Trying again...one at a time. The summer squash bed with some overgrown radishes that are gradually being fed to the chickens.

Here is a link that might be useful: Squash

Tomato plants on the left, broccoli and onions in the center, and peas on the arch plus some that have overgrown their trellis on the right. Broccoli just now heading. Onions have not finished but some have fallen over. I think an animal must visit them at night. LOL

Here is a link that might be useful: Broc and onions

The container garden.....haha.

My son came the other day and saw it for the first time and said, "Mom, now I know why you call it the 'ghetto' garden.

It has horseradish, carrots, pole beans, two eggplants, strawberries, and 18 tomato plants, I think. It's a mess.

Here is a link that might be useful: Ghetto

Carol, that really is a very nice Ghetto Garden! I'm not sure you're going to get away with calling it that because in reality it looks more like a ritzy new development compared to mine. Yee gads!

I loved all your pics and your garden looks great.

Susan

Thanks Susan. The plants look nice but the containers are little of this and a little of that. I have a gazillion nursery pots. Not pretty, but they work.

Susan, Can you see my poodle peeking into the squash bed. He is the same color as the dirt. LOL

Carol, I love the pictures. I love the ghetto garden, I would like to get one but I would have to rob a bank to get all the pots and soil. I especialy love you poodle, I have a little helper like that also. He is a Yorkie but has to inspect everything I do. He would have his head in the squash eating the leaves.

Thank You for sharing.

Larry

Carol, I love the ghetto garden too and all the rest of it. I did notice the dog peering into the bed. Everything looks great!

I have had a ghetto container garden for years, though I have tried to group containers of the same color together in different places so it looks like some planning of some sort went into it.

I am trying to slowly convert from smaller, miscellaneous containers of various shapes, sizes and colors to all the black molasses feed tubs that Fred gave me this year. Then at least the containers will be pretty much the same size and same color. Progress is slow though because it takes a lot of soil-less mix to fill just one molasses tub. A handful of those containers are a bright orange and I am not sure what I'll do with them. It is likely I'll group them away from the others and plant late summer/fall annuals in them with flowers that are complimented by the really bright orange containers.

Larry, If you can find any local ranchers who have molasses feed tubs to dispose of, they make great containers for gardening. Fred gave me 36 of them this year, so I'll be filling up containers forever and forever. A couple of the ones he gave me 10 years ago are finally getting brittle, breaking and falling apart, so I filled two of the newer ones with soil-less mix from the older ones. At the rate I'm going, it is going to take me a year or longer to fill up these 36 feed tubs.

I have noticed as I break apart mulch hay bales that the center of most bales is almost pure compost, so I've started dumping those bits of compost into the feed tubs. Maybe I'll end up with a bunch of compost I can use to help fill the feed tubs.

Sometimes you can find the molasses feed tubs on your local Freecycle website. So many of the ranchers around me have sold off their herds last year and this year that I may never get another molasses feed tub, but I have plenty so I'll be content with what I have. While they come in slightly different shapes, with some being almost octagonal in shape and others being rounded, they all are about the size of whiskey half-barrels. Most are black, but every now and then I get a pink, orange or blue one.

Dawn

Carol,

When said about the Ghetto Garden, i was imagining something else, but your ghetto garden is beautiful. All plants are looking great. Paean on cattle panel arch looks nice too. Dog looking into the bed, thought it was such a nice sculpture! Hoop house on the Squash bed is nice too. Have a wonderful harvest!

-Chandra

Dawn, I have not had a lot of luck with finding free tubs, many places around here charge a deposit on the tubs and many people have gone to lick tanks. The supplier comes by in a tank truck to fill the tanks. Some suppliers now use the bottom half of a 55 Gal. drum, but still charge a deposit. We cant even get a free 5 gal. bucket any more.

Larry

Larry if you were closer I would give you all you need. Not sure where you are located but I plan on making a few more trips east in and through OK this year and would always be glad to drop off a few if I was going to be close. Jay

Thanks, but it really is a ghetto garden. From that picture all you can see are pots, but that is the side the neighbors see. LOL Trust me Dawn, feed tubs would look better. I also like the size of feed tubs. I have four huge tree tubs and I have used them over and over. In fact, you can see one with green beans in it in the ghetto picture. There are also two more out there that have carrots and horseradish. I didn't use the fourth one this year because that is where I stored the soaker hoses last year.

