Anyone have any experience with Hydrangeas?
Still way too cool in North Dakota. Buds are barely on the trees. Night time temps still in the low-mid 30’s.
The first week in April we had a Late Freeze and Snow, killed most everything I planted. I had a lot of everything in the Green House growing so I was able to replant all my tomatoes,zucchini,peppers,cantelope, eggplant...Broccol;i, cauliflower, cabbage carrots and radishes managed to survive though. This weekend I will finish planting the sprouts in the green house.
Olive Brine Hot Pepper Sauce
A simple, hot pepper sauce condiment, needs only a little repurposed green olive brine and vinegar, and some really HOT chile peppers.The bottle in the picture used 15 – 17 Pimenta Reaper peppers. Allow 20 min to pack bottle and 1 minute to add brine. Looks so pretty on your table.
Supplies A glass jar--- mouth wide enough for 15 peppers. Chopstick to place peppers in jar.
Ingredients 15 or more (depending on jar and size of chile peppers), HOT, long, thin chile peppers (e.g., reapers, chile pequin, chile de arbol, Thai chile) small.Brine from a jar of green olives. Distilled White Vinegar* You need a ratio of 1:1 (brine:vinegar) and enough liquid to fill the jar once the peppers have been stuffed into the jar. For jar w/ 15 peppers. use a little more than 1/2 cup of each – brine and vinegar.
Instructions Clean and rinse jar. Sterilize in a water bath 5 minutes or rinse (don’t dry) and micro 3 min. While the jar is cooling, stab each pepper w/ paring knife to make a ¼” vertical cut; allows air to seep out and the brine to leak in. Once cool enough to handle, remove the jar to counter, and carefully add peppers. Use chopstick to hold and position peppers. The neater you pack them, the more you can get in the jar. Heat the brine/vinegar mixture. Btb,then let cool 1 minute.
Carefully pour into jar to about 3/4 full. Lightly tap the bottom of the jar to release air bubbles. Continue to fill and tap the jar to get as much of the brine mixture in and as much of the air out as possible. Let set on the counter for a few hours, tapping periodically. As the liquid level drops, add more of the brine/vinegar mixture.
Place in the refrigerator, let sit for 2 weeks and enjoy! Once the jar is almost empty, you can heat up more brine and vinegar and refill. Can refill several times .
Various Clematis in bloom.
While preparing to mulch a section near my porch I found an “old school” trowel. Digging further produced a small tin pail with the bottom pointed upward. I dug it out and the pail covered a plastic sewer section that was capped with a screw on lid. I covered it back up.
Does treasure await. I’m sure this is something old Merle might have done, maybe his wife. I had a friends wife that used to bury money in the yard. Crazy Tammy.
Anticipation...
OK, either I was hallucinating when I saw little tiny blueberries-in-the-making, or they were stolen by something. Birds, insects, the horrible Oklahoma wind lately, who knows? Am hoping there will be more blossoms to come, and that they’ll produce. Would like to have at least ONE berry, so I can say there was something garden-wise that I didn’t kill. Heh. :-)
Secondly, the sage plant in the front bed looks great, but is getting more and more little tiny holes in it. Anyone have any idea what would target a strong-smelling thing like sage? Ants, maybe? Aphids? I don’t see anything when I look at both sides of the leaves, except more litlte holes. Thanks in advance.
I dropped by our Menards again a couple days ago. The selection of 6-pack veggies for $2.99/pack (plus 11% rebate if mailed in) was better:
Tomatoes quantity was about 3x last week, and more varieties. I only picked up one pack of Early Girls: I never have a lot of luck with them as out hot summers seem very rough on them. But, we’ll see. I may try heavier fertilizer to speed ‘em up as much as possible, and plant a couple in pots in a spot that gets a bit of shade from 3 pm on. Most sections of the 6-pack had 2x and one 3x plants in them - got the 3x separated & repotted today, and the one 1x potted in a bottom half (w/ drain holes) of a 2 liter soda bottle. (I re-use lots of those for gardening. the top halves become funnels for rainwater collection.)
No sweet banana peppers, so I went with “Red Baron”, whatever that is, and Golden Bell (shortest to maturity). Lots of hot peppers on hand, but my Thai hots from seed seem to be doing well so far.
