I have been out driving tee post to build tomato and pepper trellises. I had planned on redoing my garden this year, but not the way I have been doing it, because of all the rain and a failed septic system near the wildlife garden.

I have lost another pepper plant because of the wet soil. I think I will have plenty tho. My daughter and grand daughter will be here today and I will pick some of the bell peppers to lighten the load on the plants. The plants are not very large but have a lot of peppers on them.

My wildlife harden is doing pretty good. I have a lot of grain for the birds, rats and rabbits.

I saw a lot of game when I went over to check if the peas, zinnias and clover was coming up. Nothing new had sprouted and the clover seed may have washed away. There was a doe and her baby over there checking to see if anything new had come up, and eating the peas that I planted a couple of weeks ago. The baby was so small it could hardly get through the tall grass, but mother led me away from it while it hid in a clump of grass. It was the smallest deer I have ever seen. I think I get more satisfaction out of the wildlife garden than I do the two gardens I have in the lawn.

Well I think I had better drive a few more post, and them get ready to take my beautiful ladies out to eat.

I will take a minute to brag on my grand daughters. Laken has finished her Masters in music, Loren finished her 4 year degree in civil engineering and got a full scholarship for her Doctorate in civil engineering. My daughter and her two girls just got back from Ireland , where they celebrated for most of two weeks.

Larry, your granddaughters are amazing! And how fun to go to Ireland. (through 23andMe, I found my Irish ancestors are probably from Cork County)

What sort of trellis do you build for your peppers and tomatoes. I like my tomato cages but it's difficult to "treat" them if needed. Or even weed around the bottom if needed.

Dawn, I haven't noticed any bolting onions yet. My onions are confused though. I'm going to try to leave them for another 3 weeks or so. They are so behind. Probably won't get a great harvest at all. They sort of remind me of my very first onion harvest in 2015. Only a little better because the soil is a lot better.

Garden stuff from the past couple of days:

I treated the white fly infected tomato plants with Neem. And fertilized the other tomato plants with an organic tomato fertilizer I found at Wally World.

Fresh wood chips were added to the garden paths (the places that Ethan and I didn't work earlier in the week).

Continuing to harvest asparagus and strawberries but they are slowing down.

Tonight I planted Seminole seeds where the peas were pulled. And southern peas in the new bed. Half of that bed is already planted with cucumbers, which are coming along okay.

Oh, I also planted Mulabar spinach in a large Smart Pot where regular spinach was planted and basically failed. And started watermelon seed in some pots to get a start on them. They'll go where the onions are.

Weeding. Lots of weeding when I have time.

The vomit mystery on the strawberries. I'm pretty sure it IS the dog vomit "fungus". I've seen a few pictures that resemble my vomit mess. Also, I found it in another bed. The strawberry bed has a lot of mulchy dead leaf stuff under the plants. For ME, that has worked well because the rolly pollies seem to stay very busy with the mulchy stuff and mostly leave the berries alone. Occasionally they get hold of a berry. The strawberry patch is messy and sorta bugs me, but it has worked in protecting the berries.

I have been thinking about my Peggy hen. I'm pretty sure that a hawk could not have carried her off. A cochin hen weighs around 8 lbs. I think a hawk could kill her and eat her in place, but not carry her off. And there were no body parts lying around other than a few feathers. We have a neighborhood coyote that we've seen when we are walking in the evenings and my neighbors have found eating mulberries and asparagus from their gardens in the morning hours. I wonder if she jumped the 4 ft. fence, grabbed her and carried her away. Is that the behavior of a coyote? Or would they eat her in the spot they grabbed her?

Oh, and less than an hour ago, I was locking up the chickens. Finbar was outside with me when suddenly some jerk cat ran at him and attacked him. They rolled and Finn got away and ran up the tree. The cat followed him up and they scuffled up there for a minute. I yelled at the cat and he ran into my garden. I hollered for Tom. He came out and scared off the cat. Finn was so freaked out that he wouldn't come down from the tree and was even growling at me as I was trying to coax him down. Finally, I stood at the backdoor and he came down and came inside. What in the world?!

This never happened with Charlotte. She gave off an air of "don't mess with me" and other cats did not. I remember looking out at night, under the OG&E light and she would be sitting out there with several cats around her...they didn't dare come towards her. It was a weird social thing that she seemed completely fine with.

Larry, I think your wildlife garden sounds awesome. I bet it is really fulfilling to see how much the deer are depending on your food plot.

Laken and Loren sound quite accomplished and you must be bursting with pride over their accomplishments! Is either one of them the granddaughter who used to help you in the garden? I bet their trip to Ireland was incredible. Tim's great-great-grandfather came to the Pennsylvania from County Cork, Ireland, in the late 1850s.

Is any of the flooding near you?

Jennifer, It is a horrible onion year. I planted mine very late because I knew they'd rot if I planted them on time, so it isn't even like I expected much from them. That's a good thing, because they didn't do a lot. We'll have plenty for fresh eating over the next few months, but I won't be chopping up and freezing tons of them to use in cooking over the rest of the year. I'm not sure why two of the red onions have bolted. I guess if more of them bolt, I'll just figure it was something with that variety for some reason this year. None of the white ones or yellow ones have bolted.

I was hoping it wasn't dog vomit slime mold just because the name repulses me. When I've seen it, the color was a little different than yours, but then it can have slightly different colorations anyway. I think I've only had it (or any slime mold) here twice. Maybe three times.

Yes, a coyote would jump a fence. That's why our dog yard fence is 8' tall. We have friends who had either 1 or 2 coyotes jump their 6' tall wooden privacy fence and get both their cats the same day. These were good cats who never left their yard. One cat disappeared earlier in the day, and the other one later, so the same coyote may have come back and got the second one. Coyotes are pretty bold. A couple of years I opened the front door as a coyote was chasing Casper right up the steps of the front porch....the cat was running up the steps and the coyote would have been on the step in another second had I not opened the door. Of course, the cat flew right in the door and the coyote veered away quickly from the steps and ran back out into the woods. Bobcats are even worse because they are climbers. We've had bobcats climb up and sit on the high peaked roof of the chicken coop before, and we've had a bobcat sit on top of the fenced chicken run. (Thankfully, there was a top over the run or the bobcat could have just climbed or jumped the fence and gotten into the chicken run.) We've had bobcats jump the garden fence when it was only 4' tall---they were in there all the time then. A bobcat once pursued Yellow Cat up onto the roof over the covered porch. It was around 2 a.m. and I heard Yellow Cat meowing frantically outside the spare bedroom window. I got up, opened the window, frantically knocked out the window screen and got him inside just in the nick of time. That was pretty scary. Tim and I have been walking down the driveway near twilight and encountered a pair of coyotes walking up into our yard from the street and they were not the least bit bothered by our presence. Usually a coyote will turn tail and slink away but these didn't. They made me nervous. I've had to turn around and come back from walking two dogs on a leash because we encountered a coyote in the middle of our road in broad daylight who didn't turn tail and run either---he acted like he wanted to fight. Our friend, Jesse, told me he knew just which coyote it was when I mentioned the incident to him, and he described its appearance to me. Said he'd had trouble on his wife's family's farm (just the other side of our back fence line) with that same one. He told me it was so bold because it was a dog-coyote hybrid (not the first one I've seen or encountered, but the least skittish one I've ever seen) and had enough dog DNA that it wasn't afraid of humans. We had that one roaming our neighborhood for another couple of years after that. I don't even walk our dogs any more. I gave it up after a few too many scary incidents like that. Wild varmints are very bold---some coyotes come to compost piles to scavenge food, and they often get in gardens and eat melons. A friend of ours was mowing a pasture with a tractor and he looked up and saw his little rat terrier, Rascal, being chased by a coyote, running right towards the tractor. When the dog got to the tractor he jumped up on it, and the coyote came awfully close to the tractor before thinking better of it, and turned and veered away. We used to have a nice wooden picnic table that sat in our yard. Two or three times we came out in the morning and there was a puddle of blood on the table. Obviously something was catching animals at night and sitting on top of the table to eat them. It was hideous. I would pour bleach on that table and scrub it clean every time I found it like that with blood on it. There, that's a nice selection of my wildlife tales, and I didn't even include the worst ones.

