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Every time I've taken our near daily splashshot that tops this page, I've been annoyed that a young maple tree's branches obscured part of our narrow raised bed of Earlirouge tomatoes. So I got out my pruning supplies and removed the offending branches. Unfortunately, the nozzle on my can of Spectracide Aerosol Pruning Seal was clogged. I began soaking it in alcohol, but also ordered a new can of it. As we move into full summer, I'm excited by the harvests to come. We'll certainly be picking green beans soon. We'll also dig garlic and spring carrots. And from the looks of our Earlirouge tomato plants, we'll be enjoying BLTs by mid-month. But looking at our current ten day extended weather forecast, I'll also be hauling lots of water to our garden plots.
Note that I have again omitted a link to Serenade. Vendors who have the excellent product in stock are still price gouging, charging two to four times the normal price!
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Thursday, July 2, 2020 - Bad News, Good News Deer found our sweet corn last night. I thought I was ready for them, having spread chips of Ivory Spring bar soap around the planting. But it had rained, which seems to cut the effectiveness of the soap's odor. While the deer nipped the tops off some corn and uprooted some other plants, we still have enough corn to produce a nice crop...if we can keep the deer out of the patch. The nipped plants may not tassel, but could still produce ears. And fortunately, I hadn't yet thrown out the backup corn transplants I'd started. After surveying the damage, I grabbed our organic sprayer and loaded it up with Not Tonight, Deer! The deer repellent I'd mixed a year ago May smelled even worse than it did last year. I put a heavy spray of it on both our sweet corn and kidney beans.
Our hill of Minnesota Midget cantaloupe had been roughed up, but one plant may survive. The plants in our hill of Passport honeydew had all been uprooted. I stuck the rootballs back in the ground, but they probably won't make it. I added seed to each hill. The Good News
Normally, I have a few replacement plants left over from our transplanting. I went a little crazy this year with our melon patch, putting in every melon transplant I had. I even cut out a couple of rows of potatoes from our original East Garden plan to make room for more melons. And actually, I'm not sure my old knees would hold up to all the digging involved in harvesting potatoes. The surprise good news of the day was by our rural route box. As I drove up to get our mail, there was a volunteer daisy in bloom by the mailbox post! After replacing plants and scuffle hoeing a bit, I surrendered pretty quickly to the heat and humidity today. While I really need to mow the lawn, I also still need to do our taxes! Yep, I'm a procrastinator. So as I wrote this afternoon, I was also downloading TurboTax updates. I got an early start on gardening this morning to beat the mid-day heat. When I got out to the East Garden, I was dismayed to find that another hill of melons had been mauled. The Tam Dew honeydew plants weren't apparently eaten, but were torn apart. With Tam Dews being a hundred day variety, there isn't enough growing season left for me to re-seed them into the hill. Instead, I seeded some Passport honeydew, as they're just a 73 days-to-maturity variety. I again sprayed our sweet corn with Not Tonight, Deer! I also sprayed our melon vines and spread Irish Spring soap chips around them. I watered, scuffle hoed, and mulched for a couple of hours in the East Garden. As I returned to the house, I brought what was left of our last bale of peat moss with me. After a short break, I hoed in peat moss, lime, and fertilizer between our double trellis where our cucumbers will go. I optimistically began watering the bed from our sixty gallon rain barrel. Although the barrel was pretty full, the watering barely made a dent in the dryness of the half of the bed watered! Since I've been using a double trellis for a few years for our early peas followed by cucumbers, I've gotten the bed prep down pat. I raise the bottom wire of the trellis on one side. That gives me access to hoe in soil improvements. I also take time to tighten the clothesline wires that hold up the trellis, as the wire stretches in warm weather. I'll probably start my gardening day tomorrow by watering the rest of the cucumber bed. I may transplant cukes into it if I can before it gets too hot. With our daily highs now in the 90s, it's no time to transplant in the heat of the day.
