Posted on 07/29/2016 2:22:50 PM PDT by greeneyes
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Sounds like a pretty good year for you so far.
That’s a beautiful picture. Thanks for sharing it.
You’ve got a raccoon most likely.
Next year you’ll have to build ‘fort corn’ to get anything. Fort corn will likely involve that thar electrical stuff.
Ask me how I know this. :)
The gravel at the end of our driveway looks like part of the yard. LOL We hope to pour some concrete there some day, but not a high priority.
Well, we think that it is a raccoon. We caught one a few years back, but one got away-must have been big-tore up the trap. Hubby may not plant any corn from now on, unless he traps the raccoon-at least that is what he said.
We have japanese knotweed there and around a section of our chainlink fence in the back. I’m guessing that it’s 7-8 feet tall. I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to eradicate it. It’s pretty, but very invasive.
Yes, invasive species are often hard to get rid of.
Well, hubby doesn’t ‘trap’ things that eat human food.
Busy, BUSY day in the garden!
Picked:
Zukes
Cukes
Tomatoes
Peppers
Misc. Herbs
The LAST of the Broccoli
Green Beans (Pole and Bush, Green, Yellow, Purple)
First batch of Fridge Pickles tomorrow...
Cleaned out two beds to make way for fall planting. The soil in those beds SUCKS, so I’ll be adding compost and peat and composted manure. Mid-August plantings will be:
Beets, Carrots, Lettuces, Spinach and Radishes.
Today was the FIRST day in a long string of days when you could even STAND to be outside for more than a few minutes at a time! It’s been an annoyingly HOT & HUMID growing season, but we’ve had more than enough rain, so it’s not ALL bad. The lawn is growing like crazy, which is annoying as hell, but when I close on my house sale on 8/12 I will be buying myself a few ‘luxuries’ as I head forward:
A really, REALLY good riding mower and little Mantis-type tiller so I can easily till and add amendments to the raised beds. I already bought myself a new coffee table. How lucky am I that a coffee table was the ONLY thing lacking in my life? LOL!
On a more personal note, Beau RETIRED yesterday - so he’s already off to our cabin, ‘Up Nort’ to chase around da bears (can’t shoot ‘em until September, but he’s training dogs AND clients this upcoming month) and we just had a batch of new pedigreed puppies; Treeing Walker Coon Hounds, and they are just more adorable than you can imagine! Seven. Two males and five females. All are perfectly PERFECT...which doesn’t always happen!
Life Is Good! :)
Lovely! My SIL and I call shots like that, ‘Garden Porn,’ LOL!
That’s funny! It surely does give me a “thrill” every time I look at it :-)
What is really hard to understand is that the russets were certified seed potatoes; the German’s were saved from last season’s crop.
I prepped the ground, putting on amendments east-west, and tilled them in north to south, and ran the rows north to south, so any soil borne problems should have shown up in a band across the rows, not down them. I just have to chalk it up to bad stock, certified or not.
Next year, I don’t care what, I WILL find the Russet Burbanks I wanted, which have done well for me in the past. Couldn’t get any this year locally, and by then it was too late to mail order. I didn’t save any Burbanks because I could buy them locally.
And, yes, other stuff is doing well, for the most part.
Impressive!
Canning food is awesome; once you get over the fear of things blowing up in your face, it’s all downhill from there, LOL!
I didn’t know squirrels like lemons. I know about them liking tomatoes and have had success detering them by spreading dried blood around the plants.
Jalapenos were great this year. We've had two big rations of stuffed poppers.
We had a major feed of meatless burgers with poblanos, big mushrooms, Odobo sauce and avocado slices. I'll post the recipe if anyone is interested.
Blowing things up & poisoning someone .... yup, those are the fears! I’m starting with high acid foods so that should be pretty safe. I’m hearing from my mom/aunt (in their 80’s) that my grandmother, who canned for 30-40 years, had problems with corn .... my uncle would be sent to the cellar to grab a jar of something & he’d report that another jar of corn had exploded & made a mess. Occasionally, I think there was a similar problem with green beans. She just used water bath canning, no pressure cooker so no wonder some of the low/no acid veggies went bad. I’m also hearing from my mom that Granny used a big roasting pan on the stove - the jars were never totally covered with water, either to sterilize initially or after the tomatoes, corn, green beans, beets or whatever was in the jars. My dad’s mother canned sausage .... they had actual metal cans that somehow they sealed. Granddad killed hogs & made his own sausage & Granny would can some of it (cured in the smokehouse first, I think). The cans were processed in a big kettle outside over a fire (again, no pressure cooker). Pretty amazing to hear the tales from the past ... far as I know, nobody got sick and/or died from bad canned goods.
It rained again at my house last night. All night long.
Good thing I picked tomatoes yesterday.
OK, experiment that may have gone awry.
Taking seeds out of a tomato, including some of the juice and bits and planted. This is the huge batch of plants I had.
Somebody warned on YouTube it would create diseased plants. Well, there was basically no cost except a small amount of time so let’s go.
OK, there’s 3 dozen of these things - growing like weeds. BUT the leaves on all of them (most of the leaves) are showing patches of yellow, with brown spots and even holes.
Obviously something is wrong. I can reuse the dirt if I have to pitch them. Just transplanted to better soil. Still have some bone meal. But I have others planted likewise (starter seeds).
Pitch? Or is there any hope?
BTW, can you double-check that I’m on the ping list? Thanks.
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