Often, when an animal, especially a chicken or guinea, is taken by a varmint, you will find a lot of feathers, and sometimes you'll find part of their body, but not always. Sometimes they carry them completely away, perhaps to feed pups in their den. Neighborhood dogs will carry off poultry the same way, though they don't seem as adept at jumping or climbing over fences as coyotes are.

I'm guessing the jerk cat was a male cat trying to establish dominance over Finbar. I usually can break up that kind of nonsense with a water gun (Super Soakers are great for this!) or a sharp blast of water from the water hose. The bad thing is you usually get your own cat wet, but it usually makes the invading cat run off too and then your cat can come inside and sulk and stare at you all night. Just kidding---ours seem to know when mama has saved them and will come lay beside me and purr or if I'm up working in the kitchen or something, they'll hang around, rubbing up against my legs and purring as if thanking me for chasing off the troublemaker cat. I know better than to pick up a cat who is upset like that because they'll often attack you, in a case of misplaced aggression, but Tim always seems to think he can scoop up a fighting cat to separate it from another cat without having them claw him to shreds. He's always wrong about that. I wonder if that is a macho male type thing, or a cop thing?

Cats do seem to have a pecking order within a neighborhood group. No one dared to mess with any of our cats as long as Yellow Cat, who lived to be at least 18 or 19, was alive. Even when he was old and frail, they would not make any trouble around him. He was feral and roamed our neighborhood for 8 or 9 years at least before he decided to adopt us and settle down. We joked that we were his retirement plan. He was one tough cat. He's been gone a couple of years now, I guess, and we have roaming neighborhood cats showing up in our yard pretty often now. Pumpkin is feisty like Yellow Cat was and will do his best to run them off, but sometimes they are bigger than him and meaner than him.

The rain in today's forecast missed us, so I'll have to water all the plants in containers first thing tomorrow. I guess I need to set up drip irrigation lines for them because it seems like the rain is going into its summer pattern of missing us.

I'm still worn out from those two very long days in the garden last week, but hope to work out there all day tomorrow too, in case the heavy rain in the forecast for Wed-Thurs really does occur. I want to get as caught up as possible on all garden chores before then. I need to pick tomatoes tomorrow and then can them as we already have a pile on the kitchen counter that we aren't eating quickly enough. I also hope to get the potatoes dug. We're about to start hitting the 90s here by the weekend, and I like to get my potatoes dug and out of the ground before we get that warm, especially in a year when the soil is really wet.

Since we did all the yard work yesterday, we played a bit more than usual today and went plant shopping and to Michael's. I didn't find anything crafty in Michael's that I wanted, but I came home with several new plants, trying to fill in a couple of holes in the perennial border. I bought three Firebush (Hamelia patens) plants for the perennial border, though they are only annuals here. I have wondered if they'd survive in well-drained soil here since they are zone 8 plants and we're in zone 7b and do have some zone 8 plants last in the ground here for at least a few years. I don't necessarily have well-drained soil though, so they never make it through the winter here. I also bought a violet-flowered autumn sage that is really pretty, and its blooms are a different color from any of our other autumn sages. And, I bought two jasmine (Jasminum sambac) plants, which are in bloom and smell so glorious. They are going into two tall urn planters that sit on either side of the garden shed door. They are not even close to being cold hardy here, and the big cast stone urns are too heavy to move to the greenhouse, but I could overwinter them by digging them up and putting them in plastic pots to bring indoors and overwinter in the sunroom. Oh, and I found a different color of Tecoma stans. I already have the yellow-flowered one called Yellow Bells, and 4 of the closely related orange-flowered Cape Honeysuckles (Tecoma capensis) and had been watching for the one I got today for quite a while. It is called Bells of Fire and the flowers are a fiery reddish-orange that is nothing like the pure, bright orange of Cape Honeysuckle. I think all the plants I bought today will plug the gaps in the perennial border. I am going to plant them tomorrow.

I am having fun succession planting cool-season veggies with warm-season flowers. I have grown veggies for so very long (my whole life with my dad, and as an adult on my own since I was in my mid-20s) and, in some ways, am ready to take a break from them for a while and maybe focus more on flowers. I think it is good for the soil to get a break too from the heavy cropping of vegetables year in and year out. One of these years I'm going to convert my vegetable garden to a cutting garden (maybe I'll convert one raised bed per year) and only grow tomatoes and peppers in pots. That year probably is coming sooner rather than later. I'm ready for a change.

I also want to redo most of the landscaping around our house, though that probably is more of a job for next year than this year. After 20+ years, it needs a total refresh, and it will be easier this time around because the soil is much improved over what we started with in 1999, and we have a lot of mature shade trees now, so whatever I choose to plant won't have to tolerate full sun the way our early plantings did. The hard part will be ripping out all the old, overgrown shrubs, I guess. Probably this is a project for next year because it is too late this year to start tearing out a landscape to replace it with the summer heat arriving soon, especially since the roofer hasn't replaced our roof yet. He's ordered the shingles and we are on his 'list' but there were a lot of houses here with storm damage, and he has several other jobs lined up ahead of ours. It hasn't helped that the constant rain has made it hard for roofers to work on roofs either. So, one good thing about the fact that the rain has started missing us is that maybe it means the roofers can get their roofing jobs done. It would be insane to try to put in new landscaping now knowing he's going to be up there tearing off the shingles and throwing them down to the ground below, so I have redoing the landscape as my top garden priority for next year.

I need to develop a nice landscape plan on paper and that will take me months, I am sure. At least I do have a much better understanding now of what deer and voles eat, so I have a good idea of what not to plant.

Dawn

Larry, your garden looks great.

Dawn, it's funny that you mentioned bobcats. My neighbor who lives on the block to our west (our block runs east and west, and her block north to south) mentioned that Marcums nursery on Sooner Rd. (whose property backs up to hers) said they believe there's a big cat running around. The morning that Peggy disappeared was rainy. There was no one out in the neighborhood. Our dogs were indoors. Some of the chickens don't mind the rain and Peggy is one of them.

And coyotes who eat melons. I'm pretty sure I've experienced that too! Last summer. If you remember, I hurt my foot and was stuck on the couch for awhile. I noticed that I had a dozen sugar baby melons ready to harvest and had planned on doing that the following day. But, during the night something had come along and taken the melons. There were no remains other than one vine that had been dragged across our property. Something big took them.

I like your idea about a cutting flower garden. That is fun.

I've considered enlarging my veggie gardens, but will probably not. Maybe if I was younger. My veggie gardens are about 40' x40' and the back garden has two 8ft. beds and one 12' bed. There's also two beds just outside of the larger garden. One has the salad greens and the other has herbs. I'm able to grow quite a bit of food in those gardens. I still have empty spots to add more raised beds too! Or large pots.

I've decided to grow what I really enjoy eating. I do enjoy most veggies, so it's hard to choose really. I eat salads everyday and really must learn to grow salad greens year 'round. Other than salad greens, I eat lots of kale, tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, beans, peas, southern peas, asparagus, berries, zucchini, squash, carrots, radishes. I enjoy melons too. I (we) eat potatoes about once a week and corn occasionally. I'm considering not growing potatoes any longer and not start with corn.

I reserve the right to change my mind, of course. I do think it would be interesting to grow food for my chickens.

And we eat a lot of eggs. Plus chickens are entertaining. Chickens are a keeper. They are starting to pay for themselves too. (not really if you take into consideration the amount of work/money we've spent on improving/building their coops).

I've had a thought about changing our backyard into no lawn and just beds of flowers, etc. and pathways. That will take a lot of work and be expensive, I'm sure. I'm working on improving the soil behind the shop. It will be some time of pollinator, butterfly, OR cutting flower garden.

