Rain

It's raining right now.  Sort of.  It's an indecisive rain, one that falls intermittently between bouts of sunshine.  But it's rain, and we need it.  I heard the weatherman say that we're 12" behind for the year.  This should bring up the okra and rattlesnake beans I planted this week.

It's also going to wash off the fungicide and insecticide that I sprayed yesterday.  I'll have to do it all over again this weekend.  :-\ 

Actually, it's not a bad thing in terms of the squash.  After doing some reading, I'm not certain that the "BT" stuff I sprayed will kill squash bugs.  I bought a different kind of insecticide today, one that's supposed to be "eco-friendly" (though I'm not sure that the words "insecticide" and "eco-friendly" belong in the same sentence, unless there's a "not" between them).

Maintenance, Rattlesnake Beans, and Zucchini

Today was a beautiful day, so much cooler than the previous few days.  I was in the garden by 4 p.m., tilling up two rows for the rattlesnake beans that have been sitting on my kitchen table for weeks.  (I decided not to plant it with the corn, reasoning that if the raccoons take down the corn, they'll take down the beans with it.)  Just as I finished the tilling, I looked across the garden and noticed that two of my squash plants had wilted since yesterday.  I turned off the tiller and went for a closer look.  It appeared that both plants had been nicked with a hoe.  This was something of a relief, as I had feared the damage was from cutworms. 

But while I was inspecting the plant stems, I found bugs.  Many of them were copulating.  Some had already copulated, evidenced by little patches of brown eggs I saw on a few of the leaves.  I nearly had a stroke.

Luckily, I had stopped by the garden center for supplies - fungicide, insecticide, and fertilizer. 

Four hours later, the garden had been fungicided, BTd, and fertilized, and the beans had been planted.  We ought to be good to go for a week or more.

Before I sprayed, I picked about half a dozen squash, enough for our supper and Nanny's.  We sauteed ours with onions and ate it with Mexican cornbread.  Yum.

@!^%#

See the two vehicles in this picture?  My garden is between them and behind them about 100 feet. 

See the field?  A farmer rented this field from Nanny a few weeks ago.  Last Saturday, he planted soybeans using the "no-till" method.  The next day, he came back and sprayed broadleaf grass killer.  He told Nanny that he would spray low to the ground, and it would not damage anything in her yard.

The following Tuesday, this is how my corn looked:

The cucumbers and squash got a dose, too.

I was madder than a hornet.

Thankfully, the big shed and a smaller tool shed blocked the spray from most of the garden, but some of the chemical drifted through a gap between the tool shed and the tree line.  The entire rows of squash, cucumbers, and corn got it, all the way to the far end of the garden.  It looks like these plants are going to survive, but I'm still mad.  And the worst may be yet to come.  Once the beans sprout, he's planning to come back with Round-Up in his tank.  I don't know what to do to protect my garden, except to stretch black plastic across the "gap," and judging from how far the first herbicide drifted, this tactic may not be enough.

* * * * * *

"You're up mighty early," Nanny called from the back porch a few seconds after I walked past her kitchen window this morning. 

"I'm trying to hit the garden before the sun does," I said.  My plan was to chop around the plants, run the tiller up the middles, and then do some serious watering.  I went to the tool shed, grabbed my favorite hoe, and started chopping weeds on the pepper row.  A few minutes later, I looked up to find Nanny working among the cucumbers.  Together we made pretty short work of the squash and cucumber rows.  Nanny started on the corn rows while I went to drag the tiller out of the shed.

"How big does corn have to be before it can be laid by?" Nanny asked me as I was gassing up the tiller.

"I don't know," I said.  "What does 'laid by' mean?"

"It means we can quit chopping it."

"Oh.  Well, I think that corn can be laid by the day after Memorial Day," I told her.  Since today is Memorial Day, it brought us both a measure of relief.

