Behind the cut are two photos of the latest unknown bug to be found in my garden. I’m going to post a question about them at AskMetafilter later, but maybe someone reading my blog knows what the hell they are.

I have spent hours and hours looking at photos of bugs and reading about bugs and typing every imaginable descriptor into Google and coming up with nothing. In fact, the only thing I got out of the whole process is that I itch all over from looking at and thinking about bugs too much!
Continue Reading »

With snoopy cat, of course! Can’t have a photo without one!

The carrots, scallions, and dill are now chilling in vacuum-sealed bags in the freezer! Yippee!

I left the one dill plant most likely to produce a proper head of seeds unmolested, and instead of pulling up the others, I just cut them back (leaving a few leaves) to see if they will grow again. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Doesn’t matter, as I have enough dill for a year stashed in the freezer already.

The most enjoyable aspect of this morning is the fact it started raining a few minutes after my last post, and there’s been a nice slow rain going for over an hour. I have the windows open, and it feels so good. Also the smells in the house right now are wonderful!

The weirdest thing about this morning was the appearance of hundreds, if not thousands, of mayflies. When the rain let up for a moment, they rose from our yard like a cloud. The cats went crazy trying to bust through the window screens to get to them, and the birds descended and had themselves a nice lunch … which only added to the insanity level of the cats. It was strange walking out to the garden to get the dill amidst all the bugs and birds. Strange and weird, but sort of neat!

When the rain lets up again, I’ll be going out to pull up the cucumbers. Since it’s likely to be cooler today and the beans are blooming, I’ll leave them be long enough to see if any beans set, but I better see some beans in the next two days, or away they go too. Then the only thing left in Bed One will be the marigolds and one lonely okra plant with one lonely pod on it I am allowing to dry for seed … and the dill plants.

I think while the soil is moist (wet) today, I’ll pull up the Early Girl tomato plant. I cut it back when it stopped blooming, and it hasn’t shown any plan to grow any new leaves. It gave us some pounds of tomatoes already, so I’m willing to let it go gently into that good night. I’m also debating pulling up the Better Boy as well. It has two small tomatoes on it that have been sitting there not growing or changing color for weeks and weeks. It also doesn’t seem to be blooming anymore. I think it’s time has come. Maybe I’ll leave it for the birds, since they seem to fancy the Better Boys best of all. Might make them leave the rest of my tomatoes alone!

Aaah. Rain, lower temperatures, and good work done in the garden. Today, so far, has been a very good day.

I’m having my morning coffee, in preparation for going at the garden this morning. At 83ºF, it’s pleasantly cool outside. It’s also cloudy. There’s thunder rumbling just over the horizon. Might we get some rain? As much as I want to get some things done in the garden today, I would not be at all upset to have to call it off on account of rain. In fact, it would be so glorious to experience rain, I might even work on the garden out in the rain. It’d be really great to get some rain. I miss rain. Rain is good. Please let it rain!!!

Anyway, I don’t feel like processing a bunch of carrots and herbs today, but it has to be done at some point. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I can start getting the garden ready for the next round of growing things, and it would be nice to just pull a pack of frozen carrots out of the freezer for dinner, without the pulling, washing, cleaning, and cutting having to be done on the spot. The coffee is giving me the energy to do it (I’ve been so low on energy the last few days), but the willpower is still lacking somewhat. Too bad there isn’t an additive to put in coffee to give one willpower!

And there’s some cat news this morning. Overnight, my sweet and adorable baby, Tora, has become a teenager. Yes, the cat who almost never got into anything, who was always sweet and wonderful, has become a bit of a terror. Tora is developing an attitude. She’ll be a year old next month, so it isn’t like I am surprised by this change. One year old kitties are terrors of the worst sort. I’ve noticed that’s when they begin to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior just like human teenagers do. Hopefully, this is a stage she will outgrow quickly –more quickly than the other two, who are just now, at 3 years of age, beginning to clue into the fact that there are things they are never allowed to do.

