Well, today we had a very early cold snap with the high about 45 F, and tonight we're under a freeze watch. Predicted low is 35 F, but it might go lower. So my English peas may be toast, which is a shame, they've done so well.

I guess I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't regarding peas -- it's too wet in the spring, and the weather is too unpredictable in the fall unless I want to try planting in the middle of August instead of the end of August...

Hopefully they'll be okay, the amount I've got planted is bigger than any plastic I have that I could cover them with. This is extremely early for this sort of cold in my area (central northwest GA). It should be in the mid 60's to low 70's during the day, and 40's to 50's at night.

I'll know tomorrow morning if they froze or if I can still hope for peas -- the older plants have set blooms so it's particularly annoying to get an early freeze...

We're having a cold snap this week, not freezing, but it's getting down into the low 40's tonight, and no higher than low 50's the rest of the week. That's not good for tomatoes and peppers, especially peppers, so we went out and pulled up the plants. Had some nice pepper almost ripe, but because of the cold, wet spring and late planting of pepper and tomato plants, there weren't enough green tomatoes to bring in and ripen in a box, and the baby peppers that were just forming wouldn't have had time to grow.

So all that's out there now are the English peas. I've set stakes and run string for them to climb -- I wasn't able to put it out there when the first plot was ready, as it rained every day for about a week, so they're being a bit recalcitrant about training up the trellis strings. They want to continue growing horizontally, even when I wrap them around the string! The second plot though is doing well, growing UP, and finding the string as they need it.

Tomorrow I'll go out and set line stake on each row to support the string in the middle. Also need to hoe up grass in the first plot, again the rain kept me out of the garden for entirely too long.

Last week I pulled all the NK 199 corn, made 16 pints. Which was pretty good, and in line with what the other corn varieties I planted did. Tasted very nice, too, more of a starchy corn flavor than you get with the supersweets. I had about a pint left over, which I fixed like this:

Take about a dozen ears, husk and silk. Cut the kernels from the corn. Put this in the refrigerator so it doesn't all convert to starch while you do the next step.

Melt a stick of butter per dozen ears. When the butter is hot and bubbling, add the corn and milk that may have drained out. Cook at medium high heat, stirring constantly, for about 15 to 20 minutes. You have to stir constantly or the corn will burn. Add salt and pepper to taste.

That's how we made it when I was a kid in Florida. Nothing better. If you're so inclined (it's a heck of a lot of work) you can do all your corn like this, and freeze it in pint batches. You have to stir it constantly though, and a bigger batch is not only harder to stir, it takes longer to cook. I prefer just draining a jar I hot-processed and cooking it in the hot butter.

And that's it for now...

Pulled up the rest of Derby beans around August 29, and that made 11 quarts and 11 pints. Then last weekend (Labor Day) we pulled the first section of Burpee Stringless, which made 17 quarts and 1 pint. Today pulled the last section of Burpee Stringless, and made 16 qt, 1 pt. The Derby overall made 32 quarts, 1 pint; the Burpee Stringless made 33 quarts, 1 pt. If I'd planted all Burpee from the get-go I'd have probably gotten a second harvest and not had to replant.

So my grand total of snap beans, all varieties, is 65 quarts, 19 pints. That should see us through the winter and into spring and early summer, until the new beans come in next year.

I planted Wando English peas on 8/27 in the original sideyard garden, in front of the peppers. Those had germinated by 9/2, and I thinned them 9/9. I planted more in the other plot behind the tomatoes 9/5, they've just started to poke their heads up. They should bear in the first two weeks of November. I'm going to trellis them by putting in stakes at each end of the double rows (planted 6 inches apart, the double rows are 2' apart), a couple along the line of the row, and running cotton twine at 6", 18", 30", and 48". That should take care of the height, and it's reusable.

The NK 199 corn is coming in this week. I did a couple of experiments with it:

• (1) I usually go along the rows when they're shedding pollen and shake each stalk to make sure pollen drifts over the stand well. I'll even take a top off a couple of stalks and shake them directly onto the silks to make sure everything is pollinating well. Just to see if I'm really making a difference, I didn't do that this time.


• (2) I dusted the other corn I planted this year with Sevin when it tasseled out. I didn't do that with the NK 199 just to see if there is an issue with corn earworm around here.

Well, I have a partial answer to 1 and a definite answer to 2.

