Though gardening is fun, what I really need to do is mow my lawn. Unfortunately, Grady Co. is included in the ozone alert today and mowing is on the no-no list. Instead I'll cut some zinnias and maybe try to rig up some bird protection over my much-chewed-upon tomatoes.

Hazel - I tried some squash in containers this year and the poor little plants-from-seed never got more than a few inches tall. One did get a blossom on it (nearly as large as the plant itself) but that was it. Maybe the weird rain year contributed? If you learn something worth passing along about why yours failed, please do!

This is my first year for pole beans instead of bush beans. I've found ONE little one so far...I'm supposed to watch the bottom of the plants first, right? Guess I need to read up on this...

Dawn - I took a Laura Bush petunia from Spring Fling to my mama up north of Enid and that thing has gone CRAZY and looks great. The one I planted? Produced one flower and promptly shriveled up and died. *shrug* I've got some seeds to try for next year.

Love reading about everyone's garden adventures!

Kate, Sometimes we are at the mercy of various government entities, aren't we? At least you have a good reason to not mow.

Yes, watch the bean plants for blossoms and beans to form from the bottom up. I've been harvesting pole beans for a while now, and the current ones I'm harvesting are head high, so no more bending and stooping in order to harvest.

I haven't even made it to harvesting the sweet corn yet as VFD business took much longer than I thought it would today, but I harvested about 40 cucumbers and made pickles and then harvested about 3 lbs. of beans, which I will sit and snap tonight after dinner. Maybe tomorrow morning will be sweet corn harvesting time. It also needs to be tomato harvesting time as I'm getting behind on them.

I'm glad your mother's Laura Bush is doing so well and sorry yours did not perform as well. This is one of my favorite summertime plants. When it gets too long and lanky I cut it back very hard and it makes almost instant regrowth and bloom. I have a great appreciation for a plant that will bloom all summer in our ridiculous heat and still manage to reseed all over the place late in the season.

Today was supposed to be significantly cooler, but it still feels awfully hot and miserable. I can't get much done in the garden if I'm hanging out indoors trying to avoid the heat.

Dawn

I worked pulling weeds and dead stuff every day morning hours and night and still see no end.

For fun my son and went and picked sandplums last night. 6 gallons and probably could get 15 more. We will see. I will get them in the freezer so I can get tomato fences up. Pickin pullin and tuggin that's what we are doing. Oh and great news I am getting a brand new tiller. My sister buys and sells and got a great deal. She is bringing from Branson MO the 1st. It's supposed to be a size I can run.

I must get some of these Laura Bush petunias!

Congratulations on the new tiller, luvncannin! And the sandplums!

Kate, I love reading about everyone's garden adventures too.

I hope everyone had a Happy Summer Solstice with full moon and strawberry moon. I did harvest some berries today and ate them with my lunch.

Oh, and Kate, I took a soil sample to OSU extension today. The don't look at things like herbicide stuff. AND they have to run my test as "compost" and not soil because it's too chunky, so now I'm wondering if that bed is lacking nitrogen. The compost I added is still breaking down. Anyway--in two weeks I"ll have my answer. I planted some okra seed in that bed and fed it.

Kim, Isn't it sad that the weeds sprout and grow so well? I am always a weeding maniac from February through May, but then over time, as I get more and more mulch on the beds, I find myself weeding less and less. Then, of course, once I start running into too many copperheads and rattlesnakes in the garden, I give up weeding altogether for safety reasons. It kind of aggravates me that I have to stop weeding because of the snakes at some point every summer, but it is a safety issue, and so I do it.

We used a rototiller a lot in our earlier years here, but not at all in the front garden now, and only once per season in the back garden. Learning about the microbes in the soil, their importance to healthy soil and healthy plants really made me switch to low-til and no-till gardening as much as humanly possible, since rototilling/plowing destroys the soil structure and harms the microbes. I don't know how we'll ever get the back garden into as good of shape as the front garden so that we no longer have to rototill the back, but that's my long-term goal anyhow. We'll see if it is achievable. The soil back there is completely different from the front garden and harder to improve because it is sand instead of clay and both nutrients and water run through the soil like it is a sieve. Cover cropping helps, but it takes a rototiller to properly work the cover crop into the ground back there. If I cut a cover crop out back and don't work it into the ground, the voles move in and live in the cut cover crop. Those voles drive me stark raving mad, and you cannot get rid of them when you're surrounded by woodland because more just keep coming out of the woods. I guess the ultimate solution will be to build hardware cloth-lined raised beds, but we've been doing that out front since 1999 and aren't finished yet.

