My herbs are looking really nice right now.
Maybe I’ll cook something. :-)
Rain today, so it looks like Sunday afternoon:
Heirloom tomatoes.
Peppers - Red Bell, Jalapeno, hot banana and hot cherries.
Squash - summer and acorn.
Cucumbers.
Eggplant.
Potatoes
Garlic is a few weeks away from scapes.
Strawberries are in bloom and Raspberries a few weeks behind that.
I know you say each week it is impossible to hijack this thread....but if I posted in any detail how my day went yesterday with appliances breaking down and the serviceman who came to handle it for me.....well....lets just say you would be advocating for a mute button on FR
On the garden front, I replanted 3 tomatoes & they are looking pretty happy. Upon going in the ground, they had several days of heavy clouds/rain & when the sun came out yesterday, I fixed up a sun shade for them. They still get plenty of light, but it's more indirect. I've got milky white semi-transparent plastic 3/4 of the way around my columnar tomato cages. I can turn the cages so the opening allows in more sun, or turn it away for less. The plants are getting plenty of indirect light & over the next week, they'll gradually get exposed to more. I cannot afford to sun scald these tomatoes - I'm still kicking myself that it happened to the first ones!
Peppers will go in tonight when it cools off a bit (humid, mid-80's, bright sun right now). Something has pulled the first two little leaves off of two of my cukes. I may have to replant them. Everything else is growing well.
My wife has planted all her garden scattered here and there where there is maximum sunlight.
Last year she planted yellow squash and grew very good and strong plant with lots of male flowers. Strangely there were e no female flowers and thus no squash ever set on.
Is there a reason for a lack of female flowers?
The plants were adequately watered. They did not receive all day sun but they were not in perpetual shade.
As of today, the lettuce s doing well as are the snow peas.
I finally received the balcony railing brackets for my window boxes, so I could put my two 30” window boxes just outside my railing. They have gorgeous purple heliotrope, light pink/yellow/orange and deep rose/yellow/orange lantana, variegated vinca vines with red stems, portulaca, marigolds, and cherry pink calibrachoa. Looks beautiful, I get a lot of compliments. My 40 hostas on wire shelving get a lot of compliments, too. I didn’t want to mess with hummingbird feeders, so I installed 2 hanging pots on my balcony and planted fuschia in them. I also have a strawberry pot of pink verbena and deep purple petunias. Latest planting on balcony is a pair of large pots with lavender, marigold, mint, ageratum and lemon balm to act as natural mosquito repellents.
Finally got a little break from the rain. Re-tilled the part of the garden I haven’t planted yet because it was looking like a lawn at this point. Stuck my mater plants in the ground. Need to find some tall skinny white oaks for bean poles which won’t be a problem as there’s 100s of them. I can probably find enough dead standing trees. Gotta soak the beans overnight I guess though I could probably get away with just sewing them since they’re calling for rain most of the week and the soil is far from dry. I’ll probably just soak them today and stick them in this evening.
I was exploring today, scouting for future photo shoot sites, and I found some really large and very healthy prickly sow nettles. I know the juice from the nettle plant is typically good for Burns and other medicinal purposes.
Does anybody feel like it’s worth coming back with a shovel and digging up one of these plants and taking it home?
It’s obviously a weed that has some purposes other than growing yellow flowers. I’m just wondering if it’s worth getting at for making tea and other medicinal ointments..
It essentially in the right of away by the freeway so not a problem legally.
By the way I have an app on my phone called plant snap and any time I see a plant that I like but I don’t know the exact name for it I can take a picture of it and it searches a database and give you possible identifiers. Works great
Petunias & verbena
The weather guessers took a big swing and miss over the Memorial Day weekend here in Central Missouri. They were calling for thunderstorms pretty much the entire weekend. We got a little sprinkle on Sunday, then an evening deluge that lasted about 30 minutes yesterday. Aside from that, it was mostly clear and hot all weekend.
I went fishing all day Saturday, and took Mrs. Augie and one of her girlfriends boat riding on the Gasconade River on Sunday. Mrs. Augie and I went to the local nursery and picked up some pepper plants yesterday. Spent several hours working in the garden after we got home from the nursery.
I got a dozen of the tomato plants transferred from their pots into the ground. I took them out of the starter cells and put them in gallon pots right after I bought them the first week of May. The ground was too cold and wet to set them out until a few days ago. They filled the pots with roots and I stuck them neck-deep in the dirt so they ought to take off like crazy now. I need to buy some straw bales and put the cages up, and I have eight more that need to be planted.
Still need to transplant the peppers, but the ground will need to dry out for a day or two before I can do that.
The cucumbers are starting to pop up finally. They didn’t like the cold and wet that came right after I planted them. The butternut and turk’s turban were planted on hills the same day the cuke seeds went in - they popped right up and are looking good.