Larry, I have all of those pots filled with straight mushroom compost and I have about 12-15 more, also filled, that I haven't put anything into, but my cage supply has run out. I think I am going to dump out the soaker hose and use some of the smaller pots to fill another tree pot. We bought 2 pickup loads of compost this year. Some went straight to the garden and the remainder went into containers. They have had nothing but water and sunshine added to the original compost. My in-ground tomatoes had a little organic fertilizer added at the time of planting, but they also got compost in the hole and my garden had tons of leaves added in the Fall. Some of them are not growing quite as well, but they are competing with the roots of junk that grows in my fence. The ones in the middle of the garden are doing better than the ones along the fence.

Chandra, the hoops on the Squash bed are not as tall as the ones in the garden that we made out of conduit. The squash bed is not as wide as the other beds and it was built out of scrap lumber left from concrete forms from another project. The hoops are the 2 halves of one of those inside exercise trampolines which we cut in half. The side rails are 4 ten foot pieces of conduit which are slipped over the legs of the tramp, drilled and bolted. That bed is normally used for the salad greens that I grow into the winter, and start again in early Spring. It works fine for that, but the squash was beginning to outgrow it by the time I wanted to uncover it.

The ground looks bad there, but that is just a pathway that goes to the gate. I have to keep it clear so the water has somewhere to go after a heavy rain. That is the lowest spot in the garden and water flows through the fence and gate and down the road to the lake. I don't want to do anything to obstruct the water flow. Obviously it doesn't get as much attention as other parts of the garden do.

To the south of the peas, I have cattle panels which are growing peas, pole beans, and cucumbers and to their south are the potatoes. There are some bush beans at one end and behind them, I just planted long beans on a tower. To my north when I took the broccoli picture, I have slicing cukes growing on the fence and they look really good.

I had thought I would try Dawn's trick to plant something under the okra, so I planted the pre-sprouted okra then a few days later planted a few watermelon seed. The melon plants look good but there is very little okra in that bed. I think it may have dried out too much. The other two beds of okra look better, but still don't look great. I don't see that pre-sprouting helped me that much, but it is probably my own fault for not keeping it wet enough. Everyday the weather report showed rain, but it always stopped before it got to us.

My garden is on the west side of my house and parts of it get shade until mid day. I'm not sure the shade is much of a problem, but I have a tree on the south which has a lot of surface roots so that limits what I can plant there. It's funny tho because things still grow there. In fact, I have a few pole beans growing there that I am trying to grow out from seed I received from Jay and Dawn and they appear to be doing great, so I may change the way I have been planting that area.

My garden should be big enough for anyone, but you know how I am, so most years I have to find every available sunny spot and put something else in it, especially tomatoes. Thus the ghetto garden. LOL

Larry and Jay, I can never find them around here either. I thought my husband was going to croak over the four tree pots. We were in Fort Worth where they had just landscaped a new building, and they had thrown those pots into the dumpster. We were in our Church clothes, but my son got out and retrieved them. Al would only let me get four. LOL We tied them behind the cab of the Avalanche and brought them home.

All of the other nursery pots were sold at an auction when a local nursery went out of business. They sold before I arrived (along with everything else I wanted), but I found the guy who bought them. I had hoped to buy some from him, but after he teased and clowned around with me over them, he told me I could have them. He was just going to give them to me, but I paid him what he had paid, which was almost nothing. They were all sizes, but it took me two trips in my SUV to get them all home. The 5, 7, and 10 gallon size are the ones I use most. There were hundreds of others that are about gallon size but they stack and don't take up much room. I took the other gallons that I had and gave them to Lisa at the swap last year, and I sent Jay a few of the stacking ones to use in his new greenhouse. They are just lightweight plastic pots, but they hold soil, and they were cheap.

