Zukes and squashes are producing a lot. Everything else is way behind. Still haven't had a single ripe tomato or even a blush color. Only a few green ones so far.
Even the wild berries haven't produced much. The lemon tree has put on a lot of new leaves, and we have 4 lemons left that the squirrels didn't get yet.
Prayers up for all. Hope you have a great weekend. God Bless.
Pinging the list.
been a while here for me, just checking for a stray bamboo nut here, if he/she would own up to it...no reader comments yet...check back l8r...
best
Dick G
aka: Gunny G
******
Made our first batch of pickles last week - honey Pilsner bread & butter. Tomorrow, it’s dill pickle spears. Got my first beefsteak tomato - a 1/2 lb. and a little yellow indigo.
Got white mold on the ground in the new beds. Problem? Read where it’s OK in moderation. Lots of rain.
I’m ready to give up on zucchini and squash - lots of flowers, but no fruit.
Our tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, basil and lettuce are doing well. I’ll try to get some pics in the next few days. It’s been in the 85 to 95 degree range lately, and 60-70 at night. We’re had 3 female turkeys, one male and 13 “babies” in our yard just about every day. Our feral kittens have disappeared, and our whistlepigs have gone to their hot weather homes.
We had a few hours of light rain this morning, thank goodness. We’re in a drought, so we welcomed it.
Thanks for this thread, greeneyes!
My garden is basically done for the summer in North Fort Worth. I started seeds in January and planted everything in March. Bumper crop of tomatoes and made 5 large stock pots of sauce. Froze in small Tupperware containers then transferred to vacuum sealed bags. Should last a year. Vacuumed sealed 20 quart bags of wax beans and even more green beans. Did the same with corn. Broccoli didn’t yield much so nothing to freeze. Lettuce and spinach lasted till about May. Only thing left are peppers, carrots, and onions. Already thinking about next year.
Same conditions in southern MA!
Four tomato plants, TWO little tomatoes. Argh!
Squirrels aren’t our problem we have rabbits. They ate the still tiny and green berries off a newly planted black raspberry bush as well as some lower branches ( with all the thorns that couldn’t have been a pleasant experience.) We were smart enough to put up a fence to keep them away from our pumpkins, carrots, beans and sunflowers. We got things in the ground late here in South Dakota. It’s been hot and humid with a lot of sun so things are growing well. We are just praying for a late frost!
Blessings All!
- Awesome Zuke production here, also.
- Cukes are all done, but we've already started new ones to try and squeeze another season out of them.
- Jalepeno's are just about ready to come off, but the Bells are still weeks away.
- Tomatoes are big, but not yet red - maybe next week.
- Too hot for lettuce and spinach right now - they seem to just come up and bolt!
And that's our Central Konnecticut report. Have a great weekend, y'all.
We got 3.5 inches of rain this week which has revived the garden in a big way (yay!) and the grass is growing again (booooo!).
The tomatoes are really coming in and I think I have enough for either a tomato pie or a batch of salsa, maybe both. I think I’ll do the salsa first. I did have to stake up all my tomato cages Wednesday after a major T-storm (some areas lost power & had trees down) Tuesday night. Two of the new cylindrical ones blew over because the tomato plants were so big, they offered a lot of wind resistance & the ground was so soft from the rain, that the tent stakes pulled up. Next year, I’ll put in a nice tall stake when I first put the cages up & then I won’t have to worry about them.
Today, I spent a good part of the day making a pan of Moussaka - used up all the Black Beauties on my one plant. I also used venison burger. It was worth all the work (although it might be a while before I do it again) & was delicious. I still have an Ichiban plant that is producing.
Earlier this week, the crows finally got over being shy about the new fencing around my raised beds. I have to admit I laughed and laughed, watching them stalk around between the beds, staring at all the beautiful tomatoes they couldn’t get to. The fencing took a lot of work & it wasn’t cheap, but it is definitely effective. I’ve also been in/out of the garden quite a bit and the fencing isn’t a pain to deal with.
Put up another quart of sour pickles this week -the cukes are “done”, even with the rain so that will be the last pickle batch. The basil needs cutting back again and I don’t think there’s enough for pesto so I’m going to freeze whole leaves .... have a vacuum sealer so that should work well. I’m getting peppers (finally!): Garden Salsa hot peppers, hot banana peppers, jalapenos, Grand Marconi & Big Berthas. I also have one pimiento pepper plant that is producing - first year growing pimientos.
After this year’s successes and failures, I’m already thinking about what I can do next year to plan my garden more efficiently. As plants come out now, I need to start looking at a fall garden - waited too late last year, but this year I’ll have more room to start plants earlier.