I just spent a glorious 3 and a half hours outdoors. It wasn't hot at all. I worked on putting down more woodchips on the garden paths. And fertilizing. And had a snake encounter. It was a baby and probably not harmful. That shrinking pile of wood chips has become an ecosystem--a home for all sorts of critters. I'm going to measure that wood chip pile. It's an oval shape. I'm considering growing berries or flowers there. The soil should be delightful under that pile. I'll probably scrape off most of mulch and then put down a large tarp for a year or so until I decide what to do with it...as well as watch how the sun hits it.

Anyway...hope everyone is having a productive day. I'm enjoying mine. The rest of the work week will be busy.

Hi all. Larry, SO very impressed with the granddaughters' accomplishments! How wonderful is THAT? I am so curious about Laken's master degree! What area of music is her focus? What was her thesis on?

HJ, I'm having white fly issues too. NOT happy. I just sprayed some insecticidal soap on the ones that are affected. I see the potato plants are beginning to be eaten, too. Gotta hate pests. Dawn, I was thinking of you today at the school. Out in the big circle bed where the tomatoes are, the back half of it was what had standing water for so long, so the plants back there look abysmal! Single stalked with just a few leaves at the tops. And yet 3 of them had tomatoes that were an inch or so in diameter. Two had one, and one had two tomatoes. Poor things. We bought some back up tomato plants and put them in the raised beds. Our squash, green beans, and okra are doing really well at the school, though. Peppers are in about the same shape as the tomatoes, so I got a few back-ups of those, too.

It's overcast and relatively cool here today, at a breezy 80. It was spitting rain earlier, and I hope that's all we get! I'm betting not, though. I do keep finding corners to tuck more things into. I've had such lame containers on the deck in the past, I decided to really fill them up with pretty flowers. Well. . . . I am really bad at this container growing! I have the narrow-leaved ginger in one of the big pots, but with a hollyhock zebrina, cosmos, alyssum, sweet potato vine and Dusty Miller. I was asking Elizabeth when these things begin blooming and showed her a picture of mine. She said "UH, you might want to get a bigger pot." Said hers get to be about six feet tall and spread. Well, yes, it is spreading. Can you imagine all those plants in that one pot? LOL. I am going to be doing some rearranging!

GRRR. ,. . severe thunderstorm warnings and it's movin' in! RATS.

HA! It rained 1.5" in 50 minutes. CRAZY. I hope it's done for the day. Yes, Larry--I agree with Hazel. Your garden DOES look great.

And by the way, Hazel, that sounds like an ENORMOUS garden! I had no idea. Ours is a midget garden in comparison.

I'm glad you're 20 miles from the river, Larry! We're just a mile from Neosho but by the time it gets here it's Ft Gibson Lake.We're about 10 miles east of the Verdigris and about 20 miles from the Arkansas. I did not know the Verdigris was what Bird and Caney dumped into. I've spent a lot of time the past couple weeks reading up on the McClellan-Kerr River Navigation Channel!

I am behind on weeding, but can see I won't be doing any more today! I bought ---FINALLY-- four clumps of Autumn Joy Sedum. I've only intended to have some for about 30 years! YAY!

Thanks, Hazel, and Nancy for the compliment on my garden, but I was not completely honest because you only saw the best view of the north garden.

This is a view of the south garden. There are 19 tomato plants in all that trash in the first 2 rows that need to be cleaned. There are 2 rows of okra on the other side of the garden that needs cleaning.

Nancy, I don't know anything about Laken''s music. She plays a flute, got her first degree in Ft. Smith, then went to Denver for a year, then to Dayton for a year. She will be going to New York for something this summer, then back to Ft. Smith to teach. I think she wants to get into some type of music management. I think she would be good at writing, she has a wonderful dry wit.

Loren will be working in the Engineering lab at osu again this summer.

Dug 2 more potato bags tonight. Super happy so far with the harvest. They taste so good.

Pill bugs! This is crazy, they’re everywhere! I broke out the Captain Jacks, and Sluggo. But, the swarms are out of control.

Larry, I am glad you taught both girls so well. You truly are a blessing to your whole family and I am so sorry Loren lost her daddy so young. That must have been devastating. It sounds like she is such a strong young woman.

I am so glad to hear that you're a long way from the river and that the river level is dropping. All this flooding has been so, so awful.

Jennifer, Hmmm. Maybe we use different words here. When somebody here says a big cat is running around, they are referring to a cougar. Or, some of the guys here call them long-tailed cats in order to distinguish them from bobcats, which people here just call bobcats or bob-tail cats. I generally refer to them as cougars or bobcats so no one has to wonder which one I mean, but I will refer to the cougars as big cats sometimes, depending on who it is I'm speaking to.

One of our friends had a cougar kill his cattle dog (Australian shepherd) about 3 or 4 years after we moved up here. It happened only a couple of miles from our place. That dog's sister, Sheila, was our dog. At first he thought a pack of coyotes had gotten Ringo, but then he found his body cached under a pile of brush and that is how we knew a cougar got it---because they will cache their food that way and return to get it as needed. That was 3 or 4 years before I had the cougar problems just outside my garden. That year, we weren't the only ones with a cougar issue. We lost all our chickens and guineas. A neighbor up the road lost over 110 (all) of his chickens and guineas. Other neighbors lost poultry and small to medium sized pets. Oddly, we never saw bobcats or coyotes that summer or autumn, and we felt like it was because they abandoned the area when the cougars showed up. I just hate it when predators get our animals despite our best efforts to protect them.

I'm glad it wasn't hot there at all. It was ridiculously hot here. Our temperature maxed out at 90 degrees and our heat index at 100. I stuck it out for as long as I could, but when I came indoors to cool down, we were at a temp of 89 and a heat index of 99 and I simply could not make myself go back out there even after I had cooled down and eaten a late lunch. Tomorrow's a new day and I'll hopefully get a lot of work done tomorrow.

Nancy, I wish we'd had rain! It tried. A huge, towering cumulonimbus popped up right over out house and got huge and dark and thundered. Then, without dropping any rain on us, it headed northeast and rained on some of the same parts of the county that got rain on Saturday night. So, the rain missed us again. However, while we were clouded up we dropped down to 88 degrees. It didn't last...once the clouds were gone, we went right back up to 80.

I've only had whiteflies one time in my life, and it was in a rainy year, and only on a couple of tomato plants. I always wondered why those plants---I assume they were weaker than the others or something.

I've been on a stink bug-killing rampage though. And I killed two bee assassin bugs. I usually leave assassin bugs alone, but since these feed on bees and only bees, I don't put up with them in my garden. Pests and diseases are always so much worse in wet years.

It was a lovely early morning in the garden. I pulled out the poppy plants, as they were nearing the end of their bloom period and I wanted to fill their space with other plants for summer color. After I did that, I got the three Firebushes planted, weeding the bed they were going into as I planted, and then I heard the dreaded sound of a giant spray rig coming down the road. Grrr! I hurried and put up the rest of the plants in the garden shed and slammed the door shut to protect them. Then I ran to find the water hose and sprinkler, drag them down to the garden and set them up to water the east end of the garden while the spray rig was in the fields across the street from us. I am hoping that by keeping that sprinkler going the whole time he was spraying, maybe any herbicide drift that came our way would be washed off the plants. The problem is that I don't use a sprinkler often, and usually for the yard and not the garden, so I don't have a big enough sprinkler to cover the whole garden at once. I just did the best I could with what I have. Of course, I am hoping he was only spraying a fertilizer and not a herbicide, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.

Since the spraying took quite a while, I gave up on the idea of planting anything else today. Instead, I weeded the other end of the garden (maybe it would have been smarter to weed the part where the sprinkler was going as it would have kept me cooler) and then I pulled out all the 1015Y onions that had flopped over, not wanting to leave them in the garden any longer in case the heavy rain in the Wed-Thurs forecast actually materializes. I dug half the potatoes. Considering how late I planted and how rainy we've been, I was not surprised to find the crop smaller than usual. Most plants produced 4-5 good potatoes. Those were the ones in the upper few inches of the soil. Any potatoes lower than that were rotting though. That sort of surprised me because the entire raised 4' x 12' raised bed, all 22 vertical inches of it, is above grade level and has a really fast-draining sandy loam mix in it. Regardless, at least we got potatoes. I'll dig the other half tomorrow. I also hope to finish transplanting the plants I bought and I will, assuming no one is out spraying herbicides tomorrow.

