Knocked out the power to thousands of people to the north of us. Laid our corn down on the ground. I finally have a couple of green tomatoes about the size of a ping pong ball, and several blooms.
Got some green beans cooked and eaten, and some beets canned. Have a bunch of zukes and green beans to process as soon as possible. The deck corn is now about 3 inches tall. Cukes are not looking good - skins are scaly looking - very ugly, but the summer squash and zukes are doing well. Hubby hopes to get a cantaloupe.
Hope all is well with you and yours. Prayers up for all. Have a great weekend. God Bless.
Pinging the List.
A few tomatoes growing on Bush Early Girl - 10 now - 11th was rotting on bottom.
About 4 on Beefsteak (I think that name is wrong - it’s a different one - hybrid).
None have shown up on single Better Boy plant.
Got about 30-35 pepper plants going - 10 seedlings sprouting, too. Tallest about 10-12 inches. No veggies yet.
Counted about 40 seeds from regular store-bought tomato going. 3-6 inches tall. Will transplant soon.
Another 20 seeds of Bush Early Girl, about 20-25 red/yellow pepper, and 20-25 seeds of green pepper should sprout in about 2 weeks. Small indications from 2 already (10 days).
Sweet Basil going great guns - 3 plants - have already cooked from 2 harvests and dried a 3rd and sent to a friend along with pepper seeds.
My carrots and first tomato plants are weak - soil was lousy. Will try to transplant but very tender they are.
Hello, from KC, MO! Our garden is popping! Kids are eating the peas and blackberries as fast as they’re growing so there will be no canning or freezing from those two. I get to make pickles/relish this weekend and have been baking bread and casseroles and cakes with zucchini and yellow squash that are bigger than 2-liter bottles of soda! It’s crazy! Found a few watermelon that might survive. Oh, lots of spaghetti squash, too. I have NO IDEA what I’m going to do with those. Must have been crazy when I stuck those in the ground. Ha!
I’ve been sick with what I’ve self-diagnosed as eColi (which is better than my previous self-diagnosis of Ebola), so haven’t seen the garden in a week.
Luckily, it has rained so I don’t need to worry about wilting plants.
But I can feel all the weeds growing, the bugs eating, and the deer showing up.....
Last I saw, baby tomatoes were starting to form - that’s always exciting to see! Zucchini and cucumbers are proliferating, as are the green beans. I harvested 9 head of cabbage and about 15 beets the morning I got sick, so thank goodness I got those in the extra frig for storage just in time! The cabbages were starting to split, so I gather that means they were almost over done?
I’ll go hang on on the couch some more, I can only stay up for a few minutes at a time, but am doing much better overall.
Our same series of storms knocked power out for about 3 hours, [thank gooddness for my preps] I have lots of blooms, nothing to harvest as of yet. The pond is back up to it’s normal level. [durn it, makes it harder to drain & dredge later this fall]
This is the first year for our ‘swimming pool’ garden. It took about 25 dump truck loads of top soil to fill it.
The cement patio around the garden keeps the weeds and bugs out and the deer haven’t ventured into it either.
The vegetables have really taken off. It looks like a jungle. We’ve harvested kale, broccoli, lettuce, peppers, and green beans so far. It looks like we’ll have a lot of squash, melon and cucumbers this year too!
We’re going to take a canning course from the extension service this summer. Are electric canners safe? I asked the company, which assured me low acid canning is safe, but have read otherwise on the Ball site.
It has been a prolific garden year. I have canned about 50 pints of salsa from my garden tomatoes, onions, and peppers. I have frozen so many quarts of tomatoes I’ve lost count, and I’ve also frozen onions, zucchini, squash, and peppers. I’ve canned pasta sauce, canned dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, cowboy candy, and bread and butter jalapenos. I’ve added 15 more cucumber plants to extend my pickle harvest, and I’ve got 45 new tomato plants on the porch to put in for fall, to replace the spring tomato plants which are pretty much worn out. The 40+ pepper plants are crazy big and loaded, so lots of canning to do there. It’s just so hot outside that it wears me out. I’m ready for fall!!
