'cause Goldilocks doesn't live in Oklahoma?

So true!

lol Carol

Thanks for the heads up, Dawn. Time to dig more swales, I guess.

It already feels like summertime, doesn't it? It hit 93 degrees here today and I was really missing those rainy days from the last couple of weeks with highs in the low 70s.

We clearly don't have drought yet, but I dread the thought that it inevitably will return at some point, hopefully not any time soon. Maybe not this year at all. Probably next year though.

We already have the huge summer outbreak of spider mites and grasshoppers. I guess they've just been waiting for the heat. Oh, and chiggers. I am pretty good about avoiding them, but they are here now. Snakes are out in force now, with pretty much daily sightings of copperheads, which absolutely sucks all the fun out of being in the yard and garden and tends to send me fleeing to the house.

After all the incredible and very expensive damage done worldwide by El Nino-related extreme weather conditions, I bet no one is sad to see it go.

I'm enjoying not having to water....yet, but it seems the downside to all that earlier rain is the foliar disease cropping up in the tomatoes. I have started about a dozen new plants (some about to get their first set of true leaves, and some still germinating), so I can pull out and replant where I need to.

I have so many things in pots I have to water every day now, and the beds get a quick drink at the same time. I am still frustrated by the hose situation. I keep forgetting to pick up a pressure regulator.

Mary, Last week my tomato plants looked fairly good, all things considered, and I was pleased that the Daconil had more or less kept the foliar diseases from getting worse. Then, this week after the rain had gone away and the heat set in, some plants went downhill really fast. Now I have plants heavily loaded with fruit (which is, finally, breaking color more quickly in the heat and sunshine) but with foliage that looks like it is on its last legs. And, spider mites popped up by the billions. I'm already at the point where I'm just biding my time and harvesting fruit and counting the days until I can start yanking out the most awful looking plants.

I spent yesterday stripping sick foliage off of the tomato plants. What was most interesting was that in some cases, the diseases seem to run by variety. For example, both Vorlon and True Black Brandywine only had grey mold and nothing else. Nebraska Wedding tended to have powdery mildew and alternaria. Many of the hybrids types have either Early Blight or Alternaria. A few heirloom types have gray leaf spot. I guess I should be happy that every variety doesn't have all of the diseases at once considering how prolonged the wet period was when I couldn't keep their foliage dry for anything. Pepper plants growing right beside all of them are fine. Most other plants in the garden are fine, though tons of trees outside the garden have all kinds of fungal issues on their foliage, and weeds outside the garden have powdery mildew. Virtually every leaf on every tomato plant has spider mites. They went from a pretty small amount on the tomatoes (though the bush beans had tons) to huge populations overnight. Many of the organic things I might spray for spider mites cannot be sprayed in high heat, meaning at temperatures of 90 or above, and we're already there. Usually, if the plants are healthy, they can largely outlast the spider mite infestation which will peak in July most years and decline, but I don't think tomato plants with the gamut of foliar diseases will outlast the spider mites. I guess I'll find out. Last year, the plants did recover from the spider mite infestation after a few weeks of it.

I have new tomato plants started for fall too and just in the nick of time!

While standing and looking at the plants last evening, I ruefully said to myself "and THIS is why we plant fresh tomato plants for fall", because sometimes I forget how quickly plants can go downhill at this time of the year.

I am not complaining. If all the fruit on the plants now ripen and no other fruits form, we'll have far more tomatoes than we ever could eat fresh and probably more than I want to can, freeze or dehydrate. It isn't that our harvest is destroyed by these issues. It is just that the plants don't look so great any more. I can kinda relate. I bet I don't look too great when I drag myself in from the hot garden after being out there for a few hours. I've already worked outside for a couple of hours and came in to cool off. You shouldn't have to come indoors to cool off at 9:15 a.m., should you? It seems too early in the summer for the heat to feel so awful so early. If this keeps up, I'll spend July hibernating indoors.

Last night I was out shortly before sunset putting the chickens up for the night and had just walked down the gravel driveway about 3 minutes before Tim drove up it. He stopped, paused, backed up, pulled forward again.....trying to run over a copperhead and kill it. There's a talent involved in killing a venomous snake by running over it because you have to brake hard and stop right on it, or it can survive having the car just roll over it. Usually he nails them, but this one didn't die and got away. We'll never know if that copperhead was there 3 minutes earlier as I walked by, but it is scary to me to think it might have been...and I was watching too. I even had a flashlight though I didn't really need one yet. It just makes it easier to see the snakes in the fading twilight. It was near the giant driveway puddle that has been like a small lake ever since all that rain fell. Well, today the puddle should dry up, so maybe that area will be less attractive then to snakes.

Amy, I've hardly watered at all this year, but I am going to have to start watering the containers. I really got spoiled last year when the rain lasted through the first week of July and I didn't have to start watering them until summer was half over.