It is getting so hot here now. I'm not ready for this heat. I should have harvested tomatoes and peppers today, but got so distracted by the spraying and the heat that I forgot to. I guess that goes on tomorrow's To Do list as well.

I saw the first ticks today---two immature Lone Star ticks crawling through the mulch at the far north end of the garden, directly adjacent to the woodland. I killed them. I almost never actually see a tick in the garden, so this was a bit surprising.

The flies and mosquitoes are horrible. There's a ton of green stink bugs, but not many brown ones yet. I see about 2 or 3 bee assassin bugs per year, and had one last week and two today, so I've met the quota already for 2019. Somehow I expect that this is the year there will be more of them. There's tons and tons of caterpillars of all kinds. I've been killing the less desirable ones, like the army worms and the cabbage worms, and ignoring the desirable ones. Other than billions of tiny grasshoppers (I just know it is shaping up to be a bad grasshopper year), I'm not seeing many other pests. There's tons of butterflies, moths, bees and other pollinators, so that's a really good sign.

I need to get as much work done in the garden tomorrow as possible in case the Wed-Thurs rain doesn't miss us.

Dawn

Nancy, I actually measured the garden last night. It is 37' not 40'. Once we get the outside path and fence made, it will be 43'. lol

It's crooked. So crooked. Looking at an aerial view--wow. haha. I'll see if I can find that view again and post a pic of it. It's always interesting seeing your property from that view.

Rebecca, you're making me rethink growing potatoes. Nice!

Dawn, my neighbor who told me about the "big" cat is from Minnesota. AND, she was telling me what the nursery told her. I'm not sure what word(s) they used when talking to her. When retelling the story to me, she said "mountain lion", but I think people get all the non domesticated cat names mixed up. She said the nursery is finding deer legs on their property. I haven't heard a mountain lion. Don't they usually have a scary cry? I know that a woman who used to post here, said they had one in the south OKC/west Moore area (close to where I used to live...and close to where your friends live.) It's hard to imagine a mountain lion around here OR around there. Although both places have creeks and woods. If we had a "big" cat, wouldn't we see more animals--goats and chickens and dogs and cats go missing? And wouldn't we hear it? We still hear plenty of coyotes. Maybe they (the nursery or the neighbor) meant bobcat? Maybe the answer lies in what type of animal would leave deer legs. Creepy.

Oh, and it did get hot in the afternoon and oh so humid. Ick. It was perfect in the morning.

We got somewhere between a quarter to half inch early this morning.

Mountain lion is same as cougar. We called them mountain lions in Wyoming; and in MN.

I posted pictures of a couple IDKs. . . weeds. But don't see the post. Wonder if it takes a lot longer to load there. ?? Maybe I lost it. Jennifer, I had no IDEA you had that big ole garden. I just knew about raised beds. You must have a large piece of property? How suh-weet! However. . . . I should be so happy ours is NOT that big. I'm having a tough time keeping up with ours this year--between the raised beds and the larger plant/flower beds in the yard. At one point I tried to figure out how many square feet were involved, but I forget now. The larger plant/flower beds scattered around the property are good-sized, and they're nearly too much for me, and likely will be in a couple more years, when I add mowing the entire affair once a week. It's going to be a mess. I wonder how long it would take to erase some of those beds and let them become "lawn" again. I wish I could find a passionate gardener about 40 years younger than I am who who lived nearby and had no yard themselves and so could garden in ours. Or hey, I can pray for a transforming event to make me like Ruth Stout. Getting older is definitely not for sissies, is it!

Hahaha, Larry, thanks for posting the ugly. I have a beautiful ugly mess out in the shop bed I'll share tomorrow. Crabgrass is stubborn and prolific, isn't it! That is actually a brilliant idea. I think for my next FB post I'll post photos of all the failures and ugliness. And there are considerable numers of both.

AHH! My fishing line fences have done well up to this point--not perfect, but really darned good. Minimal deer damage over the past 4 years. But GDW went to bed late last night, and he told me this morning that when he went out to get the cats in, there were three deer around the center bed, and he couldn't see them well, but well enough to see that one jumped over the fishline fence to get out and then they began moving back, at which point he let Titan out to SIC em. And so today I ordered high-powered motion-activated sprinkler. They're not cheap (we ordered the sturdy powerful Orbitz, about $70), but I have friends I trust who swear by them. We ordered one and if works well, we'll order another one. With a combination of trying to grow plants deer aren't crazy about (means no roses or hostas and lots of other stuff), and growing lots of herbs (that deer don't like), and keeping the vegetables inside a fenced in area with raised beds, and a big dog, and fishline fences, we've achieved, I'd say, about an 85% success ratio. Garry and I ware watching Youtube videos of the motion-activated sprinklers today--great entertainment regarding cats, dogs, raccoons, deer . . . Maybe I should get an outdoor camera, to boot. Do any of the rest of you have these sprinklers? I feel like we are a big target for the deer, since we're the only ones in this area who garden. SHEESH.

Rebecca, That's a nice harvest of potatoes.

Nancy, I tried calling them mountain lions, but people down here don't care for that name---maybe because we don't have any mountains. lol. They told me "we are river people and we have long-tailed cats or you can call them panthers". I preferred using the term cougar or mountain lion, but when I was a kid growing up in Fort Worth, it was known as the panther city and we did call them panthers back then, now that I think about it. It is amazing to me how many sports teams here have the word 'wildcat' or some form thereof as their school mascot. I wonder if it is because there were so many wild cats back in the day when the schools were built many decades ago. (There's even more school mascots named Indians, though.)

Jennifer, If they are finding deer legs, I'd expect it likely is a big cat/cougar/mountain lion/long-tailed cat, although you cannot rule out it is a coyote either. Sometimes coyotes will get a deer, but not often, at least around here. Our herds are pretty big and I think they stick together for safety. Coyotes really eat a lot of little things most of the time like voles and other rodents, rabbits, frogs and even grasshoppers. They also eat a ton of the native persimmons that grow in groves all over the place here.

Mountain lions have a horrific roar type thing that starts like a standard roar and ends like a lady's scream. It is the most blood-curdling thing I've ever heard, and I was out alone in the dark on a winter night when I heard it up close the first time. I had heard it at a distance before and it was disconcerting but not nearly as scary. Neighbors who lived 3/4s of a mile north of us stopped by the next morning when I was out working in the garden to tell me they heard it and to check and see if I survived the experience. They said "it sounded to us like it was right here at your place". I told them it sounded that way to me too. lol. Tim was indoors watching TV and never heard a thing, which is about par for the course.

Big cats travel over a huge territory (100-300 square miles) so you wouldn't necessarily see a lot of animals disappearing, except in drought years when the natural food supply is very low. It was a very bad drought year in that horrible year when we had the two or three here (unusual in and of itself, probably young males seeking to find their own territory but thwarted from doing so by extreme heat and drought) that were so much trouble for several months. The two I had trouble with were both young---they still had their juvenile spots. The first one was a lot bigger than the second one, and I saw the second one about 6 weeks later, so I don't even necessarily think they were from the same litter. One neighbor saw two together, but his sounded like my bigger one and an adult. We'll never know, though. Another neighbor did find adult tracks that were huge. Another neighbor, who was a member of this forum, sent me a private message during all this that his neighbors saw the larger juvenile in their pasture chasing deer and tried to shoot it. They might have hit it (blood was found in the pasture) but it ran away and they couldn't see any injury on it as it ran. At some point, we did have bobcats too, but they all disappeared during those months. We never knew if something bigger killed them or if they moved off to another area. We did have a neighbor trapping them back then, so maybe he got them all.

