Posted on 08/23/2013 1:53:26 PM PDT by greeneyes
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More bad news. In addition to dying peaches, the melons have developed a virus or fungus, and the vines are dying. Will have to research to see what I can do to prevent it for next year.
Y'all have fun conversing, and I'll be back ASAP. Have a great weekend and God Bless.
Pinging the List.
My first run of squash either croaked or was so mildewy sick I yanked it up,.
When I pulled it up, I decided to look at the soil..It was full of those red and black wood ants. Wood ants living in the garden..Go figure.
Sorry about the melons; we had about five or six butternuts (our vine too had/has some sort of ailment), but when young, something ate all but one... We call him “Mr. Squash.”
/johnny
Thx for adding me to the Ping list..since I'm here more than anywhere else on FR these days, anyway!
I am working diligently on my garden for next year. I have been working and building up a huge pile of yard and kitchen waste into a super compost pile since I got back here at our home in Mississippi last month. Next week I will be adding some compost activator and red worms to the pile. Yes I am impatient and I want and expect a good start for my garden next spring. I plan to plant some winter rye as cover crop in late Sept or early October. I am anxious to get into full gardening next spring.
I am still harvesting figs as they ripen. I am freezing them when I only get a few each morning and will can them as fig preserves. Next is the harvest of pears in late Sept.
I have a plethora of happenings to report:
First, DO YOU HAVE A RAIN GAUGE? WHAT KIND?
I had a very small glass one that was hard to see, plus the inside got dirty and I couldn’t get it clean. I dumped it. Today, I got one with great big numbers on it. It is sponsored by The Weather Channel (for whatever difference that makes). It has a plastic chip in it with “Weather Channel” on the chip and it floats when it rains and one uses that to determine how much rain has fallen. This thing is easy to see and put it on a small table in the middle of the deck. I can see the numbers when looking out my glass doors. I might have to step out on the roofed deck to see where that floating chip is.
Anyway, I decided it is good to know how much rain has fallen. LIKE YESTERDAY - I had a real storm yesterday. Rightly, I don’t know if this hit your place. The rain came down in torrents (didn’t have the rain gauge until a short time ago today) and the wind was so strong it broke short green limbs off the two oak trees behind my back fence and they are all over the garden.
It bent my one Tromboncino Squash in the barrel but it is straightening up and now has a fourth leaf.
Next: Just went to Walmart and picked up my 4 ft. grow lamp with stand. I don’t like going there but having this heavy stand/grow lamp sent to Walmart to pick up saved shipping charges.
The store is full of parents and kids getting ready for school. All kids should be put in prison until they are old enough to be drafted into military service - and we need to bring back the draft. :o)
The box is heavy and at least five feet long. I’m hoping the grow lamp isn’t broken. Right now, the box is on a couch that is shorter than the box - I haven’t tackled it yet. I don’t know where it is going to end up - somehow, it’s going in this room.
I will start putting seeds in paper cups tomorrow - oh, yes, bought two more bags of organic seed starter - and by golly, these seeds had better germinate and come up. Will plant another couple of Tromboncino Squash seeds in case the one I planted dies. The other four still haven’t come up.
Johnny’s weather right now is hotter than mine. Had a short rain shower here a while ago before I got the rain gauge out there. By the way, I didn’t want to spend lots of money on a fancy digital rain gauge.
Figs and pears, two of my favorite things, but things I cannot seen to grow. Glad to see you are working on next years garden.
I will never plant any kind of squash again except Tromboncino and it's not going in garden dirt. This kind might survive garden dirt since bugs are supposed to not like it, but I've had it with garden dirt - that stuff has bugs and mold and many other impurities that murder my plants.
I'm giving garden dirt one more chance only. I will try to grow tobacco in it after I grow the plants under the grow lamp next year. Johnny is sending a magnitude of tobacco seeds to me and he and I need them to grow.
We’ve been unseasonably cool, but the tomatoes and hot peppers are growing like crazy. I canned a lot last night and managed to forget to add lemon juice to the maters. Oh well. The hot pepper butter should be okay though. I hope the melons will have enough time to mature but I’m thinking that’s not going to happen. I’m planning for next year now. I’ll be experimenting with onion and potato quantity and storage so that I can make us self-sufficient on those.
I have used Jiffy seed starting soil from Lowes, for three years and been satisfied with the germination rates. After 3 -5 days, I feed(the seedlings, not me) with diluted fish emulsion after every few waterings.
My formerly sick ghost peppers are starting to ripen. One plant has 14, the other has 0.
The “little Lady’s” succulent garden is gorgeious..I would’ve thought those would freeze in the winter up north..
Oops, I meant gorgeous.
They get covered with snow and seem to do well.
I got the two boxes out of the big box containing the grow light in one and the stand in the other. Hooked up the light and it works so it wasn’t damaged in shipping.
The stand is heavy and I haven’t taken the plastic off to put it together yet. Supposed to take only a Phillips screwdriver and I have a bunch of those with one at the ready if it requires the regular size, pretty sure it does.
My husband could lose tools faster than he could buy them and he readily admitted that. I bought my own set of tools needed in the house so I would know where they were. Then, had to keep him out of mine or they would disappear. He also never closed a drawer, only closed it half way and doors were frequently pushed shut, not really shut. He had a brilliant mind, just don’t bother him with the mundane like knowing where things were.
It was Jiffy seed starter I got today.
“diluted fish emulsion” - yuk, I don’t have that.
Tougher Tunnel/Tube Type Greenhouse Frame (temporary type for plastic/shade cloth covers)
Here’s an idea for those of you in very windy places—something I thought of a couple of years ago. Get a quarter mile of barbless wire (yes, the kind without barbs). Erect semicircular hoops of grey, plastic, UV-resistant conduit, as others have done before.
Drill the conduit horizontally, and loop the barbless wire once around each pipe, working your way horizontally through the pipes for the tube. Anchor the barbless wire ends at each end of the tube. When you have enough horizontal wire strands through the whole structure (and vertical, if needed), cover with shade cloth and/or plastic. Maybe even 4 mil plastic will be heavy enough, if your grid lines are close together enough. Use large enough sheets of cover material to adequately anchor it on all sides with earth or whatever (might be better than putting holes in plastic for fastening to pipes).
There you are—a stronger tunnel-type frame for your garden without big costs. Winds in my area often hit over 60 mph in the summer (sometimes higher in dust tornadoes, er, dust devils) and over 100 mph in winter. Using the barbless wire, higher tubes can built and used with plastic in two layers to passively collect solar heat for whatever uses in the winter. Anyway, the frame with barbless wire can be uncovered, when the cover is not needed. The cover can be stored and used again, lowering costs a little more.
By the way, here at over 9,000 feet, near the Divide, we’ve been seeing a little relief from the drought so far. Looks like half-monsoon weather. Some afternoons, it rains. Others, it doesn’t. It’s an improvement over last year. Watch out for unusual cold fluctuations, though. We saw some of those last winter and don’t know what will happen next winter. But within the next 6 years or so, we might see cold fluctuations unlike any we’ve seen in our lives (maybe just past our very low solar max in this extended minimum—only a guess). There will be hot fluctuations, too, but not as noticeable for most of us as the cold ones.
Have fun. Enjoy the adventure.
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