losing my tomatoes they are wilting to the ground and bugs, corn is not its deep green and stunted, beans have quit growing squash is light green and yellow, even crabgrass is 1/2 inch tall and quit growing. I am using the wet conditions to pull Johnson grass

Oh dear, I hope your tomatoes rebound. I've had them wilt and discolor and look awful, and then still rebound after about 6 weeks of looking like crap.

My corn has struggled. The early corn has been knocked to the ground more times than I can count. It always stood back up in a day or two, but after the last storm, some of the plants were pulled half way out of the ground. So, I did something I thought I'd never do. I manually stood up and then staked roughly 70 corn plants. Yes I did. I staked them. That smacks of desperation, doesn't it? I couldn't control myself. My early corn was tasseling and silking and so close to producing a harvest that I couldn't let the weather win the battle. I don't know if the ones that were halfway pulled out of the ground will survive or produce, but so far, so good. The early corn's color has improved a little bit this week but it is in raised beds on higher ground. The midseason corn at the low end of the garden growing at grade level looks awful. It looks like I am trying to grow corn with yellow leaves. I suspect it will not survive. The hollyhocks beside it already are dying and so is the dill.

My bean plants did quit growing, but they were already in bloom and had young beans in various sizes, and those are the beans I am picking and processing now. They may be the only ones I get, particularly if heavy rain or hail (or a tornado) hitsus today. The bean plants are just about every color but green, so we're probably lucky that we got this one big harvest.

My tomatoes and peppers look better than anything else, but that's not saying much at this point.

On the bright side, I have 29 different kinds of flowers and herbs in bloom in the garden, so they look nice on top where the flowers off even if they are dying at the bottom near the soil line.

A person who was just driving up the road and saw my garden at a glance from about 100' away likely would think it was a good-looking garden, but then if they came up the driveway and parked and got out of their car and really looked at it, I think they'd decide it looks pretty pitiful.

The heavy rain seemed to wipe out the grasshoppers, but now there's a new hatch. I'd scatter some Semaspore, but the rain would just wash it away, so I'll save that for a day with a lower chance of rain.

Our beans haven't bloomed yet and the corn is only 8 " tall. Things do seem to be stalled, but we didn't get as much rain as you did. Just at 6" here for May. What needs done now is weeding and cultivating and compost spread and surely things will grow again. The peas are in full production, but I'm beginning to wonder if I'm going to get any broccoli or cabbage this year. It's much slower than it should be. Tomatoes are setting on nicely though. And my potatoes look great. Very few Colorado Potato Beetles this year unlike last year. The broccoli and cabbage are free of worms this year too unlike last year.

Dorothy, I cannot help wondering if the stalling is as much related to the constant cloudiness (if you're having that there) as it is to the extreme soil moisture. It is hard to guess. I haven't seen any CPBs, but have had both imported cabbage worms and cabbage loopers. Handpicking and spraying one time with Bt took care of them. My broccoli bolted after undergoing some extreme temperature swings too early in its life. The cabbage is hanging in there and forming heads, albeit slowly. The peas seems slow, but the corn and beans were fast. The squash is holding its own, but I've already fought two rounds of squash bugs. The onion plants are iffy. They look good, but 1 of the 5 varieties developed serious fungal issues and started rotting. I hurriedly pulled all of that variety and salvaged what I could, though the onions still were small. Today for lunch we had French onion soup made from some of those small onions.

My potatoes and tomatoes and peppers look better than I have any right to expect given the extreme amount of rain the last few weeks, and I am grateful for that.

The voles who tunnel under my soil at ever increasing population levels may not be happy. Sink holes are developing along the garden fence on the west side, where the voles are known to pop up now and then (about 100 times a day, lol). The heavy rain is collapsing their tunnels, which thrills me. I hope the furry little nuisances all drown or are suffocated when their tunnels collapse. Eventually we'll have to deal with the complex of little sinkholes developing along the fence line, and likely sooner rather than later, before bunnies figure out how to crawl under the fenceline where the sinkholes are occurring, but that's a problem for another day----when we aren't under a Tornado Watch.