We had some fresh ears for supper the other night, and the kernel filling wasn't as good as the other corn. So apparently it does help for me to go out and micromanage the pollination. Also, each ear was chewed to some extent by corn earworm, and we found a worm in one of the ears. The damage isn't hugely bad, but after a summer of clean, pest-free corn, it was a bit alarming to find this.

So looks like I'll be shaking my corn stalks and puffing Sevin dust on all my corn next year.

Last weekend I pulled up the Derby beans in the first section of the sideyard garden, where the tomatoes and peppers are. The second block is just now making beans, they'll be ready next weekend.

Had my husband and our son out there helping, got all the plants pulled up and stripped of beans. Ended up with enough to make 15 quarts of snapped beans.

Also got enough tomatoes to process (including the ones in the freezer). I had a good batch last weekend, which I prepared in a different way, but that went into a spaghetti sauce which wasn't... quite... right. So I had the brilliant idea to open a can of commercial tomato sauce, and adjust my canner-ready sauce until it tasted like the commercial sauce.

Here is the new process for processing tomatoes:

1. The day before you want to can sauce, cut your tomatoes up into quarters and put in a sieve in the sink. Let them drain overnight to get as much water out as possible. Do this to tomatoes you're going to freeze, as well.

2. The next day either put the tomatoes in a bag and freeze them until you're ready to process, or put them in a big pot and heat just until the skins start to loosen up.

3. Run the tomatoes through your food juicer/strainer (I have the attachment to use on my Kitchenaid stand mixer) and collect the squeezin's.

4. Heat to boiling, then turn heat down but keep a pretty vigorous boil going. About medium high heat. Stir every 15 min or so, you don't want it to scorch.

5. Depending on how much juice and meat you have, it'll take anywhere from 30 min to 2 hours for the sauce to cook down. You want it to be as thick as regular commercial tomato sauce. If you need to, open a can of commercial sauce to check.

6. When it's at that point, check the pH, which should be in the 5.0 to 5.5 range. Stir in about 3/4 teaspoon salt per pint of sauce (adjust to your taste -- this is roughly what tastes right to me, compared to commercial sauce). If you opened a can of sauce, add it to your pot, and can using pressure canning.

This sauce tastes right, and it looks right in the jars. Made 5 pints.

In other news, the Stringless Green beans are just now blossoming, and the NK 199 corn has topped out and has ears tasseling. We had a pretty frisky storm Saturday night, which knocked a lot of the corn over, but it's standing back up really well.

If it's nice tomorrow, I'm going to plant the empty bean block in Wando english peas. They should be ready to pick by the middle of October or so. I'll be planting the other block in peas as well, when we get the beans out of it.

And that's all for now....

Beans: thinned the Burpee Stringless I planted 7/22, and today my hubby ran my soaker hose for me. They're doing very well, and starting to put out blossoms. The Derby that I planted 7/1 is very robust, with lots of blooms and tiny baby beans forming. I'm going to be very rich in beans. Mmmmmm, beans.

Corn: it's about 2 1/2 feet high, and was hilled about a week ago I think. I side-dressed with 10-10-10 yesterday, and once again must sing the praises of my Earthway garden seeder. I got the Fert-A-Ply side dress attachment for it, and after finally figuring out how to put it on, it worked like a charm.

Tomatoes and pepper coming along nicely, already picked and frozen some of the Italian peppers. I have several baby bell peppers coming on, and two that are almost mature size. Tomato plants are absolutely loaded, and I have about 1/2 gallon of early maturers quartered and in the freezer waiting for enough to process.

I've only had to spray insecticide once this year -- I was starting to get aphids on the peppers and jumped on them right away. I check them daily to see if there are any come to visit again, haven't seen any. Nothing on the 'maters either.

Haven't had to water with the hose or the sprinkler for a couple of weeks, we had excellent rain last week (1.83 inches) and then Monday we had 1 inch. So no need for supplemental water.

And I guess that's it, until the beans start coming in and I'm canning them.

I hilled up the NK-199 corn today, and ran a soaker hose through the patch. The corn is about 18" tall now, and looking very good. Using the tiller to bust up the soil makes hilling corn a snap -- takes about 10 min to cultivate between the rows, and another 15 to 20 min to pull the loose dirt up into hills.

The bush beans I planted 7/22 have germinated, and most are above ground. I'm still hand watering them, since they aren't all up yet. In about a week or so I should be able to see the rows well enough that I can run the soaker hose through the beans.

