If we lose a few more degrees there will be no fall crop of tomatoes. Squash, zukes, and cukes continue to produce faster than we can eat them, but not enough to make a batch of pickles, and the freezer has no more room.
The corn has been harvested and is almost all eaten(we didn't plant a big patch this year due to concerns over water/drought, because of last year's experience).LOL how wrong can planning be?
Hope all is well with you and yours. Have a great weekend, and God Bless.
Pinging the List.
When hubby gets home this afternoon he’s got about 10 ripe pumpkins to pick. I’d pick them but he likes to make sure they’ve got enough stem to last and then he keeps meticulous track of how much they weigh. So I let him do that part. There are probably 10 or 15 more that will be ripe in another couple of weeks. Here in temperate southern MS there’s time for another making. When we pick these pumpkins the vine will sull for another week or so and then put out shoots and set another pumpkin, sometimes two. Those will be ripe sometime early October and it’ll repeat the process. It’s those last squash/pumpkins that we cover with the homemade fencing/plastic tarp teepees to let them ripen after we get a heavy frost in late Oct/early Nov.
I have a sneaky Long of Naples that’s snuck into my corn patch. It’s got a female bloom that will probably open tomorrow. I’m going to have to fertilize that part of the corn patch to make sure they don’t feed to heavily on what the other needs. I’ll probably use the regular algoflash for that.
My rice is 5ft tall and each plant has ~20 pannicles of rice grains. Still smells wonderful at mid day too.
Getting a few tomatoes. Got them out late because frost got the first set in early May. Unheard of this far south.
Getting scads of hot peppers though, they were still in the garage that night. Our low was supposed to be 42 but it was 36 on my back porch that next morning and had gotten even lower in my garden.
Corn is 5ft tall right now. It’s really liking the warm nights we had over the past month. It was 65 at my house first thing this morning. Cooler than normal and todays high was all of 84 degrees. 8deg lower than normal. Feels like early fall here. Hopefully it’ll warm up to upper 80’s or lower 90’s next week. For my garden’s sake.
Sweet potatoes are taking over now too. I wish there was some way you could tell how they were doing underground. We’ll have to wait and see though.
My Kroger ginger is about 1ft tall now it its pots. It’s liked the hot/humid weather we’ve had the past 2 or 3 weeks. I need to remember to feed that when I feed my citrus.
And lastly, the Arbequina olive I got from Jungs has put on a whole bunch of new growth since I gave it a bigger pot. I’m growing it for a potted ornamental for my yard as much as I am to see if it will make olives. We’ll cross our fingers for the latter.
It’s all good this week.
Two things we note:
1. The Emerald Ash borer (originally from China) has killed an estimated 10 million ash trees in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky. I've lost six beautiful 100+ trees this year, with one survivor.
2. The Buckeye trees around here have no buckeye nuts this year. Well, not all are gone, perhaps only one or two per tree and a lot of trees completely devoid of nuts. Not sure the two events are related, but the trees are taking a beating.
On a brighter note, my last post asked for direction with spreading mint plant. Good news is we've hacked it down and contained the system. Thanks to all who provided direction.
Z
Add me to your garden ping list please.
Ub355
We’re having a bounty of summer squash, cucumbers, basil and little hot peppers. No ripe tomatoes yet, and our prospects are looking slim. Our eggplants have flowers, but nothing more. I hope that next year will be better.
50 degrees - man, that sounds good as I am sweating in Texas. Hope you don’t lose tomatoes, though.
I got Asian pears ,, oodles more after using netting.. still losing some to maggots but still nigh a bumper crop considering.
HaPPy pickin’!
Just a quick update to my rabbit problem question from last week>
I decided against putting used kitty litter around the beds as the smell would definitely keep me away.
Someone had mentioned that rabbits on’t cross dried blood I had a bag that I got for soil amendment, so I put that around all the areas where Mr. Bunbun was munching. So far, it’s keeping the rabbits at bay. Not sure if i’ll have to reapply it, but for know it’s bye-bye bunnies.
I will be canning these later this afternoon. They are darn Yummy fresh.
Well, I promised to update on some things I was going to experiment with this year.