I was watching slow-moving storms on radar this morning, headed my way. They were so slow, so I decided to go ahead and go out and work until the thunder and lightning got closer. Ha, as soon as I walked out, the thunder and a couple of raindrops arrived. I had to go back indoors and wait until it all passed, which was 3 or 4 hours. Most of the rain missed us---part of our county and other counties got so much rain so quickly that they had a flood advisory for several hours. At our house, we had about 0.40" of rain and no flooding of any sort. I finally made it outdoors after lunch and weeded for a few hours and did a little planting. Then the sun came out, it got a lot hotter and I went indoors. It was time to make dinner anyway. The good thing about being stuck indoors all morning was that I got all the laundry done and some house cleaning too.

I found and killed more green stink bugs. I've never seen so many of them. My mulch is full of them. They're easy to kill when they are on the ground though, so at least there's that.

I noticed the red onion tops are falling over now, so they'll be done soon. I thought I'd get the other half of the potatoes dug, but I didn't because of the rain. Maybe tomorrow, unless it rains more. I harvested about a dozen big jalapeno peppers and made poppers to go with tonight's light and easy dinner of tacos. I think Tim was more excited about the jalapeno poppers than the tacos. The other pest all over the garden, especially on bean plants, is spider mites. There's sure a lot of them. I usually just ignore them and usually my plants outlast them.

After I came inside, I felt something run down my arm. It was a young leaf-footed bug. It wasn't a real young nymph but also wasn't big enough yet that it was forming its wings. I knocked it off onto the floor and smashed it with a newspaper. I'm killing about one leaf-footed bug a day, but we have about a million per year, so I barely make a dent in the population at all. This one made it easy for me by hitching a ride indoors, which was a fatal error.

I'm hoping for rain tomorrow but also hoping to have plenty of rain-free time to work in the garden.

Dawn

Found a leak in the roof so we're juggling all the fun that goes in to getting the insurance to approve any work. It's going to take a pretty good chunk out of our savings, but at least we have savings. But until the work gets done, we have 2 industrial fans and a dehumidifier blocking our front hall and drowning out the tv. Poor husband has to listen to it all day, I just have to deal with it at night.

Peas look to be spent. The last few were starting to get tough, so I think I'll let the ones left dry for shelling and seeds. Radishes are about 5ft, but the butterflies love the blooms so I've let them grow. Besides, they're pretty. Couple of tomato plants have fruit, a couple peppers, and the daylilies are almost ready to bloom. Other than that, nothing to report in my little area.

I need someone to go over the procedure of curing the potatoes with me. Family will be here at the end of the month, and want to try them.

The turnips planted last fall have about 4 or 5 foot seed stalks on them and the very small pea shaped pods have dried, giving food for the small birds. The last bed of Red Ripper peas have come up and the deer are checking them out.

I am very unhappy with the fescue I planted a couple of years ago, it seems too aggressive. I cant see much good from it for wildlife.

I am concerned about my sweet potatoes. I grew Covington sweet potatoes last year and really liked them, and planed on growing them again this year, but because of running behind on everything, I failed to get any slips started. I had a few plants that I overwintered in a spare bedroom and was able to get a few slips from them. The rest of my two rows were just planted using small fingerling sweet potatoes. They are just now coming up and are looking good, but I am afraid that they may produce a lot of vines and few potatoes. I have never tried anything like this before and dont know what to expect.

I did however get my two rows of okra cleaned out before it started raining again, so the day was not a total loss.

Rebecca, Irish potatoes are easy to cure after harvest--much simpler than sweet potatoes that need specific temperatures and relative humidity.

First, you dig them. Just brush off excess soil with your hands and do not wash---washing them tends to make them rot more quickly. If any have cuts or nicks from being harvested, pull those out and use them ASAP.

Then, spread the rest of the potatoes out to dry and cure on a flat surface in a cool, dim room that, preferably, has no sunlight coming in the windows. You can cover them with a blanket or towel to block all the light if you need to. The reason for this is that any exposure to sunlight can cause them to turn green and develop solanine, rendering them unsafe to eat.

After 7-10 days, you can move them to storage. Storing Irish potatoes in the summer in our climate is tricky. Ideal storage would be around 45 degrees. Sadly, we have nowhere in our homes in summer that would register a cool 45 degrees. I usually just store them in the back area of the walk-in pantry, which is as far away from the pantry door as possible. It certainly is just normal room temperature, but that's the best I can do. I sort them into flat boxes for storage by type, because some varieties go bad more quickly than others so I want them stored separately from one another. You scrub them clean right before you prepare them for eating.....I grew up with a dad and grandfather who stored theirs with the soil still clinging to them, so I am used to that and it doesn't bother me.

Larry, So none of the wild things eat fescue? That is too bad. I bet they're enjoying everything else that you plant for them.

I cannot believe you got rain again!

I'm still waiting for rain. Many parts of southcentral OK had very heavy rainfall and flash flooding today, but our area was not among them. Our son's town about 20-22 miles north of us got well over 3" this afternoon. It was dry as a bone here. I'm watching some storms on radar now, just moving in from TX to western OK, and hoping they hold together long enough to give us some rain tonight.

Jen, We're getting a new roof because of storm damage, but insurance pro-rated it and is only paying part of it because our roof is 20 years old. We'll be paying the rest. We are on our roofer's schedule and he'll get to us eventually (he has ordered the shingles) but he has a lot of jobs lined up ahead of ours. He is a great roofer and is worth waiting for, but I probably wouldn't be calm and patient about waiting if we had a leak. All we have is battered shingles.

Nancy, I have done my best to avoid creating more garden space than I can care for. The back garden is difficult though. I always start with the front garden and run out of time, patience and/or good weather before I can get to the back garden. Next year I should plant it first. It is just a more difficult space because it doesn't have raised beds, and it has all those voles. In the years I get it planted, things do well, but if the weather gets too hot, the voles start eating the roots of everything. If I were to give up some part of gardening, it would be that back garden since I only use it about half the time anyway. I always did all the mowing plus all the gardening until about 10 years ago. I finally told Tim that I couldn't keep up with both, so he took over the mowing. It just chews up a huge chunk of his weekend to get it all done though.

One thing that has reined me in is that the deer eat anything not protected by a good sturdy fence, so around the house I only have trees, shrubs, vines and groundcovers. I'd love to have flower beds close to the house overflowing with flowers, but they'd just be Deer Chow, and I'm not going to attempt it without a fenced yard. I tried having flowers close to the house in our early years here, and more or less got away with it most of the time...until the weather got hot and dry, which happens pretty much every summer. Then, all bets were off, and the deer were snacking on flowers nightly. I'm just not going to do that again.

I worked in the garden today when the weather allowed, but we sure were hot and humid and I'm not crazy about slaving away in hot, humid weather. I used to stay out there no matter what, but several rounds of heat exhaustion (while at wild fires) in 2011 destroyed my body's ability to tolerate heat, so now at the first sign that I'm getting too hot, I immediately come indoors. I harvested onions, weeded, deadheaded flowers, tucked more flowers into every available square inch, etc. I have a long way to go, but I am getting all the weeds out, one raised bed and one pathway at a time. All our swallowtail cats disappeared, with the last one leaving this morning. So, somewhere in there, each has formed its chrysalis so it can emerge in a few weeks as a butterfly. They are kinda slow compared to some other butterflies. I hope my fennel and dill have time to recover and regrow before the next round of swallowtail cats show up---some of the smaller dill plants were eaten down to the ground, but there's plenty of others coming along. I still am finding army worms and killing them as I find them. Today I was finding tiny ones about a half-inch long. I'd rather find them small before they start devouring plant foliage.