The thunder is really rumbling now. The radar shows it raining to the south of us and to the north of us. With my luck, we won’t get a single drop at my house. I’m keeping my fingers crossed though, because I would really like to have some rain today. Not even for the garden, which has been recently well watered, but because it would be nice to have some kind of weather other than hot and awful. It could even hail, and I wouldn’t be too heartbroken about it. I just need some sort of weather other than the weather we have been having! Of course, if it does rain, it will only make the heat worse when the sun comes out (which it will), but still, it’d be nice while it lasted.

My coffee is done, and I think I have the willpower to get pull up the carrots and do all the things I need to do to get them into the freezer. Once I get them done, maybe I’ll feel like doing the same with the dill and scallions … and pulling up the non-producing aphid hotel cucumber plants will just be the icing on the cake. I’ve also done research on the beans, and my fears that they won’t set fruit due to it being too hot turns out to be true. I still like how easy those beans are to grow, but now I know not to bother planting a second planting during the summer. Live and learn! I am consoling myself over the waste of an entire pack of seeds with the fact that beans, even when they don’t produce anything edible, help increase the nitrogen levels of the soil they grow in.

Well … I am off to work on carrots. Maybe I’ll get rained on while doing so, and that would be just fine with me!

No matter how tired, cranky, or lazy I am tomorrow, or how hot and disgusting it is in the morning, I am going to clear out Bed One in the garden and process what’s there for the freezer. The sooner I get it done, the sooner I will feel inspired to get the seedlings for the next round of planting started. If I get Bed One cleared out, I can then start working up my willpower to deal with the mounds and the tomato plants. None of it is especially awful or heavy work, but in the kind of heat we have been having around here, just walking out to the garden to look at it feels like heavy work.

The potato plants are seriously starting to die back. That means that very soon we will be chomping on homegrown potatoes! After they die back or are cut back, I’m supposed to wait a couple of weeks to dig them up. It allows the skins to harden for storage. I doubt I will be waiting a couple of weeks for two reasons. We eat a lot of potatoes, and I don’t have room to store a lot of potatoes anyway. I hardly think there are going to be that many potatoes there, and if there are, well that’s what processing and freezing is for.

In short, I am eager to move on with the garden. The spring garden is all but over now, and the heat has to break eventually (it does, doesn’t it). I know I have griped about my garden a lot, and it is true things didn’t go as well as I had planned, but if all the stuff we’ve eaten out of the garden since sometime in February were piled up together, we’ve actually gotten a lot of produce from it … and I had fun and learned some new things.

Here are some of the things I have learned:

It is imperative that I have an indoor seed starting setup.

I will never bother with cucumbers again. Too much aggravation.

Tearing things out of the ground that aren’t doing anything is A-OK.

Mulching around plants is necessary in Texas.

Homemade, organic methods of pest control work.

Focus on a few types of veggies and plant more of each.

Companion planting may be a lot of hooey.

Have a dedicated herb garden with nothing but herbs.

Be even more organized with everything.

Start earlier than I think I should start.

And more, of course. Those are just the top things that come to mind as I start planning the next plantings. I’m looking forward to the next garden, and the next one after that. As long as I still enjoy it, there will be a garden at Casa de Orb.

Speaking of gardening (when am I not), I got a catalog in the mail the other day for iris bulbs. I am not much of a flower person. I like flowers, but I have never felt the desire to grow them, and any flowering plants I have been given, I quickly kill through neglect, but I do love the iris. While I don’t think I’ll ever spend $20 for a single tuber (but, OMG, it is a totally black iris), I think I want to devote the entire front bed to iris plants. Why? Well, aside from loving them and having fond memories of my grandfather loving them, I know for a fact I can’t kill them.

We have blue irises in the front bed and yellow irises in the back yard all of which have been here since we bought the house. The closest thing to attention they have ever gotten is the annual attempt to remove all the weeds from the beds (which I always give up on before the job is done). Even though I pay them no attention at all and never water them, they continue to come back ever year and bloom beautifully. In 6 years, I haven’t killed a one of them, in fact, there are more now than when we moved in. Therefore, the iris is the perfect flowering plant for me! They are apparently indestructible!

