4th of July

Cousins Gus and Ann always invite their extended family to a 4th of July cookout, every year, at high noon.  Gus roasts pork shoulders on the grill.  Ann decorates their garage in patriotic colors and makes gallons of sweet tea and probably does 90 million other things in the kitchen while Gus minds the grill.  The family starts pouring in around 11, bearing their specialty dishes, just about the time the shoulders are ready to be pulled apart for sandwiches.

If you have never been part of a shoulder-pullin', you have missed one of the most orgasmic food experiences in the world.  The skin on the outside of the shoulder is charred and crisp; the meat on the inside is warm and moist and fall-apart tender.  Juice runs down your arm when you sneak bites.  Heaven on earth. 

As always, I picked my brain for side dish ideas.  With so many people bringing food, it's hard not to duplicate.  We picked up a watermelon and a store-bought cherry pie while we were browsing the supermarket for ideas.  We ended up getting ingredients for a cool tropical fruit and marshmallow salad, with loads of pecans and coconut and whipped cream.  Thirty years ago, this salad showed up at nearly every family dinner, but I haven't seen it for a while. 

On the gardening front, my garden is still a mess.  I did some good work last week but didn't finish, and it has rained again (almost daily) since then.  My new "hula hoe" arrived this week, and I'm interested to see if it can make any headway against the grass.  Following some online video suggestions, The Husband sharpened the blades for me.  I may try it out this afternoon, if I'm not too full to move.

Redemption

Well, reader, I redeemed myself somewhat in the garden this afternoon. 

Ran the tiller, re-planted the green beans and some of the purple hull peas.  Planted a few hills of crookneck squash.  Hit the first few rows with Miracle Grow.

Can barely move now.

Worst Gardener Ever!

When I checked the garden last week, it was grassy and pitiful, and I made plans to remedy that situation this weekend.  Although I was up before the sun, it was late in the morning by the time I finally dragged myself to the garden. 

What a mess!

The original plan was to crank up the little tiller and use it to take out the weeds closest to the plants, then do the middles with the big tiller.  However, the previous tilling had left mounds and trenches that impeded the little tiller's progress, so I swapped tillers to do the middles first, then go back with the little tiller. 

The truth is that my heart just wasn't in it.  When I started, it was already putrid hot, but there was a cloud cover, so the job wasn't too bad.  About 45 minutes into the job the sun came out in full force.  I worked for another few minutes then shut the machinery down and came back to the house, intending to go back in the late afternoon, when the garden would be shady.  The return trip never happened.

None of the plants look very athletic.  Because of all the rain, everything is stunted and yellow.  I don't know if fertilizing would help or hurt, but something needs to be done.  The thing is, I am currently too lazy to do it.

Three Week Checkup

It's been about three weeks since we planted our vegetable garden.  I have not kept track of how many rain-free days we've had since then, but it hasn't been many. 

The nine cabbages that I planted in early April sat there like knots on a log, doing nothing, for the longest time, like they were fake cabbage sets.  When we planted the rest of the garden in late May, we dosed them with some fertilizer, and for a couple of weeks they grew like crazy.  They were fine until last week, when all nine of them suddenly went limp at the same time.  I think they are drowning.

Some of the tomatoes look great, but a few of them died, and a few others look blighted.  I am going to spray them with the baking soda/vegetable oil/water mixture that I used last year.

The squash plants are a little pale and sickly - too wet.

One end of my garden has a "dip" in it, and water tends to pool in that area.  For the past couple of autumns, we've dumped load after load of fallen leaves on that end of the garden, hoping to build it up, and for the past couple of springs, no seeds have sprouted there.  Last year, I thought the sprouting failure was because the soil stayed too wet for too long.  Since then I've learned that it's not a good idea to till those un-decomposed leaves into the soil, as it robs the soil of...something.  This year, I tried to rake the leaves away from the rows before I tilled them, but still nothing sprouted on that end of the garden, as if the soil has been poisoned.  I don't know what to do about this, except to stop dumping leaves in the garden.  I suppose I'll try to re-plant the seeds once the soil dries up enough to work.  Who knows when that will be?!

For now, the cucumbers and okra are doing okay.

The pepper plants are showing off.  They're already loaded with peppers.  I will have to stake them soon or risk having them topple over from the weight.

The newspaper/straw treatment is doing a good job of keeping down the weeds in the "no-till" half of the garden.  The other half of the garden is hairy with grass, but there's not much I can do about it until the ground dries.

This is not exactly garden news, but we have inherited a cat.  We had a cat, "Lucy" (short for "Lucifer") for years.  Although she was an extremely picky eater (nothing but canned shredded turkey & cheese cat food for Her Highness), she was a great rodent hunter, but she disappeared a couple of years ago.  Truth be told, we did not miss having a pet, as we like to travel and hated to ask the neighboring relatives to feed Lucy while we were gone.  But late this winter, we discovered that BOTH of our vehicles had become homes to rodents.  I found mouse poop in the front seats of my Jeep, and something chewed some wires in The Husband's truck.  I put a box of mouse poison under the rear seat of my Jeep and figured the problem was solved.  But about two weeks ago, I found more poop in the Jeep.  When I checked the rear storage compartment, I found a mouse nest!  We removed the nest and set a mouse trap in the compartment.  Evidently, removing the nest temporarily alleviated the problem, for the mouse trap has not been sprung, but I know it's just a matter of time before another mouse discovers the hide-away. 

