Thanks for the welcome home ... as much as I adore Montana, I miss my home and my critters terribly after a week or two. It will be perfect when we finally take the plunge and move up there and just visit Louisiana occasionally.
On the tomatoes -- if you start snipping your larger suckers off now and rooting them in a glass or jar of water, you will have a good crop of fall tomatoes. Pruning the existing plants back will work also, just be sure to hit them with some good tomato fert (higher in phosphorus) to get them going again.
I wish you would post photos of the flower beds! Mrs. Bender and the gorgeous Bender Estate have really inspired me to put some work into flower beds this year. The ones I put in around the oak trees earlier this year are really getting pretty, but I lost almost every azalea. I will try to post update photos soon.
Your okra should really take off soon. We have some of that mutant stuff coming up on the turn row of one of our fields again. They re-seeded themselves rather well.
I really need to get my plants for the fall garden planted. (Wish I had a dollar for every time I say the phrase "I need to ..." every day!) My volunteer tomatoes are producing really well, and they are really delicious. I didn't water them through all of the heat, and the flavor gets really concentrated in the fruit that way. It is a trick to give them just enough water to survive, but well worth the effort.
Dear Mrs Blonde,
It is with great sadness that I must report that when I upgraded my Mac OS a few months ago it deleted a Java plugin and have been unable to upload photos to either Fotki or Flikr. I finally threw myself at the feet of the local Guru and he showed how, when and why Apple turned it off but now my browsers, Camino and Firefox won’t play nice with me or I have forgotten everything I never new about uploading photos. If you are desperate for a fix I can post some of last years stunning garden vistas.
Yours in Great Sorrow,
Sir Tube Bender
Thanks for the tips on tomato watering. We now know why our crop this year was not as flavorful as last year; too much water. Also for the info on sprouting tomato cuttings.
On the flowers, there is nothing that I could post that would come close to what the Benders have at their home or church. But I am proud of my wife's accomplishments in restarting some 30 yr old beds that were abandoned many years ago. The previous owner was 91yrs old and had not tended the yard in a long time. I dont have any true before pictures, but I do have some from the reconstruction forward.
The old dead stuff and weeds were yanked out and the dirt made ready, along with a century plant.
Restarted beds, version 1.0 June 2011
Current version, July 2012, version 2.0
The rocks in the rock garden surrounding the Century plant are not thriving, though, they are still just as they were a year ago.
The front porch area under reconstruction, all the boxwoods are ripped out and the bed that they were in was removed, July 2011.
July 2012
All the beds in the pictures have drip irrigation under the mulch, and are on a timer for low maintenance There are some backyard improvements, too, but that is about enough pictures for one post.