There's a billion tiny grasshopper nymphs hatching out everywhere and they are devouring everything in sight. They are a couple of months late, but they are here. Normally, a wet winter really knocks back their population a lot, probably by damaging the eggs in the soil, but it doesn't seem to have done that this year. So, in a normal year, if I was seeing this many grasshopper nymphs, I'd order Semaspore or Nolo Bait, put it out and see much fewer grasshoppers after that. This year, though, there is no Nolo Bait and no Semaspore. Since both products contain the protozoa Nosema locuste, which is heat-sensitive and has a very limited shelf life, I assume they must be produced under very exacting conditions, and this year no one is producing them. The Nolo Bait production facility burned down a couple of years ago. The company is in a new facility now, but it had to have some retrofitting and renovations done, so they couldn't get production ramped up in time for this spring. Meanwhile, the guy who owns Semaspore (and also Planet Natural) decided to retire and sell both companies, which appear to still be on the market and not sold to anyone else yet. I was hoping he'd keep manufacturing Semaspore, but that didn't happen either. So, our best (and pretty much only) organic grasshopper control products aren't even available this year. I'm hoping this isn't going to be a disaster of a grasshopper year.

Dawn

Oh my gosh I am so tired but can't sleep yet. The cats misbehaved and got me up at 2:30 last night. I stayed up til 4, then back to bed until 7. BRATS. Well, actually only one cat--Jerry--who was pestering Tiny. I got up the third time, and tossed Jerry out on his ear. (Well, not literally.) GDW and I were highly productive today. First, we weeded the raised veggie beds--with both of us, that only took an hour. Not many weeds in those raised beds. Then he ran the weed whipper/eater for far too long. I weeded, and weeded and weeded some more. By gosh I have the upper hand, as long as I keep it up. I'm not winning, but have the upper hand. My thought all along has been to get the weeding done and then to quick put in mulch. Well, that's a losing proposition. From here on out, I'll get an area cleared and promptly run and grab moldy alfalfa hay and get it slapped down. Then when I get everything done like that can bring in broken down and moldy wood chips. I am loving the breaking-down wood chips and moldy hay. Good stuff.

I do kinda love weeding in an odd sort of way. It leaves the mind free to observe, first, and to notice up close various things going on in the beds. I also love it because one's mind can roam most anywhere while doing it. One becomes acquainted with all the bugs out there, the good, the bad, the ugly.

And can quickly spot problems--like the blasted oleander aphids on the milkweed. I noticed them 2 weeks ago and believe I've found a solution of sorts. I despise them. So this year, I took a gallon container of soapy water out there, and cut off the stems that had the aphids. I discovered them very early, so only about 3-6 inches of each stem was affected. I cut it off ane stuck it in the pitcher. Then when I was done, drained it and put the stems into a plastic bag and tied it and threw it in the garbage. So there, aphids. And to my delight now, the stems all branched mightily and are so far aphid free. What do you think, Dawn? Do you think perhaps I got them before any monarchs may have appeared? I DID see 3-4 small Monarchs in the past couple weeks.

Some of you are on FB, and may have seen my ID question--turns out it was passiflora. By the way, PlantSnap didn't recognize it, but PictureThis listed it as one of the possibilities. Confirmed by OK FB. I was flabbergasted yesterday when I went out to check my pending rock garden and here was this vine springing up EVERYWHERE in a app. 15-20x15-20 foot area. I was initially horrified, until I realized it wasn't poison ivy, poison oak or poison sumac. So friends on FB OK gardening confirmed it WAS passiflora, which I understand is a mixed blessing. But I'm up for it. They ARE beautiful flowers. And I SAW with my own eyes that they are aggressive and invasive. I had Garry weed out all but one largish healthy one. When he runs the weed eater/whipper, he always digs in kinda deep around the beds, which keeps the weeds at bay for a good long while.

I shared this other story somewhere, but don't know if it was here. Couple-three weeks ago, I was horrified to see an explosion of beautiful little lacy carrot-looking plants had sprung up in an area about 2x4 feet in on of the raised beds. And EXPLOSION! I had no idea! They're really very pretty. So again in my experimentation, I tried PlantSnap and PictureThis. I got Queen Anne's lace or hemlock or ragweed. I know what adult ragweed looks like, certainly was not like these pretty little things were. I kinda know what Queen Anne's lace looks like, so looked up hemlock. Yeah, MAYBE, . . . and we ALL know hemlock's poisonous. So I read up on it. The first credible-looking site I checked said "DANGER!" Or words to that effect. All parts are poisonous. Do not EAT. DO NOT touch. Well I had just ripped out about half of the plants. With bare hands. I freaked a little, thinking, "REALLY?! THIS is what is going to kill me? Gardening?" And I thought the fingers on my right hand were tingling a bit. (They were. The two middle fingers that I had amputations on ALWAYS tingle a bit.) But I continued my research on hemlock, and spotted a You Tube by an herbologist. He and his wife were out and spotted this plant, which they recognized as a hemlock. It was about 6 feet tall. So they stopped and jumped out He was over by the plant and explaining how it was different than Queen Anne's Lace, and he bent it over, then broke the stem off, and then pulled it up close to his nose so he could smell it, and then I laughed, realizing I'd probably live. I'm still not sure what this plant is. . . it could be either hemlock or Queen Anne's Lace. It is DEFINITELY a member of the carrot family--it smells like a carrot. I tore out all but 2 plants of it. I want to see what it is. Maybe one of you can tell me.

I messed up, pretty sure. I staked my tomatoes up WAY late, and so I pruned off all the lower branches that were touching the ground. Well, the plants are healthy (all except for the two that had white flies on), but no tomatoes. Well, not true. . . but only like six plants out of 14 have tomatoes. And two don't even have blooms. I am thinking it's because of my hard pruning, first, and perhaps, second, I pruned them wrong. Nothing to be done about it now, will watch and wait and learn.

We had to go to Lowe's today and Garry had a list of about 5 things HE needed, tool-wise. That created a situation, because I had a couple bucks extra in my account. . . my $90 on plants is HIS fault and I scolded him for it! Let's see. . . a black elephant ear (I bought a bulb and planted it a couple months ago but nothing has happened yet. Flame-like celosia (more of em--I planted a few); some wonderfully bright orangish red zinnias; a couple unique aquilegia; some hens and chicks, purple fountain grass, and more okra and peppers for school. Wow! Kinda negates the reason I grow seedlings on the grow cart. Oh well.

Dawn, I didn't have the foresight to make beds for only what I can take care of. But will just try to trust that God will have an answer. And so far, I'm taking care. I will not worry but only be joyful in this marvelous gardening world. Right? And hold on to it as long as we're able.

Larry's ugly cracked me up, so I'm posting uglier parts of my yard on FB. Blessings to you all.

4.25” of rain in a little under 4 hours.

Getting home from work was a nightmare. Haven’t gotten out to check the garden yet.

I checked my garden this morning. I have not lost a single weed, but I did loose two rows of sweet potatoes. The woods and pastures look like a jungle, but the deer have to come and eat my sweet potatoes. I will string a hot wire on three sides of the south garden. ( I will let the tomato trellis serve as the north fence, leaving a gap large enough for me to walk through) I will try to put a SPARK in the deer's life, and try to run them back across the highway so the can eat in their own garden. ( but they have no sweet potatoes over there)

My tomatoes are so diseased the will produce very little, but so far the peppers look pretty good. The okra, beans, and peas are still alive but nothing to brag about.

Hello Everyone. I've tried to keep up, but have had a couple of events that have left me very busy and home very late at night. In fact, I looked at my garden and it is different since Tuesday night.

I am very disappointed in my tomatoes. They are slowly making (very little) fruit and the blossoms are not plentiful at all. Except the SunGold (which is why I will always grow it). But even the SunGold aren't becoming gold. The Juliet from Dawn is the only tomato producing normally. Last year was a bad tomato year and I don't want another one of those!

The green beans are climbing and that is satisfying. The okra and cucumbers are growing. The southern peas have sprouted. The Seminole have not. The watermelon have not.

Peppers are looking good.

Flowers are looking good. Do Zinnias make a new flower on top of an old one? That seems to be happening on a couple of my Zinnias.

I got in late last night and went out to close up my chickens. On the way back to the house, I noticed a very fine and handsome toad sitting on the patio. So...about an hour later, I took the dogs out for their final walk (pee) and noticed a blood spot and the poor toad's head siting on the back step. Gross and sad! Josi had been whining the entire night. Creepy. What in the world came up on our back step and murdered the toad?