I saw wilted leaves at the top of a cucumber plant this morning and my first thought was that it couldn't be too dry. Maybe it was too wet? Then, I came to my senses and realized I was looking at the first symptom of bacterial wilt. Since there is no cure for BW on cucumbers, and because cucumber beetles spread it from plant to plant, those three wilting leaves probably are the beginning of the end for these cucumber plants. I'm not happy about it, but it is fairly common here, so I always just grow them for as long as they last and then plant a succession crop as far away as possible, but not until all the BW-affected plants are pulled and composting and buried under a layer of something else on the compost pile. I grow County Fair pickling cukes because they are tolerant of bacterial wilt, but they are not completely resistant to it. So, maybe it won't spread quickly, but it inevitably will spread. When that happens, I'll be okay with it. I already have Sugar Baby watermelons growing nearby so that they can spread and climb the trellis after the cucumbers are done.

It is funny. All through May and earliest June it didn't feel like summer was close at all, and then, BAM! The rain ended, the sun came out, the heat arrived, the air quality alerts began for some metro areas, and the summer pests and diseases mushroomed. We never really catch a break in summer here. It's just a matter of how early the summer issues begin and how bad they get. Oh, and it is mosquito city here. They are waiting for me every morning when I come out the exterior door. I hate them.

Dawn

Dawn, you make me chuckle. I can just picture your DH going Rambo on that Copperhead. I didn't grow up afraid of snakes, but my poor mother was TERRIFIED of snakes. She was 48 when I was born, and I think I was pretty rough on her sometimes. My dad (who was 52 when I was born) used to save any snakes that made their way into the storm cellar ...just for me.:) They weren't going down there! I would go down, get the snakes, and chase all the boys through the yard...waving the snake at them. My dad would laugh so hard. I made a mistake one time, and brought one in the house to "scare" Mama. She nearly had a heart attack, and I never did that again! As I grew older, and had my own home, I would always carefully removed big rocks when I mowed, and I'd move all the little snakes underneath them to a "safe place". The only thing I really knew about snakes was to never touch one of them that had that "funny looking head", you know...that "pit viper" head. Beyond that, snakes were fascinating to me. Plus they scared the boys ;) Having said all that, I have developed a keen sense of awareness that snakes can be dangerous, especially when one's eyesight isn't that of a 12-13 year old anymore. I had some men do some tree/yard work a couple months back, and when they picked up a bag of mulch, that I had laying in the front of the house bed, there was a baby copperhead. They came and got me, and said they'd killed it. Of course, I had to see it. Assuming it was dead, and it probably was, I asked for them to hand it to me (by the tail). As soon as I took 'hold of it, it started wriggling...I nearly LOST MY MIND. I dropped it, and I began stomping it in only a way that a terrified crazy crippled woman can stomp something. lol Now, I NEVER venture into the yard after dark. I can't see...I can't run...I can't hop, skip, or jump, and my feeling is impaired below the waist, so I just don't take any chances. I do mess with the straw mulch in the garden, sticking my hands into it, but I take great care under anything shady (like blackberry bushes, etc). I have an older male cat who is supposed to be helping me with garden duty, but he is so lazy that even the birds ignore him now. They were dive bombing him the other evening while he just lay (laid?). It's sad that we are now down to the birds picking on this 18 lb cat. It's the same way with the bunny that lives under the garden shed. It was the only survivor of a litter, that I know of. He chased it once. It took too much effort. So the bunny eats weeds, etc., while the cat kicks back and watches. Actually, this little bunny has never bothered one single thing in the garden. It has eaten the grass/weeds in the onion patch, but nothing else. I usually put water out for him.

I know most of you all try to garden organically. I am doing better, but I'm not completely there yet. I finally nuked the garden because I couldn't take all the chewing and munching and holes in the leaves of everything. Yes, I sevin dusted. I had to. The only thing I NEVER touch with ANYTHING...are the blackberries and herbs (I didn't bother onions, either). But, in my defense, I did try hosing plants, insecticidal soaping, neem, DE, etc. I had to do something else, because I have never seen aphids/spider mites/slugs/worms, like I did this year. The only thing I did differently this year was add rabbit manure/bedding. Unless that attracted all these pesky things, I don't know.

Like you, I've been out every day stripping off sick foliage. It's not on every plant, just a few...but growing. I noticed one big tomato has sun-scald in a place because I've stripped off so much foliage. To be honest, I never got out there the other evening to spray any fungicide. I just decided not to. It's so hot, and I figured I'd just try to keep them cleaned out of any bad foliage as much as possible, and when they are gone....well, they are gone. I wish I had the room to rotate crops, but I truly don't. The best I can do is do a big patch of tomatoes one year, and just a few tomatoes the next year. In between...fall, summer, and another fall, do something in those places with unrelated vegetables, till in lots of amendments, and hope for the best.

Mary

We never got any El Nino rains here in Canadian County. I've got big cracks starting allready in the back yard.