Things are getting really busy here. Trying not to work outside in the heat of the day, I'm not getting stuff done as I'd like. Our lawn desperately needs to be mowed. Once the mowing is done, I'll need to switch out the lawn tractor from the mower deck to our pull-type rototiller, as weeds are trying to overwhelm our East Garden plot. But mowing and tilling will have to wait, as our green beans are ready for a first light picking. There's no reason to put in the effort growing vegetables only to pick them when they're overripe. I might even dig a few baby carrots for a delicious side dish of steamed green beans and carrots seasoned with fresh garlic. Our garlic is also ready to be dug. I may steal an early bulb for the green beans and carrots, but it too, can wait. The garlic certainly won't rot in the ground as dry as things are. These are the nice kinds of gardening problems to have. Have a wonderful Fourth of July. And keep a mask on when out and/or maintain social distance. Saturday, July 4, 2020 - Fourth of July (U.S.) - Transplanting Cucumbers (and Snapdragons)
I began the transplanting session by watering the sixteen inch by fifteen foot planting area. I used a sprinkler can for the watering so as not to leave any depressions in the soil. About fifteen gallons of water wet the soil to about two inches down. Each cucumber plant got a hole that had a gallon of transplanting solution added. After pushing the transplants into the soil and firming it around them, I also watered around each plant. With daily temperatures predicted to stay in the 90s for the next week, I'll have to baby these plants, watering them each day. Our strain of the Japanese Long Pickling cucumber variety came from one lone seed I'd saved for years. After a few years, inbreeding depression set in. I was lucky to find that Reimer Seeds carried the variety, although a slightly different strain than ours. I added a plant or two of their strain to serve as pollinators a few years ago. Our strain of the cucumber variety regained its vitality without losing its favorable characteristics.
I offer 2018 seed for the Japanese Long Pickling cucumber variety via the Grassroots Seed Network and the Seed Savers Member Exchange. Since our 2019 crop suffered the same tragic error last year as did our Earlirouge tomatoes, getting a good seed crop this year is really important to me. I always like to plant a few snapdragons along our trellis of cucumbers. While the cukes often overgrow the snaps, they eventually outlive the cucumber vines, producing beautiful fall displays of blooms. Our snapdragons this year are from some seed saved last year and from the Madame Butterfly
The beans snapped and canned to five and a half pints. That's not a lot, but for a light first picking, I'm satisfied. Fortunately, so far, we have not experienced an influx of Japanese Beetles which can devastate a bean crop. Besides some of our onions, our garlic seems ready to dig. It's time for me to set up our makeshift drying/curing table in the garage. Despite the heat and humidity this afternoon, I finally got our lawn mowed. It was hard to tell where I'd mowed in some dryer parts of the yard while I left heaps of grass clippings in other areas.
I was pleased to see that we'd not had any more critter damage to our sweet corn or melons overnight. Our sweet corn was ready today for its first fertilization and cultivation. With our 36" row spacing, I use our walking tiller to cultivate, turning in a little 12-12-12 sidedressed along the rows. The walking tiller has the advantage of having one shield missing which allows soil to be thrown into an adjacent row to bury small weeds without burying the corn. Later in the day, I realized that I'd probably tilled in all of our smelly Irish Spring bar soap deer deterrent, so I went back out (in a hundred degree heat index) and cut up a bar and a half of the soap around our sweet corn and kidney beans.
I did notice with some delight that we have some yellow squash ripening. Our two other Slick Pik plants have blooms on them. I'm also pleased to see our Encore peas came up well. Sadly, the supersweet Eclipse peas planted at the other end of the row totally failed. I'm undecided whether to re-seed, start transplants inside, or wait until next year for the Eclipse peas. Poor germination has always been one of their problems. Even though the Encores are a short pea variety, they'll get a short trellis to climb on. Keeping the pea pods up off the ground prevents rot and makes for better seed saving. Whether it's the Eclipse or Encore pea variety, I'm hoping to be able to share supersweet pea seed with other gardeners once the Seminis/Monsanto/Bayer PVP plant patents expire! Monday, July 6, 2020 - Digging Garlic
Some folks say snapping off the scapes increases the size of the garlic bulbs. I'd snapped off a few of the scapes weeks ago, but left the rest simply because I like the way they look when they "bloom." While I've never tried them, garlic scapes are supposed to be good to eat. Digging really isn't the right term for what I did today. Like with harvesting carrots, one puts a heavy garden fork deep in the soil beside the garlic bulb and lifts by pulling the handle back towards oneself. If you get deep enough, the lever action lifts the garlic, often with a gigantic soilball around its roots.