Also, Finbar came in limping earlier (before I got home according to Tom and Ethan). Maybe the mean cat?

Going to Colorado next week. In a way, I look forward to being finished with that trip so I can focus on my new normal.

Ethan got a job at Sprouts and has started a summer class. My daughter is completely her own person...and I got to witness that last night. It's all good. That's what we want for our children. BUT, parenting my kids is the most important job of my life and it's over. Nearly..Ethan still needs me. And I'm trying hard to not make him a "live in my Mom's basement at age 40", but I would probably be okay with that. LOL. Not really, but...they are our sweet babies and then they're not.

Chickens. Two broodies. I'm leaving Tom instructions to pull them off the nests every day. and collect ALL egg every day until I get back. Then I'll let them sit on eggs. With Peggy's death and the broodies, my egg production is down. I have people who want to buy my eggs--get texts every day asking for eggs. It's sorta stressful because I can't accommodate everyone. I have people who want 3 dozen a week. This morning, I delayed going to work because I was waiting for the hens to lay enough to offer a dozen and half to one lady. THEN, of all things, I broke one while cleaning them. So, I had to take her 17. LOL.

K, I'm rambling now.

:)

HJ, don’t worry, we always need our moms.

I replaced my seed box this week, and cleaned it out.

Jennifer, yes, the kids will always need and love their Mom.

Feel free to ramble, any ole time. I like your ramblings.

Oh my gosh, that darned JERRY. Got me up at 3 again tonight Danged cat Tom=good; Tiny=good. Oh what a great day out in the yard. It was weeding/rearranging day. I had moved lantana to a back bed. . . well realized the bed I put it/them in (I divided it into two shrubs when first moved them to it; but saw there wasn't enough sun so was going to move them to more sun) but when I dug under one, found a pond of water down 1 1/2 feet. Yikes--that's not good. SO. Moved that guy over to the shop bed. It will love being there and so will the Bermuda grass. I just got through tearing out a patch of iris and over half of the big sage clump there, because I don't want perennials in that bed. Now I got one more (possibly MONSTER) perennial there.

Larry, I haven't lost a single weed either, or Bermuda. Cept for my own pulling and digging. And likewise, having some tomato challenges. I was feeling defeated with the tomatoes, since I can't find ANY on 3 plants. I know it's my fault for the hard pruning. BUT I thought to kinda count the tomatoes and have 25-30 at present, so it'll work out.

One of my dear friends confessed to me last week that she didn't like tomatoes. WHAT?? Well. Actually I don't either, unless they are fresh from the garden. I asked her if she didn't like BLTs? She said she'd take the tomato off. My thinking is that she's never had a good tomato. So I challenged her and she took me up on it. I will fix her a BLT with a Cherokee purple slice on it. Wish me luck.

My potatoes are nowhere NEAR read to dig up, but I had to peek, so pulled one up. It had 8 beautiful potatoes! Six were smallish but still beautiful. Two were medium sized. Kennebec, and they were gorgeous. . . thin-skinned and smooth.

Where in CO, HJ? Have a good trip.

Aha! Japanese beetles showing up on the 4 o'clocks. I was totally creeped out, as I always am by bugs. BUT. I grabbed the nearest spray killer, Insecticidal soap and sprayed em, and then tore the leaf off and stomped em. I didn't have gloves on so couldn't pinch em off. You gotta be proud of me, though my method was primitive. I was so proud of myself.

All the lettuces are now history. They all turned bitter. Was a good run while it lasted. Peppers are taking off now. Yay!

I so appreciated your questions about potato-curing, Rebecca. . . and so appreciated your answer, Dawn! Thank you!

I'm going to have some fine onions and garlic this year. I am just now coming to the end of my garlic from last year. Perfect! You all know that garlic is very good for you, right??

Get this: I only have three out of 14 beds that aren't weed free at the moment. BUT. Need to get mulch on those immediately!

Question for you all. I know I've seen this before in conversations. Potato has "tomatoes" on it. WHAT?

Nancy, Having cats is about like having small children at times, isn't it?

I imagine you blasted all the aphids off before monarchs really have begun much egg laying up there. They're laying eggs down here, but we're always a bit ahead of those of you further north.

With QAL and hemlock, the purple streaks on the stem usually are a very obvious indicator. If you look at your plants, you can check the main stalks for very tiny, fine hairs. QAL has those very tiny fine hairs running up and down the stalk, and hemlock's stalks are smooth. My favorite way to tell them apart is that the seed heads of QAL will curl up into a bird nest type shape as the seeds dry. So, if in doubt about any plants that might be QAL or hemlock, just watch the seedheads. We have QAL, but I keep it pulled out of the garden and adjacent areas. I don't mind it elsewhere, just nowhere near where I'm growing anything on purpose because of its invasiveness. This year we have a lot of hedge parsley, especially in the neighbor's pasture due south of us. We've cut it down on our property so it cannot reseed here, but their seeds will wash downhill to us. I don't mind it---it is a host plant for the swallowtails, but at the same time, I don't want it invading my garden and taking over. I'm guessing all the moisture we've had since last Sept. has made every seed that was in the ground germinate and grow.

When we moved here we were in our early 40s and this was intended to be our forever home, so I've always had that in mind as I garden---not wanting to create more than we can maintain as we age. Our nearly constant recurring droughts help me a lot in that regard because I cannot create more growing beds than we can irrigate throughout the summer months, and that reins me in more than anything else. We were in the second consecutive year of awful drought and a huge grasshopper infestation when we moved here in 1999, so that helped too---you cannot go crazy creating beds and planting when the ground is rock hard and the grasshoppers are eating every plant in sight down to the ground. You could say that Mother Nature reins me in from going overboard with plantings.

Rebecca, That's a lot of rain. We have had less than half than much over the last two weeks. I hope your plants are okay.

Larry, It is a hard garden year and the deer are not helping. They keep coming to my garden in broad daylight trying to chase me out of it so they can come in, and they just stand and stare at me like "who do you think you are?" I try to remember to close the garden gate behind me when I go in there so they cannot follow me into the garden. I don't know what their problem is---there's tons of natural food or them. I am pretty sure they want my okra plants, and I don't intend to share them.

Jennifer, Sometimes zinnias just do that. I am sure it is some sort of genetic defect or mutation. I don't see it often---just a couple of times ever 4 or 5 years. Echinaceas do it too.

What would eat a toad's body? Snakes of many different kinds, hawks or raccoons for sure. Probably other things too.

Don't worry. Your kids always will need you, just in a different way. I enjoy the company of our adult son (and nieces and nephews) so much now---it is awesome to see them continue to grow and develop as adults. Then, someday, they'll likely become parents and you and Tom will become grandparents, and that is its own kind of awesome.

If the demand for your eggs is higher than your supply, maybe you can refer some of those folks to the Conscious Community Co-op. There's almost always pastured eggs available there.

Nancy, It sounds like your water table is coming up pretty high underneath your plants. Hopefully with less rain falling, that water level will begin to fall.

I cannot complain about our tomato plants at all. We are reaching the I-cannot-bear-to-eat-another-tomato stage because we've been overdosing on them for 5 weeks now. A lot of my plants look sickly with foliar diseases (not unexpected because I've grown tomatoes in the same soil for 20 years, and they were supposed to be in the back garden this year.....), but they're still producing like crazy. I give the early planting all the credit for this, because I don't think my plants are setting any new fruit now and I don't think anything but the cherry and paste types have set new fruit in the last 2 or 3 weeks. I think the high humidity might be holding them back, because we've only barely been into the 90s at all, and certainly not enough to (theoretically) impede fruit set. I don't even care. Since we've been gorging on all the tomatoes we can eat, if I walked out to the garden tomorrow and all my plants mysteriously had died, I think I'd shrug it off, pull them out and replace them with zinnias and cosmos. Why not? I have 8 beautiful and healthy tomato plants in large containers near the garage that are producing very well if you don't count the minor herbicide drift damage from the neighbor's fence line herbicide spraying. I could be happy with nothing but the fruit from those 8 plants. I'm at the grumpy tomato stage where harvesting them, washing them, sorting them and processing the extras by freezing, drying or canning is annoying me. Life really is a lot easier if you don't grow too many tomatoes. I clearly grow too many, and that is nobody's fault but my own. Every year at this time I swear that I will take off next year from growing tomatoes, but of course, I don't do it. I do wish I had the self-discipline to only plant 6 or 8 tomato plants.

