Rain

It was raining this morning when I woke up.  YAY!  We need it.

As my usual luck would have it, I spent several evenings this week watering the garden.  But I hadn't yet gotten around to the purple hull pea rows, so it's all good.

The Grandson paid me a visit while I was watering the tomatoes.  This child loves mud with a passion.  I'd used the soaker hose, and I'd built little dirt dams alongside the rows to keep the water hemmed up where I needed it, so the middles, for the most part, were dry.  But the regular water hose had sprung a leak near the soaker hose connection, and I'd aimed the spurt toward the garden, so there was one area between the tomatoes and the green beans where the ground was 6" deep in soft mud.  He dived into it with both feet before I could stop him.

Naturally, it wasn't long before he turned the water hose leak on me.  We were both pretty wet and muddy before the job was done.

He asked me, "Grandmama, did you plant EVERY vegetable?"  I answered that I had not planted EVERY vegetable, explaining that I had not planted any corn because the raccoons always get it before I do.  As we moved around the garden, I pointed to the rows and named the vegetables that I had planted.  When we got to the row where the squash and zucchini were growing, he wanted to know why the squash plants looked just like the zucchini plants.  "They're cousins," I told him, "and they look alike because they are from the same family."  He thought about this for a minute and said, "I think apples and tomatoes are cousins, too." 

We continued our watering, moving the soaker hose from row to row.  At one point he said, "When I grow up, I'm going to plant a garden with corn in it."

"Oh, yeah?  What are you going to do about the raccoons?" I asked.

"I'll stand out there and guard the corn."

"What will you do at night?  Raccoons love to come for the corn at night."

"I'll guard it all night."

"You can't guard it all night," I said.  "You've got to sleep sometime.  Maybe you could get a dog to guard it for you at night."

"That's what I'll do!" he said.  "I'll get a coon dog.  AND a thquirrel dog!"

Sounds like a good plan.  ;)

First Squash

We picked our first mess of squash on Sunday.  We gave some of it to our son and his family, and sauteed the rest (with onions and hot peppers) for supper that night.  I picked another 2-gallon bucket full this afternoon.  This weekend I'm going to drag the canning equipment out of the attic and make some squash pickle when the next batch of squash gets ready.

The garden is looking good, so far.  Beans and cucumbers are blooming.  Tomato plants have tangerine-sized tomatoes on them.  The okra is beginning to grow.  The rows are clean (mostly).

I watered the tomatoes and the squash today.  The hydrant closest to my garden is not in working order, and I had to use the one on the back of Nanny's house.  This required stringing several hoses together, dragging them for miles, and then dragging them all back and un-stringing them once the watering was done.  No more of that.  One day this week I'm going to buy the biggest hose cart/reel I can find.

Mid-June Maintenance

It's been hard to work in the garden for the past few weeks.  We've had sporadic rains, making the soil too wet to work.  Yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to do some maintenance: tilled the grassy middles, sprayed for bugs and blight, used the hoe where the big tiller would not go.

We ate our first ripe tomato yesterday.  It came from a potted patio plant, which already had a little green tomato on it when I bought it.  The plants in the garden are pretty far from having ripe tomatoes, but they are coming along nicely.

The Grandson's tiger eye beans are beginning to bloom. 

We'll be eating squash and zucchini by the weekend.

The pepper plants are going nuts making peppers.  This seems odd to me, as the pepper plants don't generally kick into gear in our garden until later in the season.  I hope they don't poop out before the tomatoes get ripe so that I can use them in salsa.

Blight Control

Today, I fired the first round - or so I thought - in the battle with blight.  Doused the tomatoes with fungicide, put down some landscape fabric around them, and snipped off any leaves that were touching the ground or even thinking about touching the ground.  I only thought that I was firing the first round because I had not closely examined the plants; I thought I was making a pre-emptive strike; in truth, the blight was one step ahead of me.  Some of those lower leaves that I cut off were already looking yellow and sickly.  It's a good thing I struck when I did. 

Watch it rain tonight or tomorrow and wash off the fungicide.  :-\

Re-Bean

Very few of the beans I planted on 5/16 actually came up.  Maybe I planted them too deep.  Maybe the moon wasn't right.  Who knows?  In any case, I re-planted today.  The purple hull peas need re-planting, too, but I'm out of seeds at the moment.

The squash and zucchini seeds sprouted nicely, as did the cucumbers.

Tomatoes and peppers growing nicely.  Some of the peppers even have peppers big enough to eat.  Go, peppers!