We ended up getting 73 good garlic bulbs out of the about 80 I planted last fall. Actually, the garlic didn't get planted until December 26, the latest I've ever planted it. Combined with our recent dry spell, the late planting produced much smaller elephant garlic than usual. Our regular garlic was about its usual size. The smaller garlic size could also be due to my omitting adding bone meal under the garlic sets. The bone meal seemed to draw moles to our previous plantings. It was 91° F (heat index 99° F) when I came in from digging, but there was an occasional gust of refreshing wind while I worked. I dug a little more than half of the garlic before taking a much needed rehydration break. As usual, I set up drying/curing table in the garage, once again mentally thanking my wonderful wife for the heavy duty sawhorses she gave me. I also opened the garage windows and turned on an ancient box fan I keep in the garage to keep some air movement going over the garlic. Note that it's important to leave the leaves on the garlic as it cures. In the past when pressed for space, I've trimmed the garlic prematurely with less than wonderful results. The leaves apparently help the garlic bulbs cure. For more information on growing garlic, see: Tuesday, July 7, 2020 - Surprises
The second surprise was much more pleasant than the first. I'd been out watering our tomatoes and peppers in our East Garden plot. As I started up our back steps, I saw and heard a few raindrops hit the top of a trash can. In just a few minutes, a pop-up thundershower came through. While it seemed to rain fairly hard for a few minutes, our rain gauge showed only about a tenth of an inch of precipitation. Earlier, while running water for our peppers and tomatoes, I began picking green beans. But sadly, after the rain, the plants are wet. Picking through wet bean plants can spread plant diseases, so the beans will have to wait. Thursday, July 9, 2020 - Green Beans
This was our second picking of green beans, as I did a light picking on Saturday of our three earliest varieties (Provider We're going to get at least one more picking of green beans. Usually, I pull the plants as I make our third picking, but with the light first picking, we'll probably get a fourth picking this year. Our how-to, Growing Beans, tells how we grow ours. If you're new to canning green beans, it's hard to beat the Ball Book of Canning and Preserving. There is a short version of canning beans online.
We've had a couple of lovely days of late. Today was a bit hotter than yesterday when we had a slightly cooler day with a pleasant brisk breeze. Being a persistent procrastinator, I had to work on taxes both days, as I'd put off that unpleasant task with the July 15 filing extension due to the coronavirus. I did haul compost to our compost pile yesterday and scuffled weeds a bit, but my back let me know I'd done too much stoop work when picking our green beans on Thursday. The green beans canned out to fourteen pints. Thirteen of the jars sealed properly with one going into the fridge for future use. With seventeen pints in our pantry now, we're close to having enough put up to last the winter. That's a far cry from when we used to can thirty to forty quarts of beans when we had kids at home.
While the cost of Garlic bulbs may seem a bit steep, it can be pretty much a one time investment. After each crop comes in, one can save the best of their harvest for re-planting the next fall. In actual practice, I sometimes buy fresh garlic if our saved garlic seems to have lost its vitality and vigor. When looking at our garlic curing in the garage today, I noticed that we had hardly any garlic bulbs with split wrappers, something that hints of early rot of the garlic. When I was canning beans on Thursday, I ran out of regular mouth canning lids and had to switch to wide mouth jars. I had plenty of wide mouth lids on hand. When I shopped for more lids today at Walmart, a local grocery, and a Dollar Store, they were all out! Online, regular mouth lids were priced at three times their normal price. I finally found some still overpriced but less so on Amazon. With more green beans and tomatoes still to can, I'll need lots more canning lids in the next month or so. I had to poke my head outside between paragraphs, as the tornado warning sirens were sounding. We could use a good rain (but not a tornado) as we're still in the "Abnormally Dry" classification according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. From looking at the online weather radar, the storm is a good bit north of us. Just after noon today, I noticed some of the leaves on our pumpkin and butternut vines looked a bit droopy. They weren't quite at the day wilting stage, but were showing definite signs of heat and moisture stress. When I went out to get a picture of the deflated leaves this evening, they'd recovered somewhat. We'll need to haul water to our vining crops tomorrow morning if we don't get some rain tonight.
On a brighter note, I have fresh green beans and carrots steaming with garlic on the stove as part of a late supper for tonight. And while the tornado sirens have gone off, we're getting a good shower right now.