It's too soon here, for beans. But we just started getting Sugar Snap Peas. Yum! Most of our beans are looking good. With this weather it is good to garden on top of an old gravel bar. Everything in our garden is looking pretty good. It's just hard to get time to cultivate. I haven't managed to get any squash to come up yet, which is strange. I think it's just slow.

My sweet potato slips are selling well. I was keeping half of the slip producing trays on the ground, out in the main garden. But last week I noticed that something was eating the roots, and that, at an alarming rate. I set a trap and caught a rat that probably weighed a pound. Yesterday I put one tray back out. But even in broad daylight the roots were chewed on. So, I will have to keep exterminating for a while.

Yesterday Jerreth and I had a wonderful day. It was our anniversary. We went out for breakfast and then spent the day working on gardens, especially her flower gardens. I did put out our first 30' of sweet potatoes. I made a row parallel to our stone bamboo, in what I call the driveway garden. Every year I have to fork up that end of the garden, pulling out many feet of bamboo roots. So, this year I planted a row of sweets there, figuring that in the fall I'll get a jump on getting the bamboo out when I dig my sweet potatoes. I think I'll also put in a barrier, in order to save myself from this yearly ritual!

Haven't seen a potato beetle, this year, yet! And, more importantly, I've only seen one grasshopper, which I killed. Last year I couldn't find most of the potato crop when I dug. This year it came up strong. I have been hoeing most of the old planting out. But I did leave the row with my seed produced experimental potatoes. Some of them are looking very promising, and, I think I will get a shot at harvesting seed from them.

George, Happy Anniversary to you and Jerreth!

I've been trying to stay on top of the weeds, but in order to weed, I have to stand in flooded pathways, which really isn't pleasant. The standing water has turned my mulch into slimey, gummy decomposing mulch so the challenge later on will be to remulch all the pathways once the standing water is gone.

My squash, and the handful of cucumber plants I stuck in the pea bed are slow too, but the cukes are finally starting to bloom. These are just a couple of slicing type cuke plants for fresh eating. I haven't even planted pickling cukes yet and won't until it dries out some.

With a chance of rain in our forecast for every day and every night for the foreseeable future, the plants and I are just trying to keep our heads above water. I won't even bother planting sweet potatoes this year because our clay soil is going to hold too much water and stay too wet. The long term weather pattern for the next few weeks seems like it will be more of what we're already having. I would hope that by the time this prolonged rainy spell ends, maybe all the OK lakes will be back in good shape. I just hope the rain isn't hurting the winter wheat crop too much.

Memorial Day is approaching and the kids are getting out of school, but it doesn't really feel that late in the year to me, maybe because it is cloudy every day and raining on many of those days. Sunlight pops out for an hour or two and then quickly goes away again. We miss the sunshine, but then if it pops out and we heat up, the heat index numbers will soar. The cool-season flowers definitely are looking a lot happier in this weather than the warm season ones.

I stepped on a snake the other day. It was a non-venomous one, and I sort of saw it before I stepped on it, so did some fancy footwork and mostly avoided it. Yellow Cat stepped on it three times and the poor snake performed some really fancy rolling maneuvers to get away from Yellow Cat, who is very old and was not the least bit interested in the snake. In his younger days, he would have at least played with it a little bit.

Dawn

Can't get the vision of Dawn break dancing trying to get away from the snake! But then I imagine all of us would have done the same! I've been known to two-step a few times and I don't dance!

I've been seeing more snakes than normal this year. All non-venomous, fortunately. As long as they aren't too big or venomous, I pretty much leave them alone. With small grandkids I don't want either around.

This last couple of weeks has seemed longer than an entire winter. I'm trying to be patient and not overreact to how the plants are acting. Right now, it looks like I will only loose 3 or 4 tomatoes and maybe a couple of bell peppers. It's extremely difficult not to wade in and get replacements in the ground!