A FYI to anyone obtaining feed tubs for containers. Here most are either black or red. The black ones seem to last for years. The red ones last 2-3 years max before coming brittle and falling apart. I put straw bales around my black ones to keep them some cooler. Then just remove them early in the season so they will warm up faster. Others paint them white. Jay

Larry,

I'm sorry feed tubs are so hard to find there. I don't think deposits are being charged yet for them here, but I suspect that sort of thing is inevitable. Some of the folks here just pile them up and burn them to get ride of them. In fact, that's sort of how Fred gave us these....he said "come and get 'em if you want 'em. If you don't want them, I'll just burn them." We couldn't get over to his house fast enough to pick them up.

Jay, That's so nice of you to offer to share your feed tubs. I've never seen red ones, but they sound like the pink ones here. At least the pink ones don't stay pink long. They bleach out to a sort of beige after a couple of years. By the time that pink has faded, they're already getting brittle though. If I don't move them, I can make them last up to 5 or 6 years, but if I forget and try to drag a full one to a new location after it has gotten brittle, that's the end of it.

Carol, Well if you are out of space, maybe it is time to plant a roof garden. They are all the rage, especially in Chicago. And, all kidding aside, I'd love to build a reinforced roof for my potting shed that could hold the weight of a roof garden. I'd probably just plant succulents up on the roof if we ever got around to doing that. I'd love to put dwarf cascading tomatoes on the shed roof, but harvseting the fruit would be difficult.

I used to paint Tidy Cat buckets with Fusion paint and plant everything in them, but got tired of watering them so often. Also, the Fusion paint doesn't seem to adhere as well as it used to and I am tired of repainting. It makes me wonder if I topcoated the first batch of Fusion-painted pots with a clearcoat of spray paint, because those lasted forever and ones painted more recently don't keep their paint for long, especially in a rainy year. I think I am not, for the most part, going to plant anything smaller than molasses tubs in future years.

I do shade my black pots with hay and other materials once the weather heats up.

I am fretting as I watch my stack of mulch hay bales dwindle. It has been such a nice thing to have them sitting there making me feel like I have so many bales I'll never run out. The time is now approaching when all of the original 206 bales will be gone, likely before the end of the summer. You can hide a multitude of unsightly things with a few bales of hay.

Dawn

Hay is a great way to insulate though and keep those black pots from getting direct sun, but since it is usually $7.50 a bale, I don't buy much.

Dawn, you could put jack-o-lantern faces on the orange tubs and plant pumpkins in them, accent with a few bundles of corn stalks and your Fall decorations would be done. LOL

Jay,

I would love to meet you and buy you lunch or dinner whether you have tube or not. I live 17 miles south of Ft. Smith Ar. If you are traveling down Hwy 71 and would like a good home-cooked meal, I am married to one of the best cooks around.

Carol, I bought 7 loads of compost, bought 44 bags of composted manure, hauled 5 loads of shredded leaves and several loads of oak shavings, 3 of those loads in the past 2 days with more loads planned for tomorrow. If it stays as dry as it is now this stuff will never decay.

Larry

WOW Larry, that's a lot of stuff. I had intended to add compost all last winter, but since my neighbor gave me so many leaves, I just used them instead. I think I can get all the leaves I can use delivered to my garden gate, so I may just add compost in the Spring like I did this year.

Great pics, Carol. Our broccoli is almost done. Picked about 30 Thursday and younger daughter and I put them up yesterday. Then picked 7 yesterday evening and took them to older daughter this morn. Have 6 more out there which I will pick tomorrow and then the chickens get all the plants.

Your asparagus looks good, too. Most years I pick asparagus through the end of May but since the season started so early this year, I picked the last picking on Mother's Day when daughter and kids were here.

Carol,

You know, horse people are very picky about the hay they feed their horses. I know that when my cousin lived in Fort Worth and kept her horses at a stable, she'd drive from north Ft. Worth to Springtown to buy horse hay from one specific person because it was such high quality. Now she lives in the country and grows her own. I thought of her pricey hay the other day when we went into TSC and they had really fresh, really clean coastal bermuda for something ridiculous like $12.46 a bale or something very close to that. It might have been $12.64, I about fainted when I saw the price. I have bought a bale of alfalfa hay for less than that.

I was thinking that the orange molasses feed tubs are a natural for a halloween thing of one sort or another.....

Larry, That is a whole lot of stuff! Your soil will be so happy. So, y'all are dry now too? Wow. When your place, Carol's place and Dorothy's place are all dry at the same time, something is really wrong with the weather.