While picking beans today, it was impossible not to notice that a lot of our onion plants had toppled over. While storms over the weekend helped them blowing over, falling over is also a sign the onions are about ready for harvest.
We had our annual BLT celebration of our first ripe tomatoes last night. Actually, I'd added a couple of small ripe tomatoes a couple of days ago to some ham and beans. But our bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches last night were made with three small Earlirouge tomatoes. The tomatoes I picked actually yielded enough sliced tomatoes that I had leftover tomato on a cheeseburger for lunch today with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. As always, the taste of our first ripe tomatoes was incredible. I was late watering our gloxinias on our dining room table recently and all the blooms wilted. Fortunately, the plants and some of the blooms quickly recovered after a good watering producing lots of nice blooms. I have one full shelf of gloxinias under our plant lights downstairs still coming into bloom. Each summer, we enjoy having a table full of gloxinias in bloom. They're not hard to grow, but do take a little time now and then.
Related items: Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - Carrots
What we got was several pounds of rather small, thin carrots. Looking at it optimistically, you could call them gourmet carrots. Even though I hadn't thinned the carrots very well, we had few splits and also very little bug damage. I used a heavy garden fork driven into the ground beside the carrots to lift the carrots and loosen the soil around them. The carrots came out of the rather dry ground very easily. They got a quick rinse in a bucket of water before going into our garden cart. I later soaked the carrots in the cart for an hour or so before rinsing them a couple more times. Since I've cut down the amount of spring carrots I sow, this light harvest may prove to be the right amount. In the past when I spring planted a fifteen foot double row of carrots, I always had lots left over when our fall crop came in. This year's double eight foot row should prevent the disappointing and wasteful practice of having to throw away extra spring carrots. Our varieties planted are all favorites that have grown well for us in the past: Laguna, Mokum Busy Day Along with the carrot harvest that dominated the day, I mowed and raked the one acre field next to us. I also cultivated our sweet corn and used the walking tiller to work up the narrow raised bed where our garlic had grown. After digging the carrots, I pulled some onions that had fallen over and whose leaves had dried a bit. The onions got crowded onto our drying/curing table in the garage with the garlic that was already there. And I mulched our newly transplanted Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants. As I said, it was a busy day. But there was a reason for that, as there are thunderstorms tonight giving us a much needed rain. I hustled today trying to do as much as possible before the rain came. Thursday, July 16, 2020 - Fall Garden Planning
An easier method of deciding what one can still plant and grow as a fall crop is the Fall-Harvest Planting Calculator (381k XLS file) from Johnny's Selected Seeds' Planning Tools and Calculators page. It's a spreadsheet that you enter your first frost date into and the spreadsheet calculates the last dates one can safely plant various garden crops. It automatically adds in a couple of weeks to account for shorter daylength in late summer. Below is a screenshot of their calculator I did this morning. If you don't have a spreadsheet program such as Excel on your computer, Open Office is a free, open source one that can do the job. Peas and Kale
The pea transplants were a mix of Eclipse, Encore, and Garden Sweet When planting fine seeded crops such as kale or carrots, I use an old scrap of 1" x 4" lumber that broke off a few years ago. It has a pointed edge that I run down the prospective row to make a half inch deep planting furrow. You can see the furrow better and even some seed treated green in the larger version of the shot. Over half of the kale planted was Vates or Dwarf Blue Curled Scotch. They're both about the same variety, but with different names. Either way, they're our favorite kale. For some variety, I also seeded Judy's Kale, Purple Moon, Lacinato and Rainbow Lacinato, and Red Ursa, a giant leaved kale featured at the top of Our Best Garden Photos of 2013 page. My original garden plan for the narrow raised bed was to grow fall broccoli and cauliflower in it. We had a good spring harvest of both and froze a lot, so I'm not growing them this fall. That opened up the bed for the kale. The peas were a hopefully bright idea. I've not grown peas and kale together like this in an intensive planting. I still need to get some spinach, lettuce, and our fall carrots planted. From the Johnny's calculator above, you can see that I have about a week to get our green beans and onions harvested and the area tilled to get our carrots in. I'll probably pull the bean plants tomorrow, stripping off any good beans still on them. Where to go with the onions is a problem I have as yet to solve, as our drying/curing table is filled.
