It's been raining all day today and lots during the week. Hubby has not been able to work construction, so he's been busy harvesting during the temporary cessations of rain, and produce has been busy producing like there is not tomorrow.
Hope you are all well. Have a great weekend, and God Bless.
Glad you are getting rain, not so here in SE Texas.
Hi! Heading out for fish Fry.
I put some calcium on it and a little nitrogen, but they don't look any better. Help please!
Pinging the list.
I don’t know how I managed to get Brietbart in there, and I don’t know if it’s possible to take it out. Please feel free to ignore it.LOL
We need rain, and it's been hot. We saw 109F one day this week. Supposed to be a chance of rain over the weekend, and we need it. Badly.
/johnny
Pretty good year in SE Wisconsin. My Contender green bush beans barely survived getting chewed on by little white flying things. The Roma style flat green beans were not affected at all. All the other veggies are doing well.
This is a new one for us. :)
It's sitting on our kitchen counter at the moment, but I think my husband may be cooking it tonight.
Everything is doing well here in Western Washington state - corn and tomatoes ripening and we are buried in green beans.
FYI It is August 9. My brain transposed what I was thinking between the brain and fingers.LOL
I got a peach! One whole peach. But I am happy to have deprived the woodland wildlife of that, let me tell you. It was a wonderful peach, fragrant, juicy, sweet.
The tree had been LOADED this year, second year of producing really. I was unable to save any fruit last year, so this year I experimented with using tulle as netting, and clothespins to hold it in place, protecting select fruit on a handful of branches. Didn’t work.
But one day last week I found one decent sized peach that seemed close to being ripe-so I picked that peach. There were about a dozen smaller ones left still. Next day there was not a single peach on that tree or on the ground beneath. I carefully ripened that one peach, and today .... I ate it.
Bwahahahaha!
I bought a package of mixed heirloom seeds. I've been watching these tomatoes, but they didn't seem to be getting ripe. Well, it finally dawned on me that maybe they were meant to be green. Sure enough, they're green sausage tomatoes!!
Can't wait to try one. My Black Russians were spectacular!!
Finally - will used kitty litter - the non clumping kind - keep rabbits out of the garden if I spread it around the edges? I've got one little bunny thoroughly enjoying my bush beans and I;d like Mr BunBun to move on to some one else's yard.
We have gotten more rain in the past two months than we normally get during the entirety of our wet season , almost what we get during an entire year .
I normally start my fall tomatoes and peppers this time of year in sunken beds to catch water . The beds are now flooded with standing water and are full of tadpoles. (wish I had planted rice in them lol )
I have a bunch of 55 gallon barrels that were given to me so I think the tomatoes and peppers are going in them for now .
Seeing all this rain it is just hard to fathom that some areas of the country are still very dry.
I bought a couple of jalapeno plants yesterday at the nursery and have been watching some YouTube videos on pickling. I think I can do this.
Hi! It’s been raining a lot here too!
I had a couple of proto-yellow squashes die on me. :-( I was looking at a bottle of blossom rot stuff, and it described the condition as the proto-veg starts browning at the blossom end. Well, of course I have to be different! Mine were browning at the stem end and progressing toward the blossom. Don’t have a clue what to do. Actually, I guess at this point, I don’t care, unless someone just happens to know. I’m just keeping the plant alive with its beautiful blooms and enjoying the fact of it.
Better news: I’ve been harvesting the okra! Wow! It’s going great guns! Couldn’t be more tickled! Cucumbers are doing well too!
One of the mammoth sunflowers is over 9 feet tall. Amazing, and one of them is starting to open up. :-D
My very first ever carrots have sprouted! My 2nd batch of snow peas seem extremely happy. The 2nd round of scallop squash has sprouted and the acorn squash seeds from 2009 have sprouted. Have transferred the squash seedlings to their pots.
Some of our roses are blooming and just gorgeous! Darlin decided we needed to have a crimson red crepe myrtle, so we obtained one of them today and are pondering now where to locate it!
Amaranth is still alive and looks healthy, except for the holes in most of the leaves put there presumably by grasshoppers. I have been neeming it, but the rain keeps washing it off.
The garden beans and the black turtle beans are coming into their own and I’ve actually harvested a handful of green beans from each and were they ever yummy in my soup with the okra and one of the tomatoes!
The fava bean plant is still green and growing, but not sure if it is going to make another push.
I got up the courage to fertilize - but this time not the phosphate! I used the Miracle grow food, and we’ll see if that helps.
I have a lone tomato developing which is the first one from a plant I grew from seed. It is about the size of a cherry tomato, and I don’t know if it IS a cherry tomato or something else. There at the end of May, I was throwing tomato seed into pots willy-nilly and I have idea what landed where! The plant seems a little big for a cherry tomato plant, so we’ll see! I did sprout a little cherry tomato seed a few days ago, but it looks like someone chewed on it.
I’ve been wanting to get a stand of chamomile started, and have had a hard time getting any of my seeds to sprout. Finally I have 2 tiny little seedlings sprouted! Hope some others come up too!
I sacrificed my two parsley plants from Lowes to the Swallowtail babies. They’ve gotten nice and fat, and then disappeared. I have no idea if they got eaten, or if they managed to crawl off somewhere to do their thing. I haven’t discovered any cocoons anywhere. I even bought some parsley from the grocery store when it looked like the live plants were just about stripped. That seemed to buy time, because yesterday I saw the plants start putting out some more leaves. I never was able to sprout my parsley seeds and grow a parsley plant this past spring. Oh well.
I do have news on the rooting experiment. I think I last reported that the romaine stumps were doing well, and then didn’t make it. So I can start them, but don’t know/understand yet how to make them happy enough to stay alive.
I tried the root hormone experiment again with celery. This time I left a little more length on the stump. I was excited to find that not only did I get roots, but a little celery sprout started pushing its way up from the center! Darlin’ finally strongly encouraged me to take the experiment outside and plant it! So we’ll see if I’m able to keep this one alive. Any tips on celery from anyone?
Hope all is well with all of you!
blessings
texokie
I wish we’d get some of you rain. Our Brazos River is so low, the catfish have fleas. It’s terrible.
These are NOT 'orchard' apricots, but 'shelter belt' apricot trees, so they more closely resemble the wild types: smaller, less sweet, and somewhat drier, so I had to use a heavier syrup than usual for apricots to compensate; they do have a good flavor, though. We bought the seedlings about 12 years ago from the Farm Service Agency, through their Conservation Trees program. For one reason or another, they stayed in 5 gallon pots for 5 or 6 years before we could get them planted out.
They have a very short window between 'not ready', 'good', and 'bird food': they can go from sort of hard & dry to over ripe & turning brown in 24-48 hours, but they ripen over several days instead of all at once.
Some of the sauce, instead of getting canned, will be used tomorrow, along with left over juice & syrup from the cherries, and maybe with the addition of some of our fruit syrups, when Mrs. AR makes a "tuti-fruiti rabbit" for dinner...after which I'll be canning its littermates.