We had the same storms after you, and luckily didn’t lose power for long, about 30 minutes, so that barely counts.
I love when it rains because it means I don’t have to water that day. I have enough flower beds going that I usually water something every day.
My only vegetables are two tomato plants, one Better Boy, and then a cherry tomato plant. The BB plant has a couple of small tomatoes growing. The largest is about 2-1/2 “ now. This year it doesn’t look like I will get the yield that I did last year. :(
In the perennial garden, the false sunflowers have blossomed, along with the moonbeam coreopsis, orange and pink double coneflowers, and a few phlox. In an adjacent bed, the Stokes asters are taking a break (that means I need to deadhead them), and the day lilies and obedient plants (white blossom) are still hanging in there. The stachys and monarda are blooming nicely.
Has anyone here ventured in to miniature fairy or gnome gardens? I’ve made a few, usually in small containers so that I can bring them indoors once it gets cooler. This year I added a small wheelbarrow and a square galvanized tub to my assortment of minis. I don’t know what I’ll do with them once it’s colder. They are too large to bring inside.
All in all, I’m grateful for the summer warmth and rains when they come. The flowers are beautiful! I can’t believe I get to live in the beautiful place that we call home now!
I had a white fig yesterday that was better than anything i can remember ever eating. The skin was blotched brown over yellow like an overripe banana, and the eye was an open pool of honey. Inside was amber flesh immersed in syrup. When a fig is dead ripe even the skin is sweet. And if you get to it before a pig on the wing then you consider yourself blessed. The interesting part is that this has been my favorite fig tree all year, owing to its graceful and willowy growth habit. So you see i knew it was special before the first taste...
My compost enclosure is teeming with maggots and, further down, earthworms. My method is simple: block enclosure, first course is set into the earth. Layer of foid scraps, layet of dirt. Hat, layer of dirt, food scraps, and so on. Courses are added as needed.
The worm bins are all quite happy and my wicking method of watering them is working. Mosquitoes are a ceaseless torment when working with my worms.
My experiment of laying cardboard over my oyster shell driveway has worked out well; the weeds are dying or dead and earthworms, drawn by the cardboard, are replacing the weeds with a thick layer of castings.
Hi greeneyes and everyone!
Sneaking in the back of the class, here.
As most of you know, we were under the weather a bit this past spring, so opted for another year without a lot of hands-on gardening.
Today was just gorgeous, and although hot, it wasn’t unbearable. We felt up to doing a little bit to scratch the garden itch.
This spring we had some volunteer tame plantains growing. We also have a boatload of them wild in the yard. The seeds on the volunteer were ready to harvest, so I did. The seeds on the wild ones are not ready yet.
I cleaned up an area where I had stacked a bunch of empty pots, ready for new inhabitants. I had been wanting to get some compost sacks for some time, so we got the truck out and went to get some. We went to the box garden store and found some.
While there, we saw some lovely Greek oregano, German thyme, and Bee Balm.
I had had a good stand of oregano and thyme, but this year, for some reason they did not come back. I was delighted to be able to grab these to quickly replace those. I had not ever had Bee Balm and so will enjoy watching it attract the butterflies and humming birds.
We decided even though it’s late, we would enjoy a nice splash of color for the next few months, so we obtained some petunias and echinacea. The stand of echinacea which up until last year was really happy just have been disappointing this year. They are really scraggy and there are some deformed leaves and sometimes deformed flower heads. I am inclined to think a virus may have gotten to them. I plan to place the new ones in a different area of the yard.
The strawberries are still happy. They had over weathered last winter. A friend of mine gave me a replacement cutting of hensnchicks and an aloe vera plant. The Christmas cactus is also hanging in there.
So there you have it. We’re just plugging away here on the Oklahoma Plain! I hope all is well with all of you!
The garden soil we have was heavy on the red clay so I went to the dairy and got three pick up loads of manure and tilled it into the soil back in March.
The production has been prolific. I’m sick of eating squash and my neighbors and family have been getting the surplus.