It's About Time! With many governors refusing to issue statewide mask requirements even though cases of Covid-19 are surging in their respective states, I was glad to see that Walmart and Sam's Club will begin on Monday requiring all customers to wear a face mask. I've been aghast seeing three-fourths of the customers in our Sullivan (IN) Walmart not wearing a face mask. Many of those unmasked customers were clearly in the high risk group due to age or other obvious physical problems.
While watching over the canner, I cut five Earlirouge tomatoes, squeezing their seed and gel into a canning jar. I'll let the seed ferment for 3-4 days before rinsing and drying it. The tomatoes cut were all ones that had split their sides, something that often happens after a dry spell followed by rain. I give step-by-step directions in our how-to, Saving Tomato Seed. Getting the green beans out will allow me to prepare part of our main raised garden bed for some fall, succession crops. I need to get our fall carrots seeded soon. Fall lettuce and spinach will also go into the area once it's renovated.
Since pulling our broccoli and cauliflower plants, other than the broccoli that is now bearing seed pods, I'd let some grass weeds that broke through the mulch get pretty well established. This part of our main bed got away from me the last two years, and I've been determined not to let weeds take over the area again. I intended to take a garden rake, hoe, and a scuffle hoe with me to clean up the area. My standard garden hoe wasn't on the back porch, so I proceeded with the other two implements. It turned out that the soil conditions today were perfect for using a scuffle hoe. I cut the grass weeds off at their base, other than one huge weed that came up with a soccer ball sized rootball! After a lot of raking a scuffling, the bed is ready to be rototilled and fall planted.
Looking around our raised garden beds, I was pleased to see that we have a few things going right despite our current dry spell. Our Japanese Long Pickling cucumber plants are growing well. Sadly, all of the snapdragon plants transplanted the same day around the cucumbers succumbed to dry conditions or cutworms. Elsewhere in our raised beds, our new planting of peas and kale are doing okay. The pea plants are surviving our current, hot conditions with daily watering. Keeping the direct seeded kale rows watered is a priority, as kale doesn't really like hot conditions. Our Earlirouge tomato plants are bearing fruit now. We had a lot of blossom end rot from them early on, probably caused by the dry conditions that prevented the plants from uptaking the calcium we'd put in the soil (lime/ground egg shells).
I also picked several yellow squash today. Like everything else, the squash and squash plants are showing the effects of the dry spell. Almost unbelievable is the forecast showing a chance of rain every day for the ten day period! Of course, weather forecasts can and do change by the hour. But we may be seeing the end of our current drought. Farming through the Drought of 1983, droughts are something that really scare me. In 1983, I watched as our fields of corn shriveled, producing two to three foot tall stalks that bore no ears. My most important gardening job for today was tilling the part of our main raised garden bed that I recently cleared crops from. The dry ground didn't till up all that well and could use another pass with the tiller. With heavy rain predicted, I may have to go with just the one tilling.
