Overall I'm happy with where my garden is at this point. Due to several reasons my garden planting has been spread out over a long period. Some on purpose and some due to having too many irons in the fire. I posted a picture of my first dwarf fruit in my first post. I will attach a link to my photobucket site with some more pictures of my garden. My onions have really took off. The garlic tops isn't as big as I've had but the bulbs so far have been as big or bigger on everything I have dug. My potato plants are looking good. Not sure how many of how big the spuds are. The early sweet corn has just started tasseling. The full season corn in the picture was planted over a month later. I plant my sweet corn in furrows at least 8 inches deep. Then pull the dirt in around the plants as they grow. If I don't I have problems with the wind blowing the plants over. The tomatoes are really growing and setting better now. We have 2-3 hot days coming up but then another cool off. The cool offs have really helped with fruit set. I did have something thin several of my bean plants while they were small. The only real insect issues I've had was aphids on the peppers while still under the lights after I started opening the windows. I moved them outside and the lady bugs I turned loose have cleaned them up and think they have moved on. Hopefully a few stayed around. I will start digging some more garlic in the next week. I think the onions are 2-3 weeks off. Candy and Bronze Di' Amposta are starting to bulb up. Need another rain. But overall things are looking a lot better than the previous 3 years. Jay

Here is a link that might be useful: Photobucket

Everything looks good, Jay. Our garden has really perked up after the rain last week. Got 5" total in a week. As usual I planted too many cucumbers and have to find someone to give them to.

Jay,

Congrats on the first ripe slicer and I hope the BT sandwich tasted great.

The garden looks great, but then your garden always looks perfect.

I'm glad the weather is being kinder to you and your garden this year. It is long overdue.

Since it rained and I was trapped inside the house today, I processed tomatoes. I dried three cookie sheets of bite-sized tomatoes in the oven, and cooked down a huge stock pot of tomatoes into sauce. I'm developing a rhythm of picking one day, processing the next. This is the wrong time of the year to get behind, so I am trying hard to stay caught up.

Dorothy, I always plant too many cucumbers too. I bet you won't have a hard time getting rid of them. This is a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I get so tired of the cucumbers that I just pull the plants after a while, or at least most of them, and throw them on the compost pile.

I'm glad you got all that rain and glad your plants perked up, but y'all still are so far below your usual rainfall that it just blows my mind.

We have had 6.2" of rain in the last 10 days or so. First we had 2.7" over several days last week, and then 3.5" in the last 24 hours. My garden looks like a movie right now. A movie called "A River Runs Through It".

The garden perked up a lot after the first 2.7" fell so I expect it really will perk up now. Unfortunately, I expect weeds and mosquitoes will perk up too, and bet this weekend's heat index will make working outside pretty unbearable. Still, we needed the rain. When rain falls in June, it gives me hope we'll be able to keep the garden going for a while in the summer without endless watering.

I don't think our high temperature even made it above about 75 or 76 degrees today. It was the coolest June day we've had since 2009.

Dawn

I'm jealous of your tomato! I'm still impatiently waiting for my first ripe one. They are setting a lot more fruit now at least. There are a few Black Cherry tomatoes that have just sat green for what seems like weeks. They taunt me! How long should I wait to fertilize the tomato plants again? They're still in recovery mode from the storm and haven't really grown much of their leaves back yet.

My bush beans have been producing well, and I just picked my first handful off the pole beans tonight.

Tonight while digging around in my cuke vines I was starting to get frustrated because the vines have TONS of flowers and no ripe cucumbers yet. Then I went back and looked in a spot that I had already checked and found three lunkers hiding under all the vines. They were incredibly easy to miss if you weren't looking in the right spot. I'm going to have to start tying some of the vines up on the trellis to get the cuke bed a bit better organized, because they're not climbing on their own. It's just a tangled mess from the wind storm we had what..a week ago now?

I pulled about half the onions tonight and set them out to dry. The rest still don't look ready yet, but I'm not sure how much longer to wait. I need to pull the rest of my carrots too. The ones I pulled last week look AMAZING, which surprised me because I was afraid they would struggle in our shallow soil. Unfortunately they don't taste as sweet as the store-bought ones, but I think perhaps the heat had something to do with that?

Oh, and my basil and mint are FINALLY taking off. I don't know what took them so long. I didn't think mint was a heat-loving plant, so I figured it would do better earlier in the season.

Our garden is also looking pretty good. I put out our last tomato variety this week, which was looking sickly & stunted, due to the delay. But I'm sure it will recover and produce well for the late summer and fall.