Dorothy, I took out my last broccoli plant this week. I had intended to let it go all summer like last year's Piricicaba did, but with all this hot and windy weather, little rain and lots of cabbage worms, I was tired of looking at it.

I hope the warm season crops hang in there a lot longer than the cool-season ones have done. I do have one head of lettuce that hasn't bolted yet.

Dawn

Dorothy, thanks. My asparagus patch is closet size compared to yours, but we got a surprising amount from it this Spring. I started to cook some of the spears I got from you tonight to have with our chicken alfredo, but I used the fresh green beans instead. Tossed them on a cookie sheet with some seasoning, some sliced vadalia onions, drizzled with olive oil and roasted in the oven. I'm ready to eat.

I wish my broccoli was ready to process because I want to plant some spaghetti squash in that location. I usually leave a few plants for side shoots, but my space is too limited to leave it there very long.

Dawn, I have not priced hay this year, and after your post, I'm not sure I want to. Even chicken feed has increased by a huge amount. I can see why a lot of farmers and ranchers just give up.

Al forgot to order our beef this year, but when he called we managed to get the very last one that was ready for market. It is a small one, but will be ready this week. I don't even know the cost, but it's a sure thing it will be cheaper than the grocery store and I know how it was raised. We will be eating out of the freezer this week as I try to make room for it.

I wouldn't care if the feed buckets were pink, they are practical. I'm sure you will come up with a cute Fall idea for the orange ones. My neighborhood doesn't do much decorating for any holiday, and that is probably because we have so few children here. Every year I think I will get inspired and do better, but it doesn't happen.

Carol,

With all the rain and based on all the hay bales in the fields from the first cutting in April, I thought it would be a good hay year, but then the rain stopped falling, so it seems like it will be a long time before folks here get a second cutting. I am sure the pricey coastal bermuda we saw was imported from elsewhere because no one's bermuda here looks good enough for a cutting yet.

I am shocked at how many empty pastures there are around us that used to have cows in them. I believe Fred told me he sold a lot of his, though he still has some, and another ranching neighbor told me the other day that he'd sold most of his. He said the price at market was so high that he felt like he had to sell. The price of beef at the stores is shocking.

Beyond our immediate neighborhood, we can drive from Marietta to Ardmore on either I-35 or SH 77 and see empty pasture after empty pasture after empty pasture. Those pastures used to be full of cows all the time. It has been a very slow reduction in the herds since the drought of 2005-2006. Every year there were fewer in each pasture, then some pastures became empty, and now most pastures are empty. I don't know if these folks are out of the cattle business for good, or if they are waiting for rainier weather to return so that they can raise cattle without spending a fortune on feed for them. Also, more and more, we are seeing cattle ranches converted to horse ranches. In our part of the state, horses are taking over. I don't even see as many fields of goats or sheep as I used to.

Chicken feed is getting ridiculously high, but our birds free-range a lot in the summer and eat relatively little feed--maybe half as much as they do in the winter. Some days it seems like they hardly touch the feed at all and I assume they are filling up on grasshoppers and such.

I love the molasses tubs.

The other thing I love is my galvanized stock tank (the bottom is rusted out, so it drains well). I've had it about 20 years and have grown everything from potatoes to sweet potatoes to tomatoes in it.

The cattle feeding trough on legs that we bought last year is now my favorite way to grow lettuce. Since it sits a couple feet above the ground, most of the lettuce pests we have in the garden don't cause any problems in the trough. This year I stuck a few leftover onion plants in it, intending to harvest them along the way as green onions. Well, I never used them all because I was using the ones that were bolting on a regular basis in the big garden, so now some of those leftovers are almost as big as the onions in the raised bed in the Peter Rabbit Garden. I didn't think they'd get as big in the trough as they have. So far, I've grown lettuce and mesclun blends, kale, beets, onions and dwarf tomatoes in that cattle trough. I think I will get another one next year and try raising onions in it with lettuce in the original one. If I could grow onions in that trough, I wouldn't have to worry about flooding rains rotting them like we had happen in the big garden this year.

I used to decorate the front porch, back porch and yard for every holiday when Chris was younger. After he went off to college, I found I was doing it less and less. I always think every year that I will do better too, but I don't.