With the dry spell, watering has become a daily chore. Our newly transplanted peas are doing so-so in the dry weather. Some of the kale I seeded on Thursday has emerged already! I usually have a tough time getting kale seed to germinate in hot, dry conditions. Of course, the seed that has emerged is some of our freshest seed purchased in the last year or two. I'm holding my breath on the older seed coming up. While out in our East Garden yesterday, I discovered a softball sized Sugar Cube cantaloupe. In a week or two, we may begin feasting on melons. My hopes for a clean field of melons are now a thing of the past. I simply can't mulch fast enough to keep the melon areas of our East Garden weed free. So we'll get some melons amongst the weeds, although the melon plants are currently producing a good canopy of leaves that impede weed germination and growth. Wear the Mask It's become pretty obvious that our federal government and President aren't going to do much to protect us from the coronavirus. As citizens of this nation, what we can do is to wear face masks in public and social distance. It's a miserable state of affairs when one has to abstain from hugging children and grandchildren. And as a retired teacher, the President's push to open schools this fall seems to be his wish for re-opening at the cost of our grandchildrens' lives. Please consider his abhorrent actions as we approach a Presidential election this fall. Monday, July 20, 2020 - Fall Carrots Seeded The rain made our recently tilled soil heavy and difficult to work until I drug a rake across it. I also spread grass clipping mulch out from our row of broccoli for seed to about the edge of the carrot area. I laid my walking boards over the mulch so that the mulch and boards would keep me out of the mud and also lessen any soil compaction I was creating. I used a short piece of one inch scrap lumber to make shallow furrows down the string lines, keeping the furrow around a half inch deep. I tried to be careful spacing the carrot seed, buy my fingers got sticky with mud, so there will be clumps of carrots to be thinned. After lightly covering the seed with soil and tamping it down with my hand, I covered the planted rows with my walking boards. They'll help retain moisture in the soil and also slow weed growth under them, as carrot seed can take more than a week to germinate. I seeded Bolero, Laguna, Mokum See How We Grow Our Carrots for complete planting, harvesting, and storage info for carrots. I'd hoped to direct seed rows of beets and spinach today, but hot, humid conditions drove me back inside just after noon. So I cleaned up, ran to Walmart (where everyone was blessedly masked), and brought in a fresh onion and garlic to make some homemade refried kidney beans. Annie is making tacos or burritos for supper tonight. Later I went back outside around eight o'clock and seeded rows of beets (Bull's Blood Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - Trimming and Storing Garlic
The photo at right is a size comparison of average regular garlic and elephant garlic. I took the photo to use in our Growing Garlic how-to, as the size comparison shot I'd used there had no frame of reference for the size: thus, the mini-ruler. We store our garlic in our basement plant room. Storage conditions there aren't ideal, but we always have good garlic until the next crop comes in. Note that the braid of garlic shown is from last year. I just didn't have the heart to pitch it. Disappointing Peppers My first gardening job of the day was trimming all the red peppers off of our Earliest Red Sweet plants. Every red pepper had blossom end rot. Even though I'd put down a good bit of lime and ground egg shell to provide the plants calcium to prevent the rot, dry conditions apparently prevented adequate uptake of the necessary mineral. Peppers set on the plants since we've gotten rain look to be okay. BTW: If you purchased Earliest Red Sweet and/or Earlirouge seed from us this year and are dissatisfied with it, email me for a full refund.
Excellent Yellow Squash Recipe On a far happier note, I did a search for yellow squash recipes and found a dandy in Samantha Skaggs's Baked Parmesan Yellow Squash Recipe on the Five Heart Home site. The recipe is really quick and easy, and possibly only calls for items you already have on hand. (I didn't know we had grated Parmesan in the freezer, but my darling wife did!) The recipe is a variant of a zucchini recipe, so it should work with that vegetable as well. The results were delicious. Another inch and a half of rain fell here overnight. Instead of working outside (playing in the mud), I decided to get some things started inside. I seeded some fall lettuce: Jericho; Coastal Star; Crispino; Sun Devil; and Barbados. I'll probably seed some more in a week or so. I haven't grown any good cabbage in a few years, so I started some Super Red 80, Alcosa, and Tendersweet. Last of all, I started two 4 1/2 inch pots of Slick Pik yellow squash. While Slick Pik plants are very productive of thin yellow squash, the plants seem to wear themselves out pretty quickly, making succession plantings necessary. They're also very attractive to squash bugs, one of the few pests that causes me to break out liquid Sevin I looked out our kitchen window around noon and saw a half dozen hummingbirds swarming around our big 32 oz. feeder. I'd just filled the feeder a day or so ago. Both of our other feeders, 10 and 16 oz., were also empty. That told me that the second clutch of hummingbirds hatched out this summer had left the nest. I'll stay busy refilling the feeders until the interesting birds begin their migration south next month. I didn't take any garden shots today, but did capture a colorful evening sky over our raised beds.