My garden is not nearly as weed-free as yours, but I am making good progress. I still have three or four raised beds to weed, and several pathways. I think I have a good chance of getting all that done on Mon-Tues as this is a grandchild weekend and I'm not stepping foot in the garden at all.

The tomato-like fruit on the potatoes is the potato fruit (remember, the part we eat is the tuber) which is not edible but contains seeds you can allow to mature on the plant and then sow if you want to try growing potatoes. Some people refer to them as seed balls to make it clear that they are not edible fruit. Google True Potato Seed if you want to read about growing potatoes that way. I did it one year just for fun to see if it could be done (it can!). You won't always get the potato fruit---just like your potatoes do not/will not always flower. I only get potato flowers/fruit in years when the nights stay cool for a prolonged period and those cool nights have to coincide with the potatoes being at about the right stage to flower.

I don't have a lot to add about our garden. Although the tomatoes look sickly, I could nip that in the bud if I was willing to spray them with a fungicide, and I don't think I am. Y'all know I hate to spray anything at all on my plants ever. I think I'll just harvest the fruit and yank out the plants one by one whenever I get tired of looking at them. At least the heavy rainfall stopped here a couple of weeks ago, so the tomatoes taste much better now because excessive rainfall is not watering down their flavor. All the beans and tomatoes have spider mites, though not at huge levels yet. Either the predatory mites and lady bugs and other beneficial insects will take care of the spider mites, or they won't. If they do, great, and if they don't, I'll yank out heavily infested plants after the beans are done producing. It is rare for the spider mites to kill tomato plants as the predatory mites usually catch up, population-wise, by July and start knocking back the spider mite population, at which time the tomato plants put on a surge of new growth and rebound. I am concerned about the plethora of grasshopper nymphs I'm seeing and the fact that they are chewing holes in every single leaf on every single plant in my garden. The issue, really, is that our two organic grasshopper bait type control products---Nolo Bait and Semaspore are not available this year, so that is a big problem. I have a bottle of beauveria bassiana and I could use it to control the grasshoppers, but I worry about the effect it would have on other insects inside the garden. I think I'll just try to wait out the grasshopper damage. Or, if I start feeling really desperate about the grasshopper situation, I could spray the beauveria bassiana in a wide band around the outside of the garden fence and hope it kills the grasshoppers as they make their way to the garden. That might be a reasonable compromise. I really don't want to use it inside the garden because it can harm some beneficial insects (not all, but I don't want to sacrifice any of them).

Earlier this week I noticed the caterpillar of the Variegated Frittilary Butterfly on my pansy plants. I was getting ready to yank out the pansies and replace them with Profusion zinnias, but now I'll leave the pansies until the Frit caterpillars are done with them.

Lillie has been here for a couple of days and nights now and we're about to take her home to spend the rest of the weekend with her family. We tie-dyed 12 t-shirts and 2 pairs of shorts (half for herself, and half for her little sister) so my hands might be looking a little blue, purple and green (and pink, orange and red). lol. I've scrubbed them pretty hard and think most of the dye is gone now. I did wear gloves while tying and dying, but not when I was taking the rubber bands off the t-shirts to rinse them before running them through the washing machine. That is what gets me every time. Now that I've washed the t-shirts and shorts twice in the washing machine with those SHOUT dye-catcher things in there with them, I think they won't fade in a normal laundering, but I'll send the rest of the box of dye-catchers home with her today so they can protect the next few loads of laundry they wash. That worked out well for all of us last year, and now that we have tie-dyed t-shirts for 2 consecutive summers, Lillie has declared it to be "our family tradition". I'm okay with that.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend. It is 88 degrees here and starting to feel a little bit toasty.

Dawn

Dawn, it's funny that I'm jealous of your tomatoes and you're "over" them. Haha! For the LOVE! I can't get mine to produce. There are small fruit on some of them. I was excited to see a single fruit on the Cherokee Purple and Super Sonic. My plants don't look awful, but don't look great either. White flies are the problem. That, and Neem oil. I know that Neem works well for Everyone but me. It burns my plants. Even if I use it at night. So now, all the plants that had white fly problems and were sprayed with Neem, are now burned on the areas where I put the Neem. AND they are probably using their energy to heal themselves other than make fruit. AND the ones that I didn't spray, have white flies. AND I'm pretty sure white flies mess with the blooms because they are drying up. We moved here a little over 5 years ago and this is my 6th summer. The first two years with tomatoes=nothing. The next two years=great crops. Last year, not so great and I don't want a repeat of last year.

Nancy, we are staying Canon City, but will travel around. I'm the driver, so this should be interesting as I have no sense of direction. Congrats on your garlic and onions! Those are staples at our house.

Went to the OKC OSU Farmer's Market today and got some meat and a few other things. First time going there. They have only MIO stuff. The Norman market allows other states to sell.

Did some weeding. The asparagus beds will be a lawn again if I don't get with it.

Good things: the beans are blooming! SO happy about this.

Okra and cucumbers still look good. The Seminole and southern peas are all sprouted. I will have an onion harvest, just not as wonderful as the past couple of years. AND, after handpicking the worms off the cabbages, it looks like I'll have an okay harvest of those too! Jalapenos look good. The sweet peppers look much better.

Bad things: I have a couple of volunteer squash/zucchini plants. DUMB SVB buzzing around and those are so hard to catch and kill. Also, momma and daddy squash bug hiding under the stalk. I pulled them out and squished them. I've been ridiculed here at this forum for saying this: but I still feel bad about killing them. I feel remorse even though I hate them. I can't explain it. They're just trying to do what they were made to do. But, WHY were they made to do that? I found their eggs on two leaves and scraped them off. However, with the SVB around, the plants' days are numbered anyway.

I visited one of my egg customer's (and friend) garden yesterday. (the one who got the 17 eggs.) Her onions are in a raised bed and look great. Her garden looks really nice. Except I saw a SVB there too and tried to kill it, but couldn't catch it.

About the eggs, Dawn, most of the people who buy my eggs wouldn't travel to Conscious Community Co-op very often because they live on the south side of the metro. (I want to go there, though! Next time I'm in Edmond...) There's eggs to buy around here, though. The thing is, they want my eggs...for a variety of reasons. They know the hens are loved. Some have "met" my chickens OR they see pictures of them and know their names and hear stories about them. My eggs are very fresh...they are sold as soon as they are laid. And, some of them just want to support me.

Okay...there will be a new thread tomorrow, but I posted here and now because who knows what tomorrow will bring.

:)

I am a rock star. Had a blast today squishing only 8 Japanese beetles. Had my gloves on. Yay for Nancy!

I suspect your beds are a lot bigger than mine are, Dawn. I pulled the potato fruit. Bummed now. Maybe I'll find one on another potato. Funny--you're about done with tomatoes and we haven't started yet. I spent the day weeding.

The little granddaughter of our neighbors has been visiting this past week, so she and her Grandpa came to visit yesterday morning so she could see Tiny. Then she came back in the afternoon by herself, and she came again today and then this evening. It appears now I have a new friend! she's a cutie pie! And we have come to a compromise. She was not happy when she learned her kitty was stolen by us. it was HER Kitty!! But over there he was to be an outdoor kitty. Apparently he didn't cotton to that idea so came trotting over to our place. And now she has framed it perfectly. HER kitty lives at Nancy's place.

Isn't that perfect? She is the cutest little person. I am so blessed that now she is one of my treasured little friends.