Dawn

Dawn, how are your dwarf tomatos doing? I was reading some input on another forum about them, and word is that they are fairly slow to set fruit.

Also wanted to ask if you are still using the SunLeaves bags. After this summer, I doubt I will grow as much, which is not much to begin with. But, the cost of potting soil has run thru the roof and I can't do that every year. The large bags of potting soil contain 16 gallons of soil. That's more than half a bag of soil for 1 10-gal. plant/bag. For filling a 20 or 30 gal. container, that is nearly 2 bags of soil at $22 for one tomato plant. I would have soil delivered, but I have no space to put a big truckload. I am not comfortable re-using soil for vegetables. Maybe ornamentals, but not vegetables with all their associated diseases.

I am getting cukes now, so will be making some pickles soon - Kosher Dills and Bread & Butter. I picked up some spices at Lowe's the other day, the Ball brand. Anyone ever used that? I am not happy with Spacemaster 80 plants. Too much mildew. In reading about them, apparently they are not very resistant, but the regular Spacemaster is more tolerant, so if I plant in the future, will be looking for it or another variety. I am going to try spraying them with a milk/water mix since I don't think that will harm anything else in the environment of my garden. We'll see.

It is raining here again, and it wasn't supposed to rain again until this afternoon. What do they know! I hope you all are getting some of this "liquid sunshine" as they call it in Jamaica, too.

Susan

I love your pics! Really nice garden pics, including the poodle. :)

Moni

Susan,

None of my dwarfs from The Dwarf Project have set fruit yet. They haven't even flowered, I don't think. I looked at them yesterday and didn't see any flowers, but admittedly I was just passing by and didn't stop and look at them closely. When I go back out to the garden in a few minutes, I'll make a point to stop and examine them out there as well as the ones in containers near the house.

Dwarf varieties almost always are slower than the non-dwarf tomatoes because of the way they grow. Except for New Big Dwarf which sometimes sets a few fruit here at a fairly early age, all the dwarfs I've ever grown are slow to set fruit, so I expected it. Despite whatever their DTMs say, and I've found this to be true of all kinds of O-P dwarfs, they set fruit very late and none of their DTMs seem correct, to me, in our climate.

I haven't used any SunLeaves bags in a couple of years because I've been accumulating larger containers for the last few years. I still have some of the bags in a box in my garage sort of as a security blanket in case we ever again have a year like 2004 or 2007 when heavy spring rains made it impossible to grow tomatoes in my garden since a river of water was running through it constantly. I don't know if we'll ever again have a spring so rainy that I'll need them.

Yes, filling containers is costly. Were it not, I've have all those molasses tubs that Fred gave me filled up and planted with something already. It drives me crazy to look at them stacked up empty by the potting shed, but can you imagine how long it will take to fill up 36 of them and how costly it will be? My goal is to fill up at least 2 per month. At that rate, it will take me practically forever. I think I've filled and used 4 or 5 of them so far, and some of them got used soil from cracking containers that were old and brittle and ready to go on the trash heap.

I do reuse soil-less mixes and never have had a disease problem because of it. I do add lots of good organic fertilizers and soil amendments when I am reusing soil-less mixes. I mix in lots of compost and composted cow manure or mushroom compost.

For pickling, the most disease-tolerant cucumber I've ever found is County Fair. H-19 Little Leaf is pretty good too. With smaller leaves, I guess there is less surface area for diseases to attack. For fresh eating, I just grow any old thing I come across. The O-P Lemon Cucumber has as good of a disease tolerance as any hybrid I've grown most years.

The Ball spices should be fine, but I don't know that I've ever used them. If Ball cannot put together good spice mixes, then who in the world can? (grinning)

I'm in the midst of plum jelly-making, so am glad there's no cucumbers to pickle this week. I likely will put the first batch of tomatoes in the dehydrator tonight.

It sure seems early in the year to be doing all this food preservation, but at least the plants are beating the heat in terms of production. I picked about 40 pounds of zucchini and yellow squash this morning, so will be doing some dehydrating and freezing with a lot of it, and probably will feed some to the chickens and even to the deer. Our deer herd visits the area near the back compost pile southwest of the barn around 7 to 8 p.m. every evening, so if I have anything for them I put it on the edge of the pile and they feast upon it. I might even pickle some squash. There's definitely no shortage of summer squash this month.