My 2010 Mac Mini had been overheating and shutting down for a week or so. I'd opened it up and sprayed it with canned air to clear out dust, but that didn't help. So last night, fortified by a couple of glasses of scotch, I tore down the machine trying to find the problem. I'm not a rookie with these things, as I've partially torn down this model in the past. (This is my second 2010 Mac Mini. The first one died of, what else, overheating.) But I'd not previously pulled the motherboard on one of these things. Sadly, I didn't find the dust or dust bunnies covering the heat sink that I'd hoped to blow away. So I'm not sure if there is a problem with the motherboard, the computer chip, or the hybrid hard drive. Fortunately, I'd gone on eBay and purchased another 2010 Mac Mini before beginning the teardown. It's surprising how many of these old machines are still around and for sale. I like this model, as it's the last Mac Mini that will run Apple's Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8) operating system. I have several applications that run well under Snow Leopard that I'd have to update and/or repurchase to run under Apple's later operating systems. Installing my RAM chips and hard drive on the incoming machine will be fairly easy. I finally got my slightly newer MacBook Pro to drive my 23" monitor tonight. So, I don't know how much garden writing I'll be doing in the next few days. Other than breaking my mower, my only outdoor activity today was scraping a few weeds in our main raised bed with a scuffle hoe. The soil was still too wet for the hoeing to be effective. And after our recent rains, grass weeds are erupting throughout our garden plots. Saturday, July 25, 2020 - Weeding My first gardening job today was to take care of the grass weeds that had sprouted in our main raised garden bed since our recent rains. I'd scuffle hoed a bit yesterday, but found the ground was too wet for that to be effective.
Since the carrots, beets, and spinach seeded weren't up yet, I strung my rows again and scuffle hoed as close as I dared to the planted rows. While it didn't look like I was doing much good as I hoed, a few hours later, I could see that I'd killed most of the seedling weeds. I'll probably have to go over the area again tomorrow with the scuffle hoe to clean up weeds that survived today's weeding. And I'll have a mess of in row weeds to pick out once the crops emerge. Onions I pulled the last of our onions and moved them to the curing table in our garage. The onions pulled easily, which told me they were no longer drawing moisture and nutrition from the ground.
Most sources I've read say that storage onions need to cure in a warm, dark area for four to six weeks before being stored for winter use. When cured, one twists or cuts off the leaves. I bag our onions in old mesh potato bags and hang the bags in our plant room for storage. Broccoli for Seed I tried growing broccoli for seed last season for the first time, but didn't get any seed from our plants. I didn't give the plants enough time to mature seed and didn't have multiple plants blooming at once for the necessary cross-pollination. I found that broccoli doesn't self-pollinate. We did get some lovely blooms last year. This year, I planted a row of seven Goliath broccoli plants just for seed. It was tough not harvesting the beautiful large heads of mature broccoli, but several of the plants have now matured seed pods. I cut the stalks with seed pods on them today, placing them in a large, paper grocery bag to dry.
The idea of bagging plants for seed is that the seed pods will rupture and leave seed at the bottom of the bag. My experience with other plant types has been that I have to manually split some of the pods to release the seed. But this is my first time with saving broccoli seed, so we'll see what happens. Sweet Corn Tasseling
Near our sweet corn, our rows of melon vines have gotten away from me. I usually try to mulch with grass clippings before the vines grow over them. But this year, rains produced rampant vine growth beyond what I could mulch ahead of. Fortunately, the vines will canopy and prevent a lot of weed growth under them. We should still get some nice melons out of the planting. Gloxinias We still have gloxinias under our plant lights approaching their blooming stage. I brought another plant upstairs this morning with lovely purple and white edged blooms. It joined our table full of other gloxinias in our dining room. I've been hand pollinating the purple and white gloxinias this month. Later, I'll hand pollinate the other colors, but I wanted to see if the purple and whites were dominant. My lovely wife allows me to take over our dining room table each summer with our collection of gloxinias in bloom.
Our four rows of sweet corn are facing a lot less weed pressure. I'd made a pass through it with our walking tiller turning in some fertilizer. While there are weeds in the rows, the corn has now canopied, denying light to the grass in the rows.
