.
There might be a weed or two out there that needs pulled too...
After the last two summers...I've tended to lean towards Xeriscaping lately.
http://www.highcountrygardens.com/?utm_source=ezine&utm_medium=email&utm_source=bronto-batch-1&utm_campaign=2013-04-25-drought-shrubs
http://www.greenwoodnursery.com/page.cfm/22278
Cheers!!
I posted late (yesterday) on last weeks Thread that my Wife and I have safely made our move from Texas to our house in Mississippi. Unloaded our 26 ft. rental truck and are now in the process of unpacking all our boxes and trying to get settled in. This will take us some time to accomplish.
Our new pups are enjoying the yard but run like scared cats for the door when the two German Shepherds next door bark at them.
Cukes are going crazy! Oh yeah - 105°F In the Texas Hill Country. Durn! That's Baghdad HOT!
When the House doesn’t pass amnesty Rubio switches party.
The evening news just announced it is 106 right now and might rise another degree or two before the sun starts to go down. The dogs came in and you could feel the heat coming off them. All they do lately is snooze under the A/C. Who can blame them.
I’ve been watering morning and evening just to keep things alive. The squash finally went caput without giving me anything. There is one little cuke I’ve got my eye on and may have to be happy with that for the summer. Despite all the watering, the corn is drying out and it only gave me one little bitty ear that never matured. I have two varieties of corn and neither have grown over 3-4 feet.
There is one little banana pepper and none of the peppers are growing much. But then I had to replant 3 times so they were very late getting into the ground. The tomatoes I had to restart aren’t much bigger than what they were when I put them out a month or so ago but they’re happy so maybe they don’t like the heat. If it weren’t for all the yellow pear volunteers, I’d have nothing. They have maters but aren’t getting any color. I need to see if the carrots are ready.
I have bought some of the oil, and gave it a try with 1/2 to 2 TBS of the oil in my 24 oz water squirt bottle. I'm wondering if that is the correct ratio, or is it too much or too little? Also, I would like to know how often it needs to be applied. I've also been wondering how hard it is to wash off the spinach or lettuce or some of the other veggies. That is some REALLY nasty tasting stuff!
Amaranth continues to grow. The asparagus came up!!! It is really hard to understand how such a dried up thing could actually produce something green like that! I am really surprised about that. I need to put a little dirt over them a bit. The rain has been doing the watering. I haven't done anything other than dig the hole and put them in there with a lite cover of dirt.
Tomato plants which we bought that had some ‘maters on them have been reddening up a bit. I'm seeing flowers on some of the plants which I started from seed. This is encouraging because I was beginning to think that this was not a year for tomatoes. Darlin’ says I need to squirt blossom set on them.
The red bell pepper plant has a pepper. That's kinda fun.
The cucumbers are going crazy. Darlin and I need to get some kind of support for them to climb on! The cucs and squash plants are all blooming. Haven't looked closely enough to see if they are out of the male homosexual stage yet.
Sunflowers are growing.
Okras are growing, but LOTS of little ants are crawling on them. Do they harm okra, or do they need to be warded off? I squirted them with neem oil, but cant tell if it helped or not.
I have 2 dill sprouts.
Some more lettuce seed sprouted in the pot where the caterpillar had its way. We'll see.
My only sour note is, someone last week mentioned that legumes tend to be easy for beginners. Well, I guess I'm the exception to prove the rule. Few of my legumes seem very happy. Only the black turtle beans seem to be green and growing, but they haven't flowered yet. So who knows??? Maybe they are desperately unhappy too.
The favas, snow peas, great white northern, and cranberry beans are all fading. I have a few sparse pods, but I can see they are not happy. Not sure if the unhappiness has to do with location, wrong soil, or bugs. *sigh* It's discouraging.
I guess, though, that in balance, even with the problems with the legumes, I'm learning. Next year, I'll put the legumes somewhere else. I'll use a better mix of dirt. The really unhappy ones, upon reflection are potted in a soil that I started out with in the spring, and isn't as good as the mix I've been using more recently. In all, I'm probably learning a lot. But I had really hoped for some beans!
Darlin’ was joking around about a trip to a cooler part of the country and I confess it sounds very enticing to just leave it all to the bugs and heat waves.
A fine Friday night in the garden, soil was a good moisture level for weeding. Forecast rain held off.
Got a nice batch of grass clippings to lay down as mulch tomorrow after I side-dress the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant and corn.