I picked up a 6-pack of Swiss chards. I have never tried those - it will be interesting to see how they do. Several small plants per section - do I separate them? Yikes.
Other new 6-pack arrivals were watermelons (I passed), head lettuce (passed), green beans (passed), a few cauliflower (passed), a few herbs (passed), and a few onions (passed - I have red sweets purchased earlier & seem to be doing ok.)
It looked like a lot of 4-1/2” and larger pots of all sorts of stuff came in, and the 4-1/2” pots were on sale, which turned out to be a big 16 cents off. Bah! Lunchbox orange and sweet orange bell peppers were gone (rats). I found 2x Ichiban eggplants in a 4-1/2” pot - snagged it for my wife, as she likes those, and 4x “Japanese cukes” in a 4-1/2” pot — decided to give that a try.
Our Menards had 4 sections of annual flowers in 6-packs compared to the one section of 6-pack veggies. Sheesh. I don’t really have much time for lots of flowers - will put out a few more seeds, and have some Zinnias started, and see what happens. Plus we have lots of perennials and the iris and peonies are flowering now - yay! Still waiting for the butterfly weed plants to get going & have a few more seeds in a couple old 6-packs. And I moved a couple more small buckeye trees coming up from nuts from existing trees. Prob will try to slightly bury some more buckeye nuts out in an opened up (tree came down) spot at the edge of our little (~ 1/4 acre woods. Prob should try to start some walnuts from nuts at the far end of the woods. We have volunteers a few years old in “wrong” places to deal with too. Why do the squirrels bury all of them where walnut trees are a problem?
Found a pack of bluegill in the back of the freezer - likely way freezer-burned by now. Fertilizer they shall become.
Our “new stray” cat literally jumped and snatched a mouse caught in a trap yesterday, right out of my hand as I was carrying the newly deceased (literally a couple minutes B4) out of the house. He ran off with it — I guess he enjoyed it... As fast as he hit it, I’m guessing he may be a good mouser. Good! Maybe I should get him fixed, dump our lazy cat outside (esp. because even tho’ fixed he occasionally still pees in the house - really a PITA! I’m tired of ME always having to clean / refresh the bloody litter box for my daughter’s cats. I’m tempted to clean it one more time and put the dang thing (litterbox) in her bedroom and tell her she can’t close the door on the cats. The food bowls too... She “forgets” to feed ‘em 90% of the time too. “Forgets” as in “I’m busy on the computer with my friends - Dad will do it.” Bah!!
If it's not dumping rain after work today I'm going to deploy the fyke net in my bait pond and see if I can catch out most of the bluegills that are in there. After that soak I'm going to move the net to the front pond and see what kind of weight reduction I can accomplish there. I'm hoping to pull 100lbs total weight - all bluegills under 9", all green sunfish, and maybe some yellow perch will be removed. Bluegills <7" will go to my buddy's quarry lake, bluegills 7"-9" will get the knife, bluegills >9" will go back into the pond.
I stopped by the nursery on my home from PT on Tuesday. Picked up a dozen tomato plants, two cayenne peppers, and four rhubarb plants. I re-potted the tomatoes and stuck them and the peppers in the greenhouse for now. It's too early to put them in the ground here, and even if it was time the ground is too muddy to even think about it.
A blueberry update.
Earlier today, I found a real, live, honest-to-God blueberry on the scrawniest of my 3 container bushes. It’s maybe around the size of smallish buckshot. Don’t see how I could’ve overlooked it before. Hopefully at least one or two more will appear in the near future.
I feel powerful. Heh.
I guess her more modest neighbors can be thankful she is wearing “mom jeans” so that she does not look like a refrigerator repairman on World Nude Gardening Day.
DailyMail says the above woman is from Arizona. Fess up, AZ freepers!
re: Hydrangea (in 1 gal pot):
bloomed nicely for a while, then, as all things do, that passed.
pruned the dead off. what’s left are a few woody stems and some leaves.
the leaves are turning grey, curling up, and drying out in the most morbid way.
soil is not soaked but not entirely dry, so I can’t figure out if it’s getting too much or not enough water.
light is a problem. filtered at best for several hours a day.
had it on the porch for a while until it got too hot (yes, we’re there already) so now it resides in a climate-controlled environment.
any advice helpful!
