Mid-July Report

This afternoon when I came home from work, I was greeted on the front porch by a snake.  Big around as a broom handle, and probably three feet long, solid black/gray.  My best guess, based on the pictures on the web, is that it was a Southern Black Racer.  He might be fast, but not as fast as I was when I high-tailed it into the house via the back door.  He was gone by the time I put my stuff down and went to the front door for another peek.  You know what that means, don't you?  He's still out there...somewhere....  I used the back door again when I went to the garden.

The garden is coming along right well. 

Tonight I picked a plastic grocery bag full of cucumbers, and another bag full of squash and zucchini.  I saw a few squash bugs.  Nanny said she would dust the plants in the morning.  She kept the cucumbers to use for relish.  I'll play the Squash Fairy tomorrow at work.

The purple-hull peas are filling out and starting to turn purple.  I planted only three rows - not enough for this family of pea lovers.  As soon as everybody on the hill gets all the cucumbers they want, I'm going to pull up the vines and plant a late crop of peas in their place.

Did my first serious picking of green beans on Saturday.  Had enough for supper (and some left-overs), and a few to give away. 

The Grandson's tiger eye beans are drying on their vines, just as we want them to do.  They are LOADED with beans.

The chili peppers are making faster than I can pick them.

The tomatoes.  Well....

On the up side, we have several tomatoes that would do to eat today, but will be better in two more days.  (I'm craving that first ripe tomato/mayonnaise sandwich of the season.)  They're still blooming, and there are little tomatoes coming along, but not in the quantities I would like.  I planted about 45 tomato plants.  I should be covered up with tomatoes, but I'm not.  Not yet.

On the down side, I'm battling blight non stop.  The blight is probably what's robbing my tomato plants of their vigor, but I'll be switched if I know what to do about it.  I tried the baking soda/cooking oil blight treatment that I saw on YouTube.  It seemed to slow the blight down a little - about as much as the fungicide does - but it's still there.  I believe it's just in the air.  You might remember that about three years ago, I moved the tomato patch plumb out of the garden, way up the driveway, close to the road, where ne'er a tomato plant had ever grown.  Those plants had the worst case of blight EVER, so I know it's not just in the garden soil from prior years.  I even have blight on my two patio plants, which have never been NEAR the garden.

Tomatoes.    I feed.  I water (with drip hoses).  I treat for diseases and pests.  I rotate, mulch, stake, prune off leaves that touch the ground....  What ELSE is a person supposed to do to get a good tomato crop?

Organic Tomato Blight Control

Look what I found!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxeBz1e2OwU

I'm trying this today.

Happy 4th of July

We went to a cookout at Gus' and Ann's today.  Gus and my late father-in-law are first cousins.  Gus invites all his cousins, and all their young'uns, to a family dinner twice a year:  4th of July, and Thanksgiving.  On the 4th, he serves us barbequed pork shoulder, cooked low and slow, the way any self-respecting Southerner would do it. At Thanksgiving, he gives us Turkey.  The cousins and their young'uns bring the side dishes.  Five generations showed up today.  It's good to visit with the extended family.

Uncle Jack was there, and he said that he'd just picked a 5-gallon bucket of ripe tomatoes this morning.  He's picking green beans and cucumbers.  Made me green with envy.  He invited me over to help him cut cabbage for sauerkraut.  I might take him up on that, if he'll do it when I'm not at work.

I came home and went down to inspect my own pitiful garden.  One of the tomato plants has been stung pretty hard with blight; some of the rest are threatened with it.  This weekend, I will need to rig up the sprayer with fungicide to see if I can thwart it a little.

Night before last, I found a bug on one of the squash plants and had to powder them with Sevin dust.  Together, Nanny and I have picked about 4 gallons of squash this week, two of which are sitting on my kitchen table, needing to be processed.  I intend to make some of that good squash relish that I made last year, but first I'll need to make a run to the grocery store for vinegar and stuff.

The green beans are beginning to make.  The Grandson's tiger eye beans are loaded, but I'm going to let them dry on the vine so he can see how the dried bean thing is done.  Come winter, we'll soak his beans, and cook them, and talk about how we planed them w-a-y back in the spring....

My yard is phloxing. 

Night before last, as The Husband was walking down Nanny's driveway to join me in the garden, he spotted a fawn under the pine trees.  He whistled, and when I looked up from my squash-picking, he motioned for me and showed me the baby.  It was tiny!  We didn't see its mama anywhere.  "Keep a watch out for mama," I said before trotting back to our house for the camera.  The fawn was still there when I got back, and lay there and looked pretty while we took its picture.  After I finished picking the squash, we came back to our house and watched the field beside the driveway.  Sure enough, before long, the doe emerged from the tree line and eased across the field.  She was still 100 feet away from the baby when all of a sudden it bolted from beneath the pine trees and joined her in the field.  She led it back to the woods.  Sweet.  :)

As we walked up the sidewalk to our house, a rabbit ran out of the flower bed.  I took its picture, too. 

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.  :-\