On the more stressed plants, I've been pulling fruit and even blossoms at times. My thoughts are maybe it will help the plant conserve energy. Feedback welcome on that one...

To add to the frustration I still have a couple of areas I wanted to get planted. The longer this goes on, the worse it's going to be.

If it weren't for having to haul soil a bucket or a bag at a time, I would be building several raised beds to put some of my backup plants in, just to insure a good crop.

It probably was an entertaining sight, but Yellow Cat and a couple of chickens are the only witnesses and they have been sworn to secrecy.

I totally agree that the weather has made us feel all shut-in and unable to work outside just as if it was winter. I hate it. We've cleaned out the garage, which includes a big workshop area and a big storage area. We've been cleaning out closets and cabinets. Today I'm cleaning out the walk-in pantry. One day this week I'm going to tackle the closet in the master bedroom and the linen closet. All those things needed to be done, but we're only spending time doing them at this time of the year because we cannot do anything outdoors. I hateit.

I've been resisting the urge to put any replacement plants in the ground as well, and it is so hard.

On the removal of fruit and blossoms, I understand why you're doing it. However, if you're talking about tomato plants and sweet pepper plants, I would be conservative about how many I removed. My fear is that we'll be cool and rainy and then, BAM, one day it all stops and we instantly become hot and dry. Were that to happen, it might suddenly be too hot for blossoms on tomato plants to set fruit at all (except for bite-sized types and most paste types), and even sweet peppers can set poorly once the daytime highs are in the 90s, though hot peppers don't miss a beat until it is well over 100 degrees. It depends though. If removing the fruit and blossoms seems like the only option that might help the plants bounce back, then of course, you have to do it.

My main experience with waterlogged tomato plants was in 2009, when we got about 15" of rain in April (almost 13" in one day) and then got probably another 6 or 7" in the next 4 to 6 weeks. The tomato plants had been pretty happy and healthy, and even in the raised beds, they took a severe nosedive away from happy and healthy to sad and suffering. The plants stopped growing, their foliage discolored because water-clogged roots couldn't take up nutrients from the soil, etc. It probably was at least 2 solid months before I was sure the plants would recover. Eventually they produced ripe fruit and all, but it was a nerve-wracking couple of months. Pepper plants were a little more resilient, surprisingly, but the harvest still was late.

I believe that back in our other flood year, 2007, it was more of a prolonged rainy spell for months and months and the plants stunted, stalled, looked horrific.....and eventually survived and gave a much smaller than average harvest. I know that I foliar fed them weekly trying to get them back into good health, trying to gently spray the water-soluable fertilizers only on the leaves lightly and slowly so it wouldn't drip off onto the ground. I alternated liquid seaweed, liquid fish (ban all cats from the garden if you do this, or they'll almost kill your plants as they frantically search for the fish they smell), Garrett Juice and Miracle Grow, trying anything and everything that I could do to help the plants survive.

In 2004, I don't think we were as wet overall, but we had a huge amount of rainfall in May and in June---over 12" at our house in June alone, and the fruit were huge, and the flavor was totally watered down. Fruit cracked and split but a lot of the cracks healed. It wasn't the best harvest in June and July, but the plants hung in there and rain stopped in early July, and we had great-tasting fruit by August. So, while the early fruit that had set in spring suffered, the fruit that managed to set during the rainy spell in May and June produced a great late summer and early fall harvest. I remember it well as friends were visiting from out-of-state and we were getting amazing tomato harvests for August, and they fell in love with heirloom tomatoes while visiting us that month. Nebraska Wedding, in particular, produced stunningly beautiful and tasty tomatoes, salvaging what had been a fairly lackluster tomato season thus far. I also had foliar fed that year, trying to nurse the plants along and help them survive.

