I finished my early stuff today also with the help of my youngest granddaughter. She has been coming over one day a week to help Papaw, and papaw sure is proud.

I have 6 granddaughters 2 grand sons and 2 great grand sons, I am a lucky man.

Larry

Dorothy, It is the same here, and I am glad. It is too hot. I kinda dread digging potatoes when the time comes, but maybe we'll luck out and get a cool spell around that time.

So far, I am not in the mood to put up any tomatoes this summer, though maybe I'll get into the mood by the time the paste tomatoes are ripe. I am thoroughly burned out from all the ones I put up last summer, and at the rate we're eating them, I really don't have to put up any this summer because we still have plenty left. I'd rather use my time and the storage space on the corn (knock on wood) if we have a good harvest, which we should.

LOL about the mammoth melting sugar comment. I agree tha that melting must mean mushy, because they definitely are not so sweet that they melt in your mouth. I'll never waste space on them again.

Larry, You are a lucky man indeed, and your granddaughter is just as beautiful as she is sweet. I know she's sweet because of your descriptions of her in the past. She's lucky to have you to teach her all about gardening, and I bet someday she'll pass down the gardening know-how to her own children and grandchildren.

You know, if those bales of hay in the pasture behind her in the photo were yours, they sure would make some great mulch. (grin)

Dawn

We still have a few bib lettuce plants going to seed. Gonna collect whatever the wind doesn't scatter. Half of our lettuce this year were volunteers that I transplanted from the rest of the garden and lawn.

Kept two spinach plants for the same reason. Gotta get the one pulled and hung up pretty quick.

Spring taters are starting to come out, now. Had our first two meals of them, already. Onions are about ready, finally. Some of the garlic looks likes it's close to being ready.

Picked the first handful of green beans, today.

We've already had carrots, with more to pull any ol' time we feel like it.

Mustard greens are growing well, if a bit late. Same with collard greens, even though Ma Nature scattered them all over the two beds I planted them in.

Watermelons are coming along nicely, as are the sweet potatoes. Some of the pumpkins are up and healthy. cantalopes are up, too. Planted some acorn squash and re-planted the butternut.

Basil and cilantro finally act as if they really wanted to grow.

A few of the green peppers are looking good, too. Mebbe we'll get something out of them, this year. (Trying to growing the, here, has been kicking my butt.)

Tomatoes are finally growing well. They look very healthy, at the moment. I hope the squirrels leave them alone this year...

I feel as if I'm running late on everything this year, but things are growing and generally looking healthy. We've had several meals out of the garden, so far, as well.

Beautiful granddaughter, Larry, How old is she? I've had help from granddaughters as well, The 11 year old first helped with strawberries and peas, then the 14 year old came and both helped to kill chickens--the 11 year old learned to "draw" the innards and the 14 year old was our catcher. Then they went home and the 8 year old has been here learning to pick and freeze peas. She also helped plant the meal corn where the broccoli came out. Now we need rain again.

Dawn, I can remember hearing my grandfather talking about the "4th of July cool spell" and have experienced one often enough that is seems like a pattern. Sure hope this year goes back to that as that is when we usually dig the main crop of potatos.

I don't have greenbeans yet. The pole beans are at the top of the 6 ft trellis. The bush beans have something wrong. I'm going to try to take and post a pic because I don't know what it is. It looks like commercial fertilizer burn but we didn't put any on, and anyway it's only one variety.

What a beautiful helper you have!

Thanks for the compliments on my granddaughter. She turned 16 on the 10th of this month.

I am not sure she, nor I, would do well at butchering chickens. I can hardly stand the smell of chickens or beef, I did pretty well at butchering hogs when I was a kid and just had to tolerate the chickens and beef.

Dawn, the hay in the background would make good mulch. It is a little stemmy and has not been sprayed. All but about 20 acres of the place has been leased out, but I do have a good supply of mulch. If the fellows leave any hay on the field I will get that also. I have another load of shredded leaves to haul. I get mulch anywhere I can find it. It is a lot of work but I cant afford the water I would have to use without it.

Larry

wbonesteel, The weather has made everything late, well at least in terms of harvesting. I am glad to get the cool-season stuff out the door so I can focus on the warm-season stuff. The late cold nights really slowed everything down this spring. Now that we are hot, I imagine our warm-season plants will be advancing at warp speed.

My carefully timed late corn plantings are trying to catch up with the early corn plantings that are six weeks older then them. Luckily, the earlier ones finish up pollination and I can get the tassels removed, just barely, before the next variety starts silking. The cold weather slowed down the early corn varieties, and now the extreme heat is accelerating the later plantings. I likely will be harvesting 5 varieties back to back to back (to back to back, lol) with no break. It will be time-consuming, but we'll fill up the freezer and also will have oodles of new raw material for the compost pile.

Our winter squash plants have grown about 4 or 5' longer this week so their explosive growth spurt is beginning, and the cantaloupes and cukes are covered in blooms and small fruit. They really weren't liking the cloudy, cooler, rainy weather (though I sure was loving it) but now they're luxuriating in the heat and full sun.