I think I’ll go spend my five minutes of late-afternoon outdoor time checking to see what the various critters have eaten in my garden today. I’ve pretty much given up trying to keep the birds and whatnot away from things. Nothing really works anyway, and I’m a softy for the wildlife. They deserve some tasty kibble too, and I do like having the critters around, now that they won’t be living in my laundry room anymore.

I just spent my five allowed afternoon minutes checking on the garden.

The birds got another tomato. This one hadn’t even started to ripen yet. Damn birds.

The beans are still not making beans.

The cucumbers are still acting as aphid motels and not making cucumbers.

Everything looks pretty miserable.

But wait! There’s good news too!

I found a potato peeking out from under the ground! An actual potato! I covered it with dirt and giggled my way back into the house to inform Lin that it looks like we may very well have some potatoes after all. Well, we have at least one potato, and it was a pretty potato too. Nice size and color. I am so excited! I’ll probably cut back the already dying vines this week, and then in two weeks we get to find out about our potatoes! Yippee!

So I am still somewhat disgusted with what this Texas summer is doing to the rest of my garden, I’m thrilled to finally know I have produced at least one good sized potato.

Anyone want to hear me go on about gardening? No? Too bad.

I’m going to the grocery as soon as Lin is gone in the morning, and then I am working in the garden until I get some things done, no matter how hot it gets. This heat has kept me from getting some things done, because it’s hot from before the sun comes up to well after it sets … and at night. It’s still in the 90’s out there right now. This is not conducive to gardening work.

I want to get the carrots and scallions out of the ground and into the freezer, and since the cucumbers don’t seem to be setting any fruit at all, they might as well get tossed in the trash. All they are doing is harboring aphids and making more work for me killing said aphids. Waste of time, energy, and bed space. I might leave the largest one, in hopes something comes of it, but I doubt that will happen. Getting these things done will open up half of Bed One to be prepped for fall stuff.

The second planting of bush beans has been blooming, but not one bean. I’m guessing it’s too damn hot. They have about another week to produce a bean. Yes, I will leave the entire section of bean plants if just one of them manages to create a bean in the next week. I am a kind god in that way. That would leave the recently planted okra seeds, the dill, and the marigolds. I have no attachment to the marigolds, the okra will probably getting eaten off as soon as it sprouts just like the squash seedlings, and the dill can be frozen. Therefore, there is nothing at all keeping me from emptying out the whole of Bed One.

I have additionally been looking at the Three Sisters Mounds with a critical eye. The corn was a total wash. We had some squash, but then plants were destroyed in various ways (critters, pests, and my own stupidity), and the pole beans are blooming but also not producing but the odd bean now and then. At the moment, those mounds only still have plants growing on them due to those few lone beans. I suspect that once I have accumulated enough bean seeds to replace what I planted, I may cease being the kind god and tear all the plants out of the mounds. So there’s half my garden empty.

The potatoes have begun dying back. This is a normal part of the process, and it’s happening about when I expected it to happen, but I do still worry that it’s a disease issue. I don’t have a clue if there are any actual edible potatoes under those plants. As soon as a few more of the stems die back, I’ll be cutting them all back, waiting two weeks for any potential potatoes to harden their skins, and then digging them up. But, you may ask, what about the peanuts growing around the potatoes?!

Yes, well, let’s talk about the peanuts. Last week, I went out to the garden set on pulling up the peanuts. I am sick of looking at their sickly little forms, and as far as I could tell, there were no peanuts being produced. I pulled up one plant, and it had two baby peanuts on it. Ugh. I now suspect there are at least a couple of peanuts on each plant, so they get to stay until they die back as well. I’ll dig the potatoes out around them as carefully as possible, but it won’t break my heart if I lose a few peanuts. They should start dying back in a couple of weeks too, so with the potatoes and peanuts about to be “harvested” there’s another quarter of my garden open and empty shortly.