First, my barley patch was disastrous. I don’t use Round-Up but the plot planted needed more mechanical cultivation before planting. The weed competition was simply too much. The canary grass outstripped the barley and the nitrogen was insufficient to produce stalks any taller than a foot or so. Heads varied on the two-row Conlon with as little as ten grains up to thirty or thereabouts. It was tilled under and we’ll give it another more prepared shot next season.
Hops are coming in and doing beautifully. Some cones are nearly an inch and a half in length and shedding lupulin like pollen. I look forward to some nice ales this winter.
Finally, all my bean plots were literally under water well into the planting season and even after were in a state like oatmeal or play-dough. Genuine tilling condition didn’t arrive until nearly July 7th (the cut-off here for corn). No real dry beans for the table this year (I had 18 varieties I wanted to trial).
Good news is the fantastic green bean crop - tender and sweet! I guess the kitchen garden has really been the success this year (mainly raised beds) and food for garden suppers is in abundance.
Also, despite cold and rain for the pollination period on the apple orchard and the lack of bees, we had good pollination and many set blossoms. The fall crop will be very nice and we’re enjoying Northwestern Greenings (not to be confused with Northwest Greening apples) in pies, sauce and other cooking methods.
One last magnificent crop this year - mosquitoes! Never seen the buggers this numerous or fierce. We go with head nets and spray - always. Looking forward to a good frost . . .
I hope you all are having a wonderful summer and anticipating the best bounty you’ve ever labored for.
I did the tomato leather. LOL..it took about 10 hours. I put the juiced tomatoes in 2 pyrex pans. The pan on the lower shelf became a wonderful dust and chunks, after I pryed it loose from the greased pan. The second came out dampish dry but did curl as I pushed it from one end of the pan to the other. One is in a jar and the other is in a plastic zip lock bag. One on the shelf, labled and the other in the freezer, labeled.
Anyone out there tinkering with grafted tomato plants? Seems to be quite the rage this year...
Oh, boy! I picked a cucumber today that looks like a watermelon.
Anyone know why corn would simply stop growing. I have about 16 stalks and they all grew nicely till about two weeks ago. They have ears. Then, they just stopped. I haven’t opened up any of the ears but I am assuming they are going to rot.
My corn is doing fine, other than the squirrels feasting on it. Tomatoes are finally kicking in. White eggplant is going gangbusters. Jalepenos and serranoes doing good, habeneros and sweet peppers ain’t doing squat - strange. Summer squash in a lull. Green beans doing well. Tomatillos just starting to be ready. Cukes died off. Winter squash should be a bumper crop. The bok choy I planted last week germinated really well. Three nice pumpkins growing from the volunteer in the compost bin.
Does anybody have a good ketchup recipe suitable for canning?
Lesson learned as I pull up dead bean bushes: if starting from seed using seed starter and mesh pods, leaving the mesh intact combined with hard ground will inhibit root development. (Duh. I feel so stupid at this point.) Excuse me while I go kick myself with my orthopedic steel-toed workboots.
Here's one-third of our mater take just in these last three days. We've eaten the other third, and given away the other. Sadly, however, our butternut squash take is one and only one (from two plants). *sighs* Maybe next year... But the maters are delicious (Brandywine Pinks, some standard ones, and Cherokee Purples)...First, a mystery was solved today.
We have several small stands, about 50 plants in total, that have sprouted up in various places around & in the garden, that looked like our Painted Hill corn. It & the P.H. corn (normal size for it) are now both about half the height of our other planted corn. Both have multiple tillers; but the mystery plants are stouter, and the leaves broader, without any red in them. Today, they started putting out “heads” rather than tassels: it is grain sorghum (milo)! IOW, it is essentially escaped birdseed from the feeders. Considering where the various stands are at, I’m going to guess that some was deposited after passing through the wild turkeys.
A second discovery was made yesterday, right under our noses. Just up-slope, and a little past the end of the rhubarb patch, I saw small yellow apples on a tree I knew was there, so decided to check them out. Those apples are pears! There is another one a bit further upslope, but back towards the opposite end of the rhubarb. That gives us 3 known pear trees now.
That area has apple & crab apple trees in it, but I never paid it much attention, as others were closer to the house, and were the first to be pruned back into shape. We can only do so much at once, but now I have an excuse to start in on them this winter.