Summer squash is ready to pick and cucumbers are not far behind. I think June is going to be a really productive month, with the first hot peppers ready to harvest in the next few days, and the first okra blossoms appearing yesterday. The cool temperatures also gave us a lot better fruit set on the sweet peppers than we usually have this early in the summer. I think it all is going to start rolling into the kitchen at once. We have been eating something from the garden daily since April, but now have transitioned from bringing in the cool-season crops to the warm-season ones. Sometimes there is sort of a gap between cool-season and warm-season harvests, but not this year. The cool-season stuff held on longer than usual, but then once the hit heat, that stuff fell over and said "have mercy, Mr. Sunshine, we're outta here".

Dorothy, It seems like the Fourth of July cool spell has deserted us in recent years. I want a year like (I think) 1996 again. Maybe it was 1997. It was about about 65-70 and drizzling on July 4th and was so cold out in the misty air that we wore windbreakers! If we had a cool spell like that this summer, I would work in the garden from sunup to sundown just for the sheer joy of being out in decent weather in the middle of summer. You know, it is more likely to be 105 degrees and hot though. Our weather doesn't seem to like us much any more and it misbehaves a lot.

At least we're not in Colorado (all those people evacuated and so many homes lost to wildfire this week and the Black Forest Fire has 0% containment) or on the Atlantic coast in today's strong thunderstorms. Heat may be boring, but boring is good after the kind of May we just had.

It was a ridiculous 99 degrees at our house this afternoon. We had a grass fire in our fire district, albeit a small one. There was a large hay field fire out at the west end of our county either yesterday or the day before. It seems so ridiculous that we are dry enough for the grass and hayfields to burn when we have had 12-16" of rain since mid-May, and still have puddles standing in the fields. The more I watch the weather, the less I understand it and its effects on us any more. Our pond caught and held absolutely no runoff from all that rain. We remain in drought and the ground just slurps it up so the pond doesn't get to fill up any at all. Now we have to either mow the pond, or let it revert to grassland with trees coming up in it.

Your granddaughters are such great helpers too, and they learn so much about self-sufficient living from helping y'all with the butchering, the harvesting and other tasks. So many kids nowadays don't even know where food really comes from, but your grandkids know.

Larry, I agree on the important role mulch plays in keeping plants happy and watering costs down. I wouldn't even try to garden without it. When we are at a hayfield fire and all those bales of hay are burning up, the grower is seeing his hay crop go up in flames and is either calculating the lost income or trying to figure out if he can get another cutting in so he'll have hay put up to feed his livestock this winter...but I am looking at it and thinking, "Oh man, that would have been such beautiful mulch." I can't help it if I think like a gardener.

Dawn

Y'all had a nice, long cool- season this year, and that is a rare occurrence in Oklahoma. Congratulations on your harvests.

My parents had chickens, but I never could stand to watch them kill and dress them. I could barely eat them either. We had a pet chicken named Henny Penny. She played a double-yolked egg on mom's birthday. We loved that little hen.

Susan

Susan,

It was a great cool season and this week we still are eating lettuce harvested from the last few plants I left in tubs that I could move into shade. They're bolting now, but we harvested the last good leaves (and it was a lot of them too) and put them in the fridge last week, and have been eating that last bit of spring lettuce all week. We had some yesterday with tomatoes on BLT sandwiches, and it was kinda sad to look at the dwindling amount of home-grown lettuce in the fridge. Normally we aren't still harvesting lettuce in mid-June, but the cool nights in late May and early June, along with all the rain and cloudy skies, helped keep the lettuce going longer than usual. It was nice while it lasted.

I left about a dozen lettuce plants to go to seed. I'll probably collect some seed, but I mostly left the seed for the birds that like to eat it, which includes the little finches.

I cannot raise meat crops to eat either. Our chickens are basically pets who provide us with eggs, provide manure for the compost pile, and eat insects in the yard. Most of them don't have names, although the two roosters do.....the names are unprintable here. They have, let's say, "colorful" names I can use when I yell at them to stop fighting or to leave each other or the hens alone.

One is a big Welsummer and he obviously rules the roost in his coop with his flock of hens. The other is a banty Mille Fleur d'uccle who thinks he is a big as the Welsummer and who relentlessly harasses the big rooster, who could stomp him flat in two seconds if he chose to do so. Instead, the Welsummer mostly treats the banty rooster like he is an annoying little brother. The banty chickens live in a separate coop from the full-sized chickens, but both groups mingle together when they free-range every day, and both roosters love to go in each other's coops just to irritate each other. The only time that I have to keep the big rooster out of the banty coop is when the chicks are hatching because his presence there makes the banty hens extremely unhappy.

Some days at our house we have Rooster Wars, but these two roosters have been together for three years now and it all is for show because they don't hurt each other....they just do a lot of posturing and carrying on.

I had an uncle who raised turkeys and guineas and one year he made us all watch him kill the Thanksgiving turkey.....and I ate a meatless Thanksgiving meal that year. If I had to raise and kill my own meat, I'd be a vegetarian. I admire people who can do that, but even if all our chickens don't have names, they are very much pets and I couldn't eat them. I still have too much city girl in me, I guess, and always will.

Dawn