So far, our sprays of homemade Not Tonight, Deer and chips of Irish Spring bar soap spread on the ground have deterred any more deer damage. Once the corn tassels and sets ears, the deer may become more aggressive. Raccoons will also be a problem, as this year's corn is closer to the woods than in previous years. With raccoons, we just try to grow enough for both them and us. I'm still resisting going to a hot wire to keep the raccoons and deer out of our East Garden. Maybe someday. The plant shown at left was direct seeded several days after I transplanted two hills of the squash. The direct seeded plants began producing just a few days after the transplants! And the direct seeded hill seems much healthier than the transplants. Hmm! Even so, I have two pots of yellow squash germinating under our plant lights in the basement. When our current plants wear out, I'll put the new plants in our main raised bed. And while the squash have been a little slow to germinate in the basement, all of the lettuce and most of the cabbage I started on Wednesday have come up. Wanting to get these plants in the ground as soon as possible, I moved them to a protected area of our back porch this afternoon. While out this morning (I was done gardening by noon.), I pulled all but one of our Goliath broccoli plants for seed. The one remaining plant is still ripening some apparently viable seed pods. I also noticed a white cabbage moth fluttering about, so I filled my organics sprayer with Thuricide and sprayed the remaining plant and our seedling kale. I refilled the sprayer with Serenade biofungicide and sprayed our languishing Earlirouge tomato plants. I'm not sure what is wrong with the plants, other than they got stunted during our dry spell, but thought a spray of fungicide couldn't hurt. Of course, it began raining a few minutes ago, washing off much of the sprays, so I'll need to repeat them tomorrow. I may be offline a day or two starting tomorrow. A replacement 2010 Mac Mini is supposed to be delivered, and I'll be testing it before moving my main hard drive and RAM chips into it. And to top it off, I found a new 2018 model on eBay that I'm watching that may move me closer to the world of modern computing! For now, my 2011 MacBook Pro is handling all of my computing chores.
Gardening today was limited to picking a few yellow squash and looking for ripe cantaloupe. I didn't find any Sugar Cube melons ready to pick, usually our first to ripen. We again had Samantha Skaggs's Baked Parmesan Yellow Squash with our lunch. I varied the recipe a bit by adding seasoned salt and some ground asiago to go with the recommended ground Parmesan topping. The squash were delicious. I checked our rows of carrots, beets, and spinach planted over a week ago. Other than an odd carrot seedling here and there, nothing came up! I'll wait until the ground dries out, rototill, and plant again. But it's going to be close to a first frost if we can get the seed to germinate, as we're running out of gardening days for this season. Friday, July 31, 2020 - July Wrap-up
But normal has been out the window much of this year. We're staying home and social distancing, trying to stay healthy amidst the coronavirus pandemic. Civil unrest has spread across the nation, and we have an idiot President doing his best to inflame racial divisions and let the virus go unchecked. (And normally, I keep my political opinions to myself on these pages.)
Our gardening month began with some deer damage to our newly emerged sweet corn. That may have been a good thing, as it got me spraying the corn with our homebrew of Not Tonight, Deer and spreading chips of Irish Spring bar soap around the corn planting. Our corn is tasselling now, but spraying is not effective with the rain we're having. I transplanted our Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers between our double trellis on the Fourth of July. The plants took off, but appear to be experiencing a bit of downy mildew now. I've sprayed them with Serenade biofungicide. If that doesn't prove effective, I'll move on to the non-organic, but effective Fungonil fungicide.
Our green bean varieties matured sort of staggered this year, preventing one or two big pickings and cannings. We still put up enough beans to last us through the winter, but it took three tries at the canning. Even before I cleared our makeshift drying/curing table of garlic, I had to make room for some early onions. Fortunately, I got the garlic bagged and stored before filling the table with some of the best onions we've ever grown. In keeping with a non-normal July, I filed our taxes a day or two before the fifteenth. Even though it was legal, it still felt funny waiting so long to do the filing. I transplanted some short fall peas and direct seeded kale mid-month. The jury is still out on whether the pea transplants will make it, but the kale looks pretty good.
Days after the digging, I started our fall carrots, some beets, and fall spinach. When I checked the rows last evening, all I found was one beet plant amongst the weeds that had sprung up in the rows. Once our soil dries out, I'll rototill again and re-plant, hoping for a late fall.
While I let our melon rows get weedy, we have lots of cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon maturing. Our hills of butternuts and pumpkins are also doing well. I've bemoaned our computer ills enough this month. It will probably take until the middle of next month before I get everything restored and working properly. Ending on a high note, we've enjoyed fabulous gloxinia blooms so far this summer. I fell in love with growing gloxinias over forty years ago. Just growing them morphed into breeding them about twenty years ago. It wasn't on purpose, but I was teaching science classes whose curriculum included plant pollination. So I encouraged my students to begin hand pollinating our classroom gloxinias with Q-tips.
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