I may start some more tomatoes, from seed, this weekend, for a fall crop. We REALLY want to have a surplus for canning. The last couple of years have depleted our reserves. So, I'll plant a bunch of Roma VF.

This year I'm trying Rio Grande, since I'm thinking of crossing it with my own family heirloom, Tomato Rocky. Rocky lacks some resistance to late blight and probably a couple of other diseases. Rocky also doesn't like Oklahoma weather. So, for the first time in my life, I'm trying for a cross! I want to produce an improved Rocky. Rio Grande possesses the qualities I'd like to introduce. Haven't tasted a ripe one yet. But it looks like it will be a prodigious producer and the plants are stocky with good cover.

Oh, and I should mention, that after about 10 years of marginal crops, both in NJ and OK, Rocky is having a good year! The plants are looking great and setting on plenty of fruit. Guess Rocky likes this weather. Rocky normally starts to produce and succumbs quickly to disease. But it's tomatoes have the most intense flavor of any I've tried.

Jerreth (my wife) started digging onions and garlic, yesterday. The harvest is looking better than most years, which is somewhat of a surprise, in light of our earlier conditions. True, they are not so large. But they are respectable.

Yesterday I finished planting this year's winter squash: Warsaw Buff Pie Pumpkin and Scarchuks Supreme. I already have a couple of hills of White Cushaw in the ground. This one is from Illinois. I still need to get summer squash in. But I've misplaced my seed for the variety I want (Dolma Kabak). I may have to break down and put something else in.

Potatoes are looking good. I'm going to plant two more varieties this weekend. They're supposed to be heat resistant, and we'll put them to the test. So far, I haven't managed to get them to sprout. So, I wonder if they'll grow. The third variety, called Chalice, is going great guns, now at about 10" tall, and loving this weather.

Jay sent me some seed potato of Azul Toro, a Tom Wagner creation. I haven't dug any yet. But the plants are looking very good. I'm trying a couple of potatoes, both from seed and tuber, which are not "standard." I'm hoping to find more resistance to heat and drought, perhaps insect resistance and the ability to reliably produce seed. Extra flavor would be nice!

Our sweet potatoes are looking pretty good. I got them in just right this year. Two varieties got "mowed" by rabbits. But they are coming back. Gary Schaum, sent me a couple varieties to try and is helping me to assure that I don't lose what I had, after a catastrophic encounter with fungus gnats this spring.

I'm not a bush bean lover. But this year I am growing out Fowler Bush Bean, an heirloom which I received from a professor at Grace Theological Seminary, in 1984. It's a great producer, adapted widely, resistant to extremes in weather and has the unique characteristic of setting pods continually, until killed by frost (as long as it receives adequate moisture). I have to renew seed. But we'll eat them too.

I've got a good sized planting of Woods Mountain Crazy Bean. Last year, I received 20 seeds of this bean (if I recall correctly). Rabbits devastated the first planting. But in the end I harvested about 1/2 pint of seed. This one seems very well adapted for our climate. I'll have snaps in another week or two.

I'm renewing seed to Childers Cutshort, which seems identical to our own Tennessee Cutshort. And, of course, I have a good sized planting of Tennessee Cutshort. There are still a number of beans I'd like to plant. We'll see how time and energy permit.

Okay, I have to go!

George
Tahlequah, OK

Here is a link that might be useful: Woods Mountain Crazy Bean

Heather,

I believe the general recommendation is to fertilize the tomato plants after they first set fruit, and then continue to fertilize them about once every two weeks. This is especially important when you have very sandy soil because it tends to be lower in fertility than soils with a higher proportion of organic matter or clay. You can do it by side dressing with a granular or pelleted fertilizer, or with a water-soluble fertilizer applied with a sprayer or watering can.

I don't use fertilizer very much in the big garden,so I haven't fertilized the tomato plants that have been in the ground since as far back as March 12th, and they are producing fine. However, I add a lot of soil amendments every fall and winter, and that feeds the soil, so to speak, and the soil feeds the plants. I do fertilize my container plants with a water soluble fertilizer, and I fertilize them weekly with fertilizer diluted to half the recommended strength.

Yes, I do think that when carrots are not as sweet as they should be it is because of our heat. I get better-flavored carrots from fall plantings than from spring ones, but I plant them every spring anyway in case we have a long, cool spring (I know, dream on....) and they get to mature in the kind of weather they like.