I am afraid my worst fears are about to be realized and everything is going to be producing like crazy at the same time. Food preservation is a lot easier if the plants spread out the harvest evenly, but that rarely happens, especially in a year when the last freeze is early and everything gets off to a great, early start. When the big harvest is ready, it is ready, and I just have to stay in the kitchen until it all is dealt with. There are worse problems to deal with!

Earlier this morning it looked like the rain might make it this far north, but it didn't. Oh well, it has to rain again sooner or later. Hopefully it will be sooner as opposed to later.

Dawn

We got a sprinkle, but that was about it.

I haven't had squash yet, but I have several small ones on the vines and a ton of blooms and buds showing. I planted 6 kinds of squash in that one bed and don't remember which hills are which, so they will all be a surprise. So far only yellow straight neck and zucchini have made squash, but are still too small to pick.

I must have had the perfect weather for pole beans this year because I have four different kinds now producing. They haven't kicked into full production and since I don't have an enormous amount of any of them, we have eaten them twice by picking from more than one area. I have another trellis about 8 feet long that has more pole beans but they were planted later and aren't climbing yet. Their germination was much better and they are looking strong. Probably the result of warmer soil when they were planted.

After a couple of days of water, the Blue Lake bush beans are looking a lot better so maybe they were just falling over because they needed a drink so badly. It was my intention to have a lot of beans this year, but I may have overdone it.

My broccoli is making me a little nervous. It is still growing but the heads have a much more yellow tint than I remember from last year. I hope they don't suddenly break into blooms. Well, if they do then I can try again in the Fall. I think I bought Arcadia for Fall and I haven't planted that one before. So far my best performing broccoli was deChico which was a common one found on seed racks. It may have had more to do with the weather that year than the type, but I may give that one another shot next Spring.

My pea vines are looking pretty rough now but are still producing. We eat a lot of them in the garden and I have made several salads with them. They finally starting coming faster than we could eat them (which isn't easy) and I have a bag full in the refrigerator. I will still have some to pick this week, but I think it will likely be over by next weekend. I don't think I will have any to freeze, but we have certainly had enough fresh ones to satisfy our craving. I look forward to them every year, and just eating them raw and in the garden is still my favorite way to have them.

I have a New Big Dwarf in a container and it is covered with blooms but I haven't checked it for fruit set. I have at least one other in the ground also, so I will check them later and see if they have fruit. I love the way the plant looks and think it would be great for growing in a balcony garden or containers on a porch. I have a small cage around mine, but they are probably strong enough to survive on their own. I'll make final judgement on their desirability after I taste a tomato.

I plant mostly regular leaf indeterminates because I normally just plant a single crop and want them to go as long as they will. I have a few exceptions this year, with New Big Dwarf and True Black Brandywine being some of them.

I am getting quite a bit of yellowing on the Wild Boar Farm types that I have in containers. I am not sure they are going to be successful in our heat.

Dawn, I remember what it was like year before last trying to keep up with the tomato harvest. It seemed like I was making salsa every other day. I cannot imagine what it would be like to keep up with your (almost) 300 plants. Good thing you have all of that energy. LOL

Thanks Moni.

I remember Dawn's Plum harvest in 2010! Is this going to be an even year thing for plums, 2010, 2012.......?

Oh, Dawn, THANK GOODNESS I can re-use the soilless mix. Of course, it won't really be soilless if I add chicken manure to it, but, hey, as long as I can use it, I will.

I am using the SunLeaves, but only after filling my pots first. They are not as stable, and I am thinking about getting some rope to tie about 3 of them together, and I think that would stabilize them enough to keep them from being blown over in one of high wind storms. One of the bags, I didn't fill quite to the top and the top rim flaps over the soil and acts like a kind of mulch. I just have to be careful to make sure the entire soil content gets watered.

Also, thanks for the cuke suggestions, and I'll also re-read the container plant vegetable varieties thread which I saved from last year. I can't say anything bad about the Homemade Pickles vines yet. I do have fruit growing, but haven't tasted them yet. Just that I was not happy with the Spacemaster 80 mildew problem and I know there must be other varieties of dwarf cukes that have less problems with it.