Enter "Tiger."  Tiger is a full-grown male cat, orange and white, tall and sleek.  He's a card-carrying hunter, I'm told, and he eats what he catches.  When my son and daughter-in-law acquired some chickens this spring, Tiger watched them with longing in his eyes.  His family decided he needed to go before he developed a taste for chicken, and we agreed to take him, both to cut down on the rodent problem in our yard and to keep him available to our grandson.  They brought him to us yesterday afternoon.  I figured that he would immediately run home (through the woods, it's not all that far from our yard to Tiger's former home), but he's still here this morning.

So, welcome Tiger.  Now, get busy catching those mice!

Seeds in the ground

I cranked up the tiller at 9 a.m. and got busy.  Three and a half hours later, I'm sitting here in the cool, a little sunburned, but showered and shampooed and feeling accomplished.  Between me, Nanny, and The Husband, the garden is made. 

What went down was 4 rows of purple hull peas, two rows of Fordhook butter beans, three short rows of Marcotte green beans, 12 hills of cucumbers, six hills of butternut squash, and a row of okra.  I have space left for more crookneck squash, but I don't have any seeds.  I may run get some before the day is over, for it is supposed to rain in the next few days. 

Although I'd intended to do half of the garden in the "no-till" method, it turned out that only the tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cabbages, and peppers got that treatment.  I tilled the rest of the garden as usual.  I'd hoped to plant one row of beans in the no-till zone and one row of the same kind of beans in the tilled area so that I could compare their growth, but it didn't work out that way.  Long story.

When we prepared to dig holes for the plants in the no-till zone, we flipped over every other hay patty, and dug holes where they'd been.  After we planted, we put down more newspaper (HINT: wet newspaper is soooooo much easier to work with), separated the hay patties, and sprinkled loose hay around the plants.  This resulted in having about 1/2 of each hay patty left over to sprinkle atop newspaper and cardboard that we laid between the rows to keep down weeds.  I am crossing my fingers that we won't have to do much weeding in those areas.  Stay tuned to see if it works.

I am also hoping that this newspaper/hay treatment will cut down on blight infestation.  For the past few years, half of my gardening time has been spent fighting blight.  Hopefully, this mulching will separate the plants' leaves from the soil and keep down the rain-splash transfers of fungus from ground to plant.  As soon as the tomato plants settle in, I'm going to dose them with the mixture I used last year, which seemed to work as well as (if not better than) any commercial fungicide I've used:  one gallon of water, and a 1:1 ratio of baking soda and vegetable oil.  (I used 2 tbs. of each per gallon of water).  The baking soda creates an alkaline environment that the blight fungus doesn't like; the vegetable oil helps the soda stick to the leaves.

Tomatoes, Squash, Peppers

The garden looks more like a garden today.

The Husband, Nanny, and I spent several hours yesterday morning digging and planting.  We took a break around noon and went back to work about 5 p.m. when the garden was in shade.  Two hours later, all of the plants were in the ground in the "no-till" section:  48 tomatoes, 12 squash, 12 zucchini, and 12 pepper plants.

I did some tilling in the other half of the garden, but did not get finished.  Tomorrow, we'll be at it again, finishing the tilling and planting the peas, lima beans, and green beans.


 

Ground-breaking News

Wednesday afternoon, when I had come home from work and was about to walk across the road to the mailbox, Uncle B. came motoring toward me on his riding lawnmower, cutting the grass along the road bank.  I waved at him, got the mail, and started back toward my driveway.  By this time, he'd mowed past me and made a U-turn and was coming back.  I heard the blades shut down as he approached.  He eased to a stop at the end of my driveway and shut off the motor.

"You doing all right?" he asked.

"Yes, sir.  You?"

"I'm getting along pretty good, I reckon, for an old man.  I want to ask you something.  Are you going to raise a garden this year?"

(He's got his garden in, already.)

I said, "Well, yes, sir, I intend to."

He said, "I saw you out there putting down hay way back in the winter, and I thought maybe you were going to plant an early garden, but I don't see nothin' out there but a few cabbages."

I explained what happened:  I was going to try the "no-till" method; I planted cabbages, and later some tomatoes, but a freak late frost took out the tomatoes; then I got sick with a sinus infection and felt too bad to work in the garden; then it rained; and rained; and, yeah, well, I'm just late.

He nodded, asked after my mother, cranked up, and drove away, leaving me with a big guilt trip.

You see, I'd toyed with the idea of not raising a garden this year.  When I said that to The Husband later that evening, he gave me THE LOOK - the one that silently shouts HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?  I knew what he was thinking:  All that time and effort and money to put down newspaper and hay, and she's thinking about not having a garden....

So, between Uncle B. and The Husband, the guilt forced me to the garden center today to buy plants and seeds.  I got 48 tomato plants, a dozen or more pepper plants, and squash and zucchini plants.  Got purple-hull pea and Fordhook lima bean seeds.  Meant to get some cucumbers.

I came home and played a mean trick on The Husband.  He usually mows our yard and Nanny's on the weekends.  I need him in the garden tomorrow, so I mowed our yard yesterday and Nanny's yard today, to take away his excuse. 

Yeah, I'm mean that way.