Something got into one of our fenced off (but not fenced over) garden areas and ate most of our Opo plants down to 1" - 1-1/2" high. They were in pots and had grown about 5 ft. high, with stems close to 1/4" in diameter. I was gonna transplant them into soil (no pot) today...
Basically, these are "snake gourds", I guess, with a very neutral taste. (Can be added in cooking to almost any stew, soup, sauce, etc.) Any chance they will regenerate? Should I make a clean cut where the remainder of the stems begins to have been chewed? I do know these can be pruned back in normal circumstances to promote flowering (or just the darn plant from getting out of hand!), but I've never trimmed one by more than a third or so.
Thanks...
Anyone know what’s the purpose of putting Epsom Salt in the bottom of a large pot for a citrus (Calamansi) plant?
(I saw that in a couple You Tube vids about potting citrus plants.)
I need some help with my Broccoli. I have 6 plants in a raised bed that are producing VERY Small heads.Any Ideas for bigger heads?
Those “Mortgage Lifter” tomato plants have shown up in limited numbers of 6-packs @ Menards here in the mid-South USA. I almost picked one up — the plants were quite far along for 6-packs, but,
1) I’ve had much better luck with plants that produce fruits in the 8 oz. range. (Less cracking and splitting of the fruits, for one thing.)
2) These said “mild taste”, I like ‘em sweet or maybe sweet and a bit acidic at the same time. (Sweet and a bit of zing?)
3) I already have a lot of tomato plants. I doubt I’ll be short of tomato “meat”, and medium size fruits just usually work out better for me.
That said, I did see a variety I’ve never seen before, named “First Lady”. These 6-packs were fairly well along too. The description says: VFNT (not sure what that means?), Smooth, crack resistant, medium sized fruit. Early F1 hyb. MAT. 66 days. So, not quite as “fast” as an “Early Girl”, but with the plants well along, these might be an interesting comparison. I guess I’ll see how they do in our hot summer. Early Girls usually puke out.
My Thai hot pepper plants are doing well. Wifey will be happy. The Opo did NOT recover from being chewed off. I’ll have to start over - dang!
I have one butterfly weed that I did not prune back and I’ll be darned if the thing has not sprouted vigorously from the top of the seemingly dead plant - now it’s >5 ft. tall! I never heard of such. I’m hitting it with bloom booster, although long bright days is likely what it needs most, to flower.
The deer and who knows what are wreaking havoc here. I bought a bunch of mothballs, and was surprised at the price, as I thought they were practically free. Lord, do they stink! I recognized the smell from somewhere, some time long ago and forgotten. I have sensitive nose and eyes, and the things made me nauseous RIGHT NOW.
Anyway, I put a few down and the damage stopped on my lillies and none to Hostas so far and it stopped on the young lilaces (yes, liliacs). And they survive the rain and lawnmower discharge better than I expected. So I did a search on them to see if they will hurt plants, as I have a LOT more to plant and, oh, man! They are regarded as DDT on steroids.
So, from normies, I seek common sense experience. Will they hurt the plants over the growing season? I’m using two to a plant, more or less, on the ground. To me, the whole area stinks to high heaven, but I can take it.
Anybody else use them?
Asian Vegetable Noodle Salad
A nice 'n easy do-ahead meal on a hot summer day.
Ingredients 5 oz rice noodles your garden's choice Asian veggies 2 tbl each canola oil, soya sauce, lime juice, 1 tbl each fish sauce, honey, chp fresh ginger-root 2 cloves garlic, minced 3 tbl fresh-chp cilantro 2 clementines in segments 1 ½ cup cooked chicken
Preparation Cook rice noodles as per pkg. Rinse under cold water.
In boiling salted water, cook Asian vegs 3-4 min. Drain; run under cold water.
Dressing--In server, mix oil, soya sauce, fish sauce, lime juice, honey, garlic and ginger.
Final--Add noodles to Dressing, stir/coat well. Stir in vegs, cilantro, clementines, chix. Serve.