I am not sure why your herbs were slow to take off, but likely it was the early onset of heat, and all the hot drying winds we had in May. As near as I can tell, heat does not bother mint in general. However, last year's drought killed my mint, and that's the first time I've ever had mint die like that.

George, You're always so busy! I don't know how y'all keep up with the animals and garden on top of working.

I planted Fowler too. It was one of my more recent succession plantings. I believe I planted it in mid- to late-May so it hasn't had much help from the weather, though the recent rainfall sure did make the plants perk up and put out a big flush of new foliage. Prior to last week's rain, they were up and growing, but slowly. They look a lot better now.

Dawn

Dawn, if your Fowler Beans throw occasional white seeds. Let me know, and I'll send you some pure seed in the fall.

George

George,

OK, I will. Do you know something I don't know? Is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange selling Fowler seed that is crossed?

Dawn

George I'm growing both the Fowler and Woods Crazy Mountain bush beans. Something thinned the Fowler plants. I had 10 seeds of the WCM. Nine germinated and something got six of them. So have 3 plants left. Which if I can keep them alive should allow me to save seeds and build up a small reserve hopefully. I had zero germination of some Emerite seeds from an online source. The other varieties from that source germinated well. So in their place last Sat. I planted Tennessee Cutshort seeds that you sent me 2-3 years ago. By last evening I had 100% germination on them. I planted the WCM in a bed on the south side of my garage. Black Walnut roots have moved in. I planted there because I wanted to save seeds and it gave me 100' barrier between them and any of the other beans. I bought a bunch of good cement blocks cheap 3 weeks ago at an auction. I'm going to use them to make a raised bed. Hopefully it will help that bed.
The Tazmanian Chocolate was good last evening. I managed to save several seeds from it. Hopefully I will get several more. It is the time of the year when the garden usually changes daily. I'm gradually winding up my planting for now. Planting what will be my plants for fall tomatoes now. Will continue to stagger plant cukes, squash and squeeze in beans, ect as I remove maturing crops. It is cool here now but supposed to be upper 90's tomorrow with wind. But they are now saying Sunday should cool back off instead of being hot like they originally predicted. This year I plants several times more beans and potatoes than I usually do. So hopefully they won't disappoint me. Jay

Jay, When my beans get thinned, usually it is cutworms. Prior to improving the fence, it was rabbits.

Today feels better so far than I thought it would, likely because our humidity has dropped low enough that our heat index hasn't become unbearable.

I planted a lot more beans this year than usual, and I planted the bush ones really early. I've continued succession planting because I don't know when to stop. Well, I know when to stop, but I don't do it. I've already frozen enough green beans for 26 meals, and I'll be perfectly happily if I am able to freeze enough for 50 or 100 more meals. I could eat beans (and sweet corn and tomatoes and peppers and okra) at every meal and be perfectly happy about that. Had I not grown up in Texas eating real beef, I think I could happily become a vegetarian.

I'm glad you'll have cooler weather on Saturday. Having a cooler day in June is such a blessing. Working outside this morning felt so incredibly good. It was 64 degrees when I went outside at 6 a.m. and it is only 83 degrees now. After having a lot of days in May when we hit 88 or 90 by noon, it is a relief to have a pleasant day weather-wise.

I over-planted almost everything this year, with the idea that if I could get super-heavy production early, then it wouldn't matter so much if drought set in at its usual time in late June or early July. So far it is a strategy that's working. If drought doesn't set in, and everything keeps producing, I'll be in trouble because we'll have more harvest than we can eat/preserve. I love to can, but I have my limits.

Dawn

Jay, I checked my label and it was Emerite beans that you gave me and I planted to try to replenish seeds. I only got a few plants, but I do have a few pods. I don't know how many I will end up with when they mature, but I can sure share them with you so you can get seeds that were the same as your original.

I also planted a purple pole bean that Dawn shared with me and they have a lot more pods than the Emerite. I don't have a full planting of either of these, and only planted to get seed, but I can share those also if you are interested. They are big beans and the vine looks really nice when it is growing with all of the purple beans on it. I wish I had a big trellis filled with them. I will probably get both of the purple poles that Baker Creek carries the next time I go there.

Besides the two that I am growing out for seed, I have a 16 foot trellis of Tennessee Old Timey Greasy that I got from George originally, a big tub of Rattlesnake Pole, a small number of volunteers growing around a tomato cage in the garden that appear to be Kentucky Wonder. I have Blue Lake Bush beans (blooming), and an eight foot trellis of Missouri Wonder planted late and not yet blooming, and a few long beans.