I concur with you on the Ball spices - I mean, who but....? LOL!

It looks like it may be another year for squash - where unlocked cars end up with magically appearing of loads of squash by the Squash Fairy?

Susan

Now that Carol has mentioned my almost 300 tomato plants, I should count them tomorrow and see how many there are. I am afraid to count them. The sheer number of plants would be scary. The advantage to having that many will be to have a huge harvest all at once (hopefully mostly in June because I'll be done with plums and peaches by then) and do a lot of food preservation. Then, if it is so hot that heavy watering is required, I can turn off the faucet and just say "no" and let them sink or swim on their own. Well, sink or swim isn't right. I can let them live or die, thrive or fail, stay green or turn brown.

Carol, I have had yellowing on a small amount of tomato plants. On most of them it appeared after a heavy rainfall (the last good heavy rain we had) and is mostly mildew. On a few, it looks like a light case of Early Blight. Either way, I'm stripping the yellowing foliage off of them and disposing of it in order to keep it from spreading. Tomorrow I may spray with a fungicide if it isn't too windy or if it isn't raining. (Fat chance that it will be raining here.)

The only Wild Boar Farms varieties I planted were Black and Brown Boar and Michael Pollan. I haven't checked Michael Pollan for fruit, but Black and Brown Boar has set a lot of fruit early, just like they did last year, so I am excited about that.

Today I mostly worked on harvesting, weeding, and thinning the late corn earlier in the day. This afternoon I had to run errands and buy groceries and all that kind of stuff and it really chewed up my afternoon. Since it was so hot here (94 on our front porch in the shade), it seemed like a good idea to take off the afternoon and do something that allowed me to be inside in air conditioning. Our high temp tomorrow is supposed to be 80 degrees, if they haven't changed it, so I'm expecting 83 or so and will harvest in the morning and then do food prep/canning all afternoon and evening.

My plan is to use drip irrigation in May and June, as needed, but not in large amounts and then, if there has been little May and June rainfall, I'll stop watering most of the tomatoes, but keep watering the paste types until I've gotten enough fruit from them to can all the salsa we want.

Carol, I do remember the summer you were making salsa all the time. It was a very good summer, wasn't it? I think we all stayed really busy with our various harvests.

Susan, The heavy fruit harvest should be next year, not this year. Usually I get a bumper crop every third year. Not that I am complaining, of course! Today the second plum tree has ripened its first fruit, and the peaches are really coloring up so they are not too far behind. I just hope I can deal with all the plums and then after that the peaches, but last time I ended up having to pick and can from all 3 trees at the same time for a couple of weeks. I'm still eating plums as fast as I can and as many as I can. The more we eat, the less there will be to can.

When I reuse soil-less mix, I like to pour it into something big like a kid's wading pool, and I'll mix together the contents of several "used" containers. Then, I'll add whatever feels right by volume in terms of organic matter. After I put the soil-less mix back into the containers, I'll add Tomato-Tone or Garden-Tone, as appropriate, a handful of lime and whatever else I am adding at that point. Then I water it and let it sit for a couple of days before planting into it. In a year when disease has been really bad, like in maybe 2008 or 2009 when I saw a lot of Septoria Leaf Spot on tomatoes, I will put the soil-less mix into containers to be used for something other than tomato plants. I do think it would be easy to build up disease in the soil, but then so many of the foliar diseases that plague tomato plants are airborne anyway, so they can be very hard to avoid.

I've already harvested enough squash to call it a good year. : ) So, after this, it is all gravy. I do hope the squash bugs are late to arrive and that the SVBs don't arrive at all. I had neither last year, but I am not so naive that I would expect that two years in a row. It just doesn't happen!

Today while I was thinning corn in the Three Sisters Garden, a Tiger Swallowtail was flitting around the Queen Anne's Lace and other wildflowers growing in between the Three Sisters Garden and the compost pile. I was so happy to see it that I wanted to go hug it. lol I didn't though, for fear of scaring it away.

I think I'll have more people to give squash to this year because several homes around us that usually have gardens don't have them this year. I am sure those folks would love to have squash.....

Dawn