About an hour later, The Husband showed up and offered to finish the tilling.  I let him, and started laying out the soaker hose among the cucumbers.  By the time I finished laying out the hoses and getting the water going, he'd finished the tilling and had picked up the hoe that I'd laid aside.  In a few minutes, I heard Nanny call to The Husband, "I see you over there, leaning on your hoe in the shade."  Before either of us could respond, she added, "Oh my goodness...I just heard my mama talking."

"You sounded just like her," The Husband said.

I did not know Grandmaw, so I wisely kept my mouth shut.

But I looked up a few minutes later, and caught them both leaning on their hoes in the shade.

It took me about two more hours to finish the watering.  During this time, I sank in the mud as I moved the soaker hoses from row to row.  It's a miracle I got out with my shoes.

Squash Blossoms

My boss turned me loose early today (bless her), and I've spent the afternoon running the tiller in the garden, working on my farmer tan. 

The oldest of the squash plants - the batch that came up from the first planting - have squash on them!  I bet we'll be eating them by next weekend.

The corn is a good foot tall.    As I was tilling  past it, I wondered if my idea about interplanting it with pole beans is a good idea.  It is almost a sure bet that the raccoons will eventually push the cornstalks over; when that happens, the beans will go down with the corn, and that will be one confounded mess.  

I've been trying to think of ways to foil the raccoons.  What I need is about three mean Dobermans.  ;)

Happy Carrot Day!

Guess what?  WE HAVE CARROTS!  Having never actually seen a growing carrot, I almost didn't recognize them and *almost* chopped them down when I was weeding today - had the hoe poised to decapitate them when it occurred to me what they were. 

I replanted the butterbeans today.  Only 1/3 of the original planting have come up.  As I was digging a drill between the skips, I uncovered a good many beans which had swollen and shot out a tap root.  Maybe I planted them too deep.  In any case, I planted about three times as many seeds as I needed to fill the gaps, hoping that enough will sprout to fill out the rows. 

Sunday, I discovered that one of my store-bought tomatoes was withering and had spots on the leaves.  I yanked him out and tossed him in the woods.  All the rest of the plants look healthy.  The "volunteers" have tomatoes on them, already, some almost big enough to fry.  Today, I sprayed fungicide again.

The corn is about a foot tall now.  I have packets of zucchini and rattlesnake beans that I intend to plant soon.  Before I plant the beans, I want to pick Uncle Jack's brain about their growing habits, as he grows them and will know how they act.  Maybe I'll see him at the softball field before the week is up, and we can talk a little gardening before our granddaughters' games.

Lastly, I'll send out a great big "thank-you" shout to whoever sharpened my hoe.  I sho'nuff appreciate it.

Rain and Refrigerator Repairmen

Mother Nature blessed us with a much-needed rain, a good "soaker," last Sunday night.  It brought up the squash seeds I'd planted earlier in the week, along with a gazillion morning glories and a right smart stand of grass.  The ground is still too wet to work.  Yesterday, Nanny said she went to the garden to chop the grass away from the volunteer tomatoes, lost both of her shoes in the mud, and nearly fell on her butt trying to heave them out.  I guess I forgot to show her the secret "paths" that I'd purposefully left un-tilled just to prevent such occurrences. 

Speaking of the volunteer tomatoes, watching them is amazing.  They sprang up from last year's crop of mostly heirloom tomatoes - Bradley, Roma, Arkansas Traveler, and maybe Juliette, which I believe is a hybrid.  They've been dug amongst and dislodged - that is, we've given away plants and pulled up plants to thin the row.  They took a hit from a light frost in March and got blasted with tiller exhaust last week.  They haven't been fertilized.  Yet, they sit there amongst the spring weeds, a little discolored and stunted, their stems thick and already bearing fruit, while the store-bought tomatoes on the other side of the garden spend their time primping their foliage instead of thinking about blooming.  More are coming up every day.  So far, I can tell only that they will be round tomatoes and oval tomatoes.  In a perfect world, the big, meaty Bradley will have made its way over to a cute little Roma to give us big, tasty, oval offspring.  ;)

Likewise, the volunteer butterpeas and cucumbers are established and tough.  The butterpeas are growing on a row of clumpy ground that was plowed and disked but was never finely tilled.  The crop is at least as thick as it would have been if I had done the planting, maybe even thicker.  Only one or two cucumbers sprang up, and they may turn out to be squash-cumbers since their former neighbors were zucchini, but I bet they will eat just fine. 