For me, the key is whether the foliage looks good or bad, and whether the plants continue to grow any at all. If the foliage is a halfway normal green, I try to leave the plants alone and let them overcome the wet soil on their own if they can. If there is a lot of yellowing and purpling, I try to foliar feed to correct the deficiencies. If there is wilting, I do everything I can to help dry out the soil---raking back the mulch, punching holes in the ground around the plant with a piece of rebar to aerate the soil, etc. When the plants wilt as a result of waterlogged roots, that is a desperate sign of how hard they are struggling to survive. If the wilting doesn't go away fairly quickly, the plants rarely bounce back well. A few times I have taken a shovel and cut a circle in the soil around the plant as an attempt at aeration. I've even lifted plants up on top of the soil and let them sit there and dry out a day or two before plopping them back into the ground. If they seem like they're about to die from waterlogging, then it doesn't hurt to take drastic measures to save them.

One year, and I think it was 2009, I had tomato plants that weren't even in the ground yet, and I didn't want to put them there, but I needed to either plant them or toss them on the compost pile. So, we went to Lowe's and I searched the aisles for a solution that would not require me to build a new raised bed. I had a raised bed ready and waiting, but it had water standing on top of its soil, so it just was too wet. Adding more lumber and a whole lot more soil to raise the raised bed even taller would have been expensive and probably overkill. On the concrete aisle, I found those round cardboard tubes you use to pour concrete to make piers or footings or something. We bought several and brought them home. Tim cut them into 12" sections for me. I set them down on top of the raised beds, filled them with a purchased soil-less mix, and planting the remaining tomato plants inside those cardboard tubes. The tubes were bottomless, so the roots could grow right down into the raised bed's soil as the season went on, but enough of the roots were above the soil level that continued pesky rainfall didn't harm them. Those tube-planted plants gave me the best harvests that year and were healthier than all the plants that already were in the ground when all that rain fell.

Speaking of the compost pile, a while back I threw some leftover tomato and pepper plants onto the pile, keeping 10 backup tomato plants in containers in the greenhouse and 6 or 8 pepper plants. I wanted to keep them all, but didn't want to have oodles of leftover plants to tend during the non-stop wet spell. Guess what became of those plants? Did the deer and bunnies who visit the pile a dozen times a day eat them? Nope. Those plants are growing and look just as good as the tomato and pepper plants growing in my garden, albeit smaller.

I have a whole back garden, roughly 3000 square feet that isn't planted, can't be planted due to water standing in it, and has weeds head high, along with some perennial herbs and flowers. I've about given up getting in planted. I left the gate open one night, and a rabbit built a nest and had her babies in there. She's on the highest point of the land, and I closed the gate back so our cats and dogs cannot get in there and get her babies, but I cannot let her live in there forever. Maybe I'll eventually get to plant back there but it might not happen until June. Rain is in our forecast every day, so I don't really see things getting better anytime soon.

We have puddles that have stood on the ground in our yard for so long that pond scum is growing on top of the water. The pastures are even worse. This is probably a good year to focus more on container gardening, and I have done some of that, but most of my containers were filled before rain started falling, and I hate to keep buying more and more containers and the soil-less mix to fill them, when maybe the ground will just dry out eventually.

Happy Anniversary George! I look forward to hearing about TPS harvests. That is on my "someday" list.

I can picture Dawn doing the snake dance, LOL.

We planted 2/3 of the tomatoes yesterday, 10 in raised beds and 13 in large pots. We are still moving dirt from the driveway to the garden. I got 5 yards for my birthday/Mothers day. It arrived just before the monsoon. About 1/3 is under a tarp. The rest went in 3 new raised beds and mixed with other stuff in pots. This is a garden mix that already had compost manure and I think peat mixed in. I can tell you Outdoorsman, nobpdy WANTS to move that dirt!.

At any rate the tomatoes survived an inch of rain last night and some pretty strong winds. My onions and garlic look good, snow peas are doing well. Potatoes look good. Most of the asian greens have bolted. I pulled the spinach before seed set, I needed the space. I covered 2 beds with plastic and tomorrow I may put some seeds in the ground. Still have to fence the beds to keep the dogs out.