The patty pan squash are a hit, better than crook neck for frying, IMO.
We actually got a few meals worth of broccoli which is an improvement over last year’s attempt.
Red skin potatoes have done great.
The Dipper Gourd arbor is covered and fruiting nicely.
The Bradford watermelons are finally producing. They took forever to sprout and get to the vine stage. So far I’ve counted three the size of a football and many more that are fist sized. I planted two hills then two more hills 3 weeks apart. The 2nd planting hasn’t fruited yet.
Several giant sunflowers are now 10’+ tall and are covered in honey bees, a good sign considering last year the bees were few and far between.
Cherokee Purple tomatoes are getting to be full sized with no blight—yeah! About 6 have ripened. They make the best fried green tomatoes I’ve ever had.
The grape tomatoes are flourishing and taking forever for a cluster to fully ripen. The top ones are ripe and the bottoms are still green. Maybe in another week? Oh, I tried fried green grape tomatoes. Yuch! Won’t do that again.
Okra is A OK.
Zukes got buried by the pumpkins and it’s hard to get into them. Put off picking them for a week and had to toss out several that were as big around as my arms.
Basil is starting to go to seed already, need to top those.
I tried the square foot method in a 4 x 8 raised bed with different types of lettuce, parsley, catnip, carrots, and radishes. The radishes, lettuce and carrots were successful but the rest of the stuff got overgrown with weeds and it was difficult to distinguish the weeds from the sprouts so I ripped up those and put in more basil.
A couple of bird bottle gourd volunteers from last year are like some kind of plant from a japanese sci-fi movie. Had to put up bamboo tee pees to keep them from running all over the garden.
The brussels sprouts didn’t do much. I’ll plant them again in august hoping for a fall crop.
Green beans out the ears.
Many pumpkins.
About a dozen mortgage lifter tomato volunteers from last year are fruiting but they are in the blight area so I’m not hoping for much.
All this in a couple of 4 x 8 raise beds and an 1800 square foot area.
Looking forward to trying the bradford watermelons.
Since the fencing started going up, the crows have not been showing up. Twice I've seen them - once a "scout" landed on the board fence for a minute or two while the rest were in an old apple tree raiding green apples and I've seen them in the back yard. They have not been in the field around the garden at all. As a result, no more veggie damage and my tomatoes are coming in as of Friday.
Sunday a week ago, I cut back the basil plants & made pesto - got 3.5 cups - I love the stuff. I also put up a quart of "Kinda Sorta Sour" (Alton Brown recipe) refrigerator pickles last Monday. Today I put up a quart of his bread and butter pickles recipe.
The eggplants are doing beautifully and I found a Chinese Eggolant with Garlic Sauce recipe that I love - the texture of the eggplant in the dish is really good - a far cry from my previous unhappy attempts to stir fry eggplant.
Dusted off my FR picture posting & here is a pic of the raised beds with the "anti-crow" fencing. :-) The beds on the left are 4' x 8' & the ones on the right are 4' x 10'. The longer beds required an additional half panel to make them work like I wanted. I've just tied the panels together & they are light, easy to move to mow, and access to the garden is good as well.
Bought a pomegranate tree at the Farmers Market in Franklin, TN last weekend. Will have to keep it in a pot here in the Ohio River Valley of Kentucky, but am interested in seeing how it does. It is a 3 to 4 year old tree so might have some fruit on it next year if I get it through the winter.
I took 30lbs of cull tomatoes and half a bushel of cucumbers to the produce auction in Clark on Friday, met the owner, and got squared away on how to do business with those folks.
We made the first BLTs of the season over the weekend, and a gallon of tomato/cucumber/basil salad. Yummy on the tummy!
The roma tomatoes are loaded. I've got a local mexcan food truck lined up that will take up to 10 cases/week for as long as they are producing. First delivery should be towards the end of this week.
The sunflower field is loving all of the recent rainfall. We've gotten a little over 10" at my house since the last week of June.
Any tips on how to store them until I want to display them in the fall in a basket centerpiece? [c.late Sept]