The red lettuce that came up last fall and survived the winter is now beginning to bolt.  The plants sit among low-growing weeds on ground that was neither plowed nor tilled this year.  I'm going to let them go to seed again and see what next year brings.

It seems like every summer our refrigerator wants to cause trouble.  It has already started this year.  Last Saturday, water squirted out of the ice dispenser, which led to the discovery that the refrigerator wasn't cooling.  The Husband called the Sears repair hotline right away (the first available appointment was Tuesday, "between the hours of 8 and 5"  Here we go again...), and then we began the process of emptying the contents of the refrigerator into coolers (which, naturally, necessitated a trip to a store to get ice).  Later that afternoon, the refrigerator decided to start working again and was still working fine come Tuesday.  At 4:45, we received a recorded phone call saying that the refrigerator repairman might be late (no kidding?).  About an hour after that, we got a call from the repairman, himself, saying he was on his way.  I asked him, "Can you fix it if it ain't broke?  'Cause for now, it's working just fine."  He seemed relieved not to have to make the call, but - get this, for this is the best part - he gave me his name and his cell phone number so that I can call him directly if the refrigerator wimps out again.  Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa....this may prove more valuable than gold. 

Fences

Last year, Pop-Pop had one of The Nephews sink some metal fence posts in the ground around the garden.  They then strung a series of wires between the posts, and electrified it, and sat back to watch the executions. 

The electric fence didn't last long, but the posts still stand, unwilling to come out of the ground for anyone interested in getting them out of the ground.  Yesterday, I looked at them and decided to put some hog wire between a couple of them and grow something on it.  I was torn between planting gourds and butternut squash.  The squash won.

Lately, every time I think about butternut squash, I think about my brother. 

My brother moved out of the boonies and into the city in his early 20s to pursue a law career.  Now that he's semi-retired, he has moved to the semi-boonies and, for the past few years, has been trying his hand at vegetable gardening.  Far be it from me to tease him about his gardening skills.  He's doing right well, in fact.  But last year, during a summer cookout, he complained that his yellow squash plants were producing faulty fruits.  "They're all turning brown before they mature," he said.  "I've had to throw away every one of them."  I asked him to show me.

Um-hmmm...you guessed it; he'd planted butternut squash, not yellow squash.

Isn't it fun when really smart people do really dumb sh*t?  ;)

Re-Planted the Squash

It appeared that those first few squash plants that sprouted were the only ones that intended to sprout, so today I re-planted the row.  As I was arranging the dirt, I uncovered a few swollen seeds that had run out a tap root.  I just dropped a few new seeds around them and re-covered them.

The butterbeans and cucumbers are coming up.  The corn is, too - it's about 3" tall.  The tomatoes have begun to bloom, even those "volunteer" tomatoes that shivered through the "blackberry winter" we had a couple of weeks ago. 

Nearly every chunk of the potatoes we planted has sprouted.  It's funny that in every year when we've "babied" the potato seedlings, cutting them just so, letting them heal, planting them with cottonseed meal to prevent rotting, we've had a pitiful showing, yet this year's crop, which we hacked up and stuffed in the ground without ceremony, is doing great (so far). 

Two blackberry bushes came in the mail today.  I'd be out there planting them, except that it looks like it's fixin' to rain (which figures, since I watered the garden really, really well two days ago), and I've got supper going on the stove.  Since the blackberry bushes were The Husband's idea, I may let him do the honors after we eat, if this cloud passes over without favoring us with a shower.