That leaves me with the surviving tomatoes, peppers, basil, and some carrots. This sucks, but there’s no point keeping stuff around just to have something to do. At Casa de Orb, plants either produce something useful, or they don’t exist in my garden. I am a kind god and a merciful god, but I do have my limits. All gods do, you know. Besides, this really is the time to be getting ready for the fall garden. I’d expected the transition to have more overlap, but I didn’t anticipate such extreme heat, and there were some planting location errors made (as far as plants not getting enough sun).

It’s pointless to fight the inevitable end of the “spring” garden. Therefore, it must be time to sit down with my notebook and plan the late summer garden and order seeds! Things I can plant right now (which I already have seeds for) are corn, cucumbers, okra, peppers, and tomatoes. So I guess I will start with those. How I will protect the seedlings from the oppressive heat and starving critters, I do not know, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out … like starting them all in my starter tray (outside) and bringing them into the house every night.

I like the planning part, and it will take the sting off having to pull up so many plants (and having a really empty garden for a few weeks). I’m going to get out the graph paper, ruler, and other planning tools, so they will be ready tomorrow when I have to come in from being out in the heat. I’d love to start working on it tonight, but I do have to get up and get moving early in the morning, and it’s getting late. Time to go dream about how great my garden will be in early fall!

Yes, I am ever the optimist. The next garden is ALWAYS going to be great.

I harvested some seed from the garden today. The first okra pod that formed on the strongest and best okra plant, as well as the first Kentucky Wonder bean off the best of those plants. Next year I’ll be planting these, in hopes of better results, and saving the first seed from them as well again.

In other garden news, the squash seeds I planted a few days ago came up … and were promptly chewed off by some critter. I don’t have anymore seed, so I guess that’s going to be it for the squash, unless there’s some seed worthy of being saved from the squash we will be eating this weekend.

I got mulch around the peppers and tomatoes this morning. Then I sprayed the cucumbers for aphids and watered the hell out of the whole garden. I don’t think any of this is going to do too much good for the food production, but maybe I can keep some of the plants alive and somewhat healthy until it cools off in a month or two. It’s just too damn hot for plants out there. Or people, for that matter.

I think tomorrow morning I may pull up the first planting of carrots, steam them, and toss them in the freezer. The second planting is larger enough now for any fresh carrot needs we may have. The scallions aren’t growing any larger either and have never achieved the size they should have, so I’ll probably pull them up, chop them up, and freeze them in small batches as well. That’ll leave me a third of one garden bed to replant with something. Probably more carrots for fall, and maybe I’ll try to get some fennel started too.

Now I am soaking and washing dishes in preparation for baking some bread this afternoon. I will not be going outside again until after the sun goes down. Too damn hot, and there are way too many bugs. Texas summers suck.

Current temperature? 103ºF. Heat index? 109ºF. Current soil temperature in my garden? 100ºF.

I watered the hell out of the garden this morning, because I knew the heat would be beastly. The soil temp this morning was 90ºF. This morning at the crack of dawn! The intense watering lowered it to 80º, which is acceptable. Then the sun came out, and now my plants are sitting in wet, excessively hot soil. It’s no wonder everything is suffering.

Tomorrow, I am going to mulch the garden, but I don’t think it’s actually going to help as much as Lin thinks it will. With heat like this, when the soil 4″ down is very moist, and it’s still 100ºF at that level, a layer of leaves isn’t going to do anything much to help.

Though the roma tomatoes seem to love it. They are finally taking off and growing, as is the basil. Also, I thought the pepper plant that had finally started blooming was a bell pepper, but I can see now that it isn’t. It’s a pepperoncini, and there are oodles more blooms! Oh how I love those peppers. Can’t wait to pickle some!

So, as usual, good news and bad news in the garden. Still not disgusted enough to give up. After all, in a few more weeks, I’ll be planting the fennel for fall. Mmmmm … homegrown fennel!