Got a funky volunteer squash - it’s small, but it looks like a cross between a butternut and a patty pan. It will be interesting to see what it looks like in a couple of weeks.
Barley for a winter cover crop was fine but it didn’t get done until a few weeks ago and now I am working my rear off to get everything turned around for tomatoes and peppers and such. The other day it occurred to me my family spent ten generations here before they got off the farm. My dad was the first college grad and I was the first post grad. Now here I am breaking my butt on the farm. It may only be 400 sq ft or so but it is seriously tasking me.
Had to hill the potatoes a third time, and I know I’m going to have to add mulch over that.
Last night was a home grown dinner: fried rabbit; carrot thinnings; snap peas. Potato salad even had chopped Egyptian onion & boiled eggs from the hen house in it. Been eating German Giant radish thinnings, too; they are about ping pong ball to golfball size, and growing.
Speaking of snap peas, Wednesday, I picked a whole 1.25 pounds. Today, I brought in 3 pounds; they are starting to actually produce. Also discovered that some alien invaders sneaked into the seed bin: a few of the vines are flat podded snow peas, rather than snap peas. Also found a half dozen volunteer potatoes hiding under the vines; that’s what was planted there last year. Won’t get anything from them, as they can’t be hilled, and look pretty spindly, but we’ll see.
Not sure what is going on with my pole beans. Instead of starting to climb, they are starting to flower.
Does anyone know how to induce a cactus to grow an arm? The cactus I am interested in is a one foot toothpick cactus, (Stetsonia coryne). I think I saw one for sale once, about 18 inches tall, with at least 4 symmetrical arms. The price was $90, and this was 10 or 15 years ago.
This cactus will eventually put on arms naturally, as it matures.
We just got a nice little rain shower here in Central Missouri. And it was good timing as I’d finished up the garden work for today and turned on the whirly-bird sprinkler to water. Dug one row of potatoes. Got 10 gallons from a 30’ row, best yield I’ve had since I started this garden. Got the garlic all out and got most of the weeds pulled thanks to my buddy Nick and my nephew Stephen who came by this morning to help out.
My thornless blackberries are just starting to ripen and were going to need some sprinkler time in the next day or two and now thanks to Mother Nature I won’t have to do that. What a difference from last summer. I was watering the blackberries twice a week and they burned up anyway because of the heat.
Morning everyone!
We are enjoying a lovely respite from the intense heat here on the Oklahoma Plain!
1) Darlin and I are conducting an experiment. Several days ago we bought a head of romaine at the grocery store. It’s rootlets were trimmed, but we had bought some rooting hormone and decided to put the root stump into some of it in a bowl on our counter and see what happens. We had expected that if it did anything, it would grow more rootlets and then perhaps we could plant it.
What has happened is a surprise and somewhat of a mystery to me! The center of the head has been growing new lettuce leaves. The leaves have grown about 2 inches above the stump where I cut it off. There are no new rootlets. I can understand the stump remaining green, just as the celery stump we are also simultaneously experimenting with. Or a vase of cut flowers. The mystery is what is the source of nutrition? Why is it actually generating more leaves? Is the root hormone something that causes the growth of the plant itself? If that is the case, would it not be a good idea to put root hormone into a vase of cut flowers to keep them fresh longer?
Just a little puzzlement for the day while drinking my morning coffee-like substance. (I’ve started drinking different combinations of tea with protein drink in the mornings, in this case, EAS vanilla, as the creamer.)
2) What is with the stretch marks on the tomatoes? Am I doing something wrong?
3) I’m tickled to report that the sunflower which Darlin’ beheaded recently in an overzealous use of the weed whacker has survived (two leaves had been left) and it has regenerated another head!!!! (I’m glad I didn’t get angry with my sweet Darlin, but just took it in stride as part of the experiment.)
4) We have a baby yellow straight neck squash fruit developing!!!
5) We have a baby okra fruit developing!!!
6) Legumes - some are very pitiful, and fitfully blooming. The black turtles are probably the happiest of the lot. Ellendra tells me that most of my varieties are really not ideal for the hot summer. So I need to talk to some local gardeners to see what kinds of beans do well here, and when! (Thanks for the heads up, Ellendra!)
7) TArcher has given me some great info above with a link about neem which I have printed out. THanks, TArcher!
8) Cucumbers are all over the place like Marcella’s squash - and blooming like crazy! Darlin has said we could use a piece of the wire fencing material to rig up as a trellis for it.