Stay cool if you’re in the heat wave & I’m praying for rain for the drought areas since we were blessed to get enough to make a difference this week.
beginning to transition to late summer/early winter crops. problem is it has been so darned HOT the past week that the plants are really suffering and i hope things cool down a bit to let the next crop come on.
btw - wife grew sunflowers with 16 inch diameter heads - huge.
*BUMP* For tomorrow. :)
Harvesting 5 to 10 Amish paste tomatoes every day. BLTs are weekly...
We’ve had massive pepper/mushroom sandwiches and stufffed jalapeños.
This has been a very good year for our raised beds.
We’re finally getting a bit of relief from the furnace here in Central Missouri. It rained again last night. Another half inch or so. Total here since June 26 is close to 13 inches.
All of that water has been really bad for my tomato patch. Almost all of the slicer tomatoes are developing water cracks by the time they’re ready to pick. I went out in the deluge to pick after I got home from the salt mine yesterday, in hopes of salvaging something. I managed to find a couple dozen nice ones that hadn’t blown up. I plucked every tomato that was showing any color at all, and by the time I got home this afternoon there was another half bushel worth starting to turn red. I probably should have picked, but I needed to cut the grass, so that’s what I did. I’m going fishing on the middle part of the Osage River tomorrow, so the picking will wait until Sunday.
I’ve been getting a five gallon bucket full of cucumbers every other day for the last week or so. Between the cukes and tomatoes it looks like I’ll be delivering to the auction twice a week for the rest of the summer.
Good news and bad news in the kitchen garden. Watermelon, cantelope, and butternut squash are thriving with all of the moisture. They are loaded with blossoms and little baby melons. Mrs. Augie’s Russian cucumbers are starting to vine. Green beans are blooming like crazy. It won’t be long before they’re making beans. The pepper plants are absolutely fantastic this year. Best I’ve ever seen them since I made that garden eight years ago. They’re all waist high and loaded with peppers. The sweet corn, on the other hand, is probably doomed. I noticed this morning the first planting has come down with the smut. With all of the rain we’ve had I should have known to hit it with the Dipel dust as soon as it started tassling, but I didn’t. This is the first time out here that I’ve had a problem with the smut and I simply didn’t think to dust it. I think I’ll ask my buddy who runs the taco truck if he wants to add huitlacoche to the menu in a couple weeks. LOL
Lost about 1/3 of my russet potatoes.
Started turning brown from the bottom, up, until completely dead. Trouble began as they started to flower, with plants in the middle of both rows, and spread to neighboring plants in succession.
The ones that are left are puny compared to previous years; German Butterball rows right next to them are normal size & health, compared to previous years.
This evening, I dug the totally dead ones in one row, and got a relatively small number per plant of “new potatoes”, so underground growth was also puny, which I suspected.
Meanwhile, a deer got in, and ate the first, nearly ripe, Roma tomato: coincidentally, I scored a deer tag in the draw this week...
Beans are absolutely loaded with flowers and immature green beans; butterbeans & Great Northerns are full of flowers.
Peas are done, whether they know it or not. ;-’)
Also picked our first 3 cukes tonight, with plenty more coming.
A few days ago, we stripped our bush cherry, and added a few chokecherries to them. last night, I cooked them, then ran them through the Foley food mill, and let them drain in the fridge. The juice is now in a jelly bag, draining overnight, to make syrup. I’m the jellies & jams eater, but we both use syrup, so syrup it is.
Our lone peach is still green, hard as a carp, and still the size of a walnut in the husk. I’m starting to suspect that an almond rootstock was used, and it came back from below the graft.
Barb and Mandy came home from the trailer on Thursday. I had the house cleaned well=enough so that there were no complaints. I have made progress on the triangular-shaped cabinet to the right of the vegetable sink. Have the two, mirrored interior walls installed and the four plate glass shelves on order.
Our zucchini and tomatoes are starting to produce. Zucs of course are going nuts. My crazy Indian squash have set fruit. Potatoes and asparagus need weeding, badly.
We are still having a beard of bees on the left hive every evening. I took the honey super off of it and found a lot of comb/wax on the queen excluder. I scraped it as well as I could, but didn’t have a wire brush to really do the job. I took a full frame from the top brooder box, knocked off the bees and put it in the first honey super, replacing it with a blank frame. This is supposed to encourage the bees up into the honey super. I also put the second honey super on it. The right-hand frame doesn’t have a bearding problem. The bees are starting to draw-out the frames on the second honey super. We will have to watch it and prepare to buy another box and frame for that hive if they get close to filling the second super.
Now that my surgeon has cleared me to do as much as I can, I will get “down and dirty” in the garden.
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! :)
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.