At the current rate of building one new raised bed per year, the front garden's remaining grade level growing areas should be converted to all raised beds in another 5 years. The thought of slowly doing the same thing out back over such a long period of time seems quite daunting at this point. We'll be in our 80s before it is done if we do just one raised bed a year like we have with the front garden. We need to speed it up and do it more quickly before we find ourselves too old to do it at all. One thing I intend to do from the start is to make very wide pathways out back that will ensure easy access to all the raised beds as we get older. That's not something I focused on with the front garden, which started out with very narrow pathways that we have slowly widened over time. I feel like we never utilize the back garden as fully as we should, but as we get raised beds built back there and line them with hardware cloth to keep the voles out, I know I'll be happier with using that garden than I am right now, when voles can strike at any time and eat the plant roots and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.

Hazel, I bring the Laura Bush petunias to the Spring Fling every year, so watch for them next year if you're able to attend. They reseed like mad in my garden, so I always have plenty to spare in springtime when they are popping up everywhere.

Since OSU is having to test your soil as compost due to its chunkiness, it may be lacking in nitrogen. At least soon you'll have your test results and then you'll know where to go from there.

Dawn

My Lady Peas are about 4" high and the Penny Riles I planted Sunday came up yesterday. I believe the Egyptian spinach and Jewels of Opar I planted Tues are just peeking up. I watered them this morning, hope it's not too hot for them. Tues I also planted the carrots (red and black) and radish (purple) from India. I just want to see what they will do in the heat. I picked a handful of tomatos this morning and marked some so I could evaluate taste. Tightened up the fence around the main tomato bed and SO FAR it is keeping the chickens out. They are annoyed though, so when they figure out they can fly, I'll be in trouble again. Darn, I need to check on the garlic drying in the garage. I've got a bad case of the I don wannas.

I have had a bad case of the I don't wannas as well, but I did harvest for a couple of hours this morning, then piled up all the tomatoes in my Aerocart and took a photo because it was kind of a lot of them. I watered some things that needed it, and scouted the squash for squash bugs or squash vine borers. None seen yet, and not even any eggs. Eventually, I came indoors (too hot for so early in the day!) and then I dragged my feet and worked on minor stuff like processing beans, peas, cukes, and corn, when I really, really, really needed to be in the kitchen making salsa. Finally, after postponing the inevitable as long as I could, I ran enough tomatoes through the tomato mill to make 5 batches of salsa. Then, being of sound mind and hot and tired and having planned to cook a nice dinner that was going to require some time and effort, I threw all 5 one-gallon bags of processed tomatoes into the freezer and told myself I'd make salsa another day. The day will be tomorrow. My favorite part of the meal we're about to eat (meat loaf, home-grown sweet corn, home-grown southern peas, homemade cornbread (alas, not from our own corn) and homemade lemon icebox pie) definitely is going to be the pie because it is cold. If it was just me at home tonight, I'd happily eat a big dinner salad with lots of tomatoes and a slice of icebox pie, but the men in our family expect to have real meals. Notice how I threw around the words homemade and homegrown? That's on purpose. I'm going to tell Tim that since tonight's dinner is home made and homegrown, then tomorrow is his turn to make dinner since I'll be making salsa all day and I can tell you right now that dinner tomorrow will be Taco Bell!

Yummy! Fresh corn sounds so good, as do the peas, and lemon ice-box pie, as well as everything else:) No dinner here tonight. I just don't feel like cooking, so my little guy and I will have pancakes or something. He's playing quietly right now, after he and I picked another 12 lbs (not a wagon load, Dawn...lol) of tomatoes. I'm grateful to get them, because the disease is just really spreading, and the heat is taking a toll. They are still loaded with fruit, so I just need to get them through as long as possible. Cucumbers are growing like crazy, but I think they must have the spider mites, too...because they have stippling leaves. I may try to do something to them later. I hate spraying anything on them in this heat, plus they are fruiting pretty well. Despite the squash vine borers, I still have a few plants that are putting out. Jalapenos are insane, and I need to start on candied jalapenos this weekend.