I have a tub of Purple Pod black eyed peas only about 2 inches high and about 12 feet of Penny Rile planted yesterday.

I planted a double row of Roma Bush and got one plant. I think that I used some old seed although I had plenty of new Roma seed I could have planted. I think I may try another planting of those after the potatoes come out. That is, if I'm not sick of beans by that time. LOL

Dawn I suspect cutworms but haven't found or seen any. It happened in 3 different spots. About half I never found anything. I normally walk the garden area morning and evening. And would see them and then they would be gone. The other half would be ate 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through the stem. But far enough they wouldn't survive. On those where they were gone I even suspected a local bunny. But about decided against that as there wasn't anything else ate or nippled on. So sure it was a cutworm. I've never had an issue before. Never touched the okra that germinated in the same row either. Jay

I just posted some pictures I took of the various Ambrosia Gold fruits the different plants are producing and also some Sungold I picked for comparison purposes. I have found 3 distinct size/color variances so far. Two vines are producing fruit of similar size and red. The other plants are all producing golden fruit but one plant has large fruit on it. The others are more typical of what I would expect. I uploaded these to my photobucket page so anyone interested should be able to view all there. I will paste a picture of one of the larger ones. I will be saving seeds of those I like and hopefully can stabilize them. Jay

Dawn,
I've heard that Southern Exposure's seed stock produces some white seeded plants. Fowler has none of that. It produces uniformly very dark brown seeds, which are quite difficult to thresh when dry.
I'm growing out a quantity of seed this summer. If it works out, I'd be happy to share a start with any regular member of the forum. I received the seed from one of my seminary professors, back in 1983. I remember him telling me about it and I can remember the day that he turned around, in chapel, and handed me a handful of seed. I was only just starting out in seed saving and didn't realize just what a great thing I had just been handed. All Fowler bean seed, offered by anyone, is descended from that handful of seed. My professor received his seed from a family in Washington state, who had kept the seed since their ancestors carried it over the Oregon trail. Unfortunately, Dr. Fowler couldn't remember their names.

So, I'm sure that someone out there still has this seed, and probably calls it by another name, since I simply named it after the one who gave it to me.

George

Jay, This is the worst cutworm year I've ever seen. I guess our mild winter and early warmup was perfect for them.

I used to catch sow bugs and pill bugs eating bean stems, but once I started using Slug-Go and Slug-Go Plus, that stopped, as did the cutworm issues. Of course, I didn't use Slug-Go this year, and I had cutworms all over. You can bet I'll use it next year.

Carol,

It sounds like you'll have plenty of beans if Mother Nature doesn't throw you some kind of curve ball this year.

My favorite bean this year for production is a white half-runner. Like most half-runners (and many southern peas) if you plant it close enough to something, it will climb. I had it across a pathway from a row of 7' tall tomato cages, so of course, the white half-runner crossed the path, climbed the cages all the way to the top, and fought the poor tomato plants for every bit of those cages. I let the half-runners win the battle for a while and then after I had harvested huge amounts of beans from those plants, I yanked them out so the tomato plants could grow in peace. Next time I plant white half-runner I'll plant it by the garden fence so it can climb to its hearts content.

George, I love your Fowler bean story. I'll try to remember to let you know if I get the dark brown seeds, white seeds or both when my plants produce beans. They were the last beans I planted (along with Kebarika, also from SESE) because I chose those two for their heat-tolerance.

Dawn

George I believe my source of the Fowler beans was SESE also. I will let you know if I get any white seeded plants. I may come a begging for some seeds if they do. I got the cattle panels up by the long row of pole beans today. Some of the varieties are impressive so far. Jay

Jay...beautiful tomato! I, too, had my first BLT this week - a double-decker - and from a Tasmanian Chocolate that I picked the day of the horrendous hail from you-know-where :~) (think alliteratively, lol). So very good...I have another one now that's a bit smaller than a ping pong ball, so...a repeat is in my future!
As far as other tomatoes go, my last minute desperate effort in putting heavy duty cardboard around some of my plants paid off - the lowest 3 ft. or so of my Mountain Spring and Early Girl tomatoes were pretty much spared - those are my two most loaded plants. I did put netting around them this week - I can't quite tell if it was a bird or a bunny, but somebody was attracted to the green tomatoes that had been slightly nicked - they felt they needed to open those holes even wider!
Fingers crossed and marching on......

Sharon