Beginning to get some ripe tomatoes -- I have about half a gallon bag of quartered 'maters in the freezer, waiting for enough to make sauce. 2 of the plants are patently NOT paste type tomatoes -- they're your typical round slicer! Don't know what they are, but I'm sure they'll do fine. These are a couple from Totally Tomatoes -- I guess that's a hazard of ordering your tomatoes already grown. You might not get exactly what you asked for.

We've pulled a few Italian peppers, had them in spaghetti sauce yesterday. Yum. They added such a fresh, bright flavor to the sauce.

And that's it for now...

I decided we had a gracious plenty of corn (32 pints canned, 39 ears frozen, 153 row feet planted), so instead of putting NK-199 corn in the two open blocks of the corn patch, I planted more snap beans.

This time around I planted Burpee's Stringless Green Bush Bean, about 300 row feet. I know I complained last year about this variety, that it didn't seem to produce steadily but had two big harvest and was done, but looking at my records for 2008 I saw that, from 100 row feet, I got 23 quarts, so that's not shabby. Given that this is a strange year, with my first planting not coming to much because of the cold, wet spring, it's fine if I only get 2 harvests out of these plants and one or two out of the Derby bush beans I planted in the other garden plot. I have about 190 row feet of Derby, so if I extrapolate from the 23 quarts out of 100 rf, I should get about 100 quarts out of what I have now. Of course some of that we'll eat right away, so I'll likely get 80 or so quarts actually processed.

Got some tomatoes ripening, and the Italian peppers are big and plump, but not ripe. Picked a few anyway to slice up and put in a sauce for supper tonight. Got some baby bell peppers, too, and lots of blossoms.

And that's it for now...

Well, I went out yesterday evening and pulled up the corn stalks, then pulled up the soaker hose. It had quit raining, but it was still pretty mucky. I wanted to get everything out of the way, though, so that I could Round-Up the grass and weeds. So that was muddy and exhausting. I piled all the corn stalks in the wheelbarrow and put them on the compost pile (never got around to building a compost container, but I really should, there's plenty this year), then sat around and rested, hosed off my feet and my garden Crocs, then went in and had a delicious long, cool shower.

Then for supper ate baked ham, snap beans from the garden, and cornbread muffins. Dang those beans are sooooo good, so much better than anything you get at the store.

This morning Jack the kitten was rampaging through the house at 7:30 am, so I went out and sprayed Round-Up on the two empty soon-to-be bean blocks in the corn patch. NK-199 corn is up very nicely, I can probably thin it today after it dries out some. It's about 3 inches tall now.

Beans are doing very well, our two rounds of rain this week have made it really come on. We had 1.5 inches Sunday and another 0.34 inches yesterday, so I don't need to water for another week.

Got some wheat straw, going to mulch the tomatoes and the peppers later today. I also need to put up the last of the Maple Sugar corn this morning. Then I think I'll take a little nap, since Danger Kitten is taking one as well.

I picked all the Maple Sugar late corn yesterday, and processed it. I froze 39 ears, and cut the rest, which made 12 pints. I was going to pull the stalks today, but got a late start because the kitten wouldn't settle down and kept waking me up to play, then it began storming. Not complaining, playing with kittens if fun, and we needed the rain -- got about 1/2 inch so far and looks like we may get a bit more tonight.

As you know, I had planted one block of the corn patch with NK-199 corn, but rethinking my corn strategy, I've decided to plant the other two blocks with more snap beans. We eat more beans over the course of a year then corn, and I'm a little worried about how much beans I have put up and will get from the Derby bush beans I planted the first of the month.

So I've ordered a pound of Burpee Stringless Green Bush seeds for the other two blocks, and a pound of Wando garden peas to plant where the Derby is planted when it's done. I'll end up having almost 500 row feet of snap beans and 200 row feet of garden peas.

Total count so far on corn is 33 pints, and 39 ears in the freezers. With the NK-199 I should be able to add about 15 or so pints of corn. I have 5 pints and 5 quarts of beans -- hopefully I can really increase that by the end of the season.

Tomatoes are coming along, and I may have a few Godfather peppers coming ready. Bells peppers are just now setting blossoms -- I'm looking for them to be producing by the middle of August.

Tomatoes first: had an outbreak of blossom-end rot on all the baby 'maters on one plant, so I took them all off. Luckily, none of the other plants seem to have issues, and blossom-end rot seems to only affect the first round of fruit -- later fruits don't have it. Just to be safe, though, I dosed all the plants with some powdered lime (CaCO3) and a table spoon of Epsom salts (MgSO4·7H2O), then watered it in. Got several baby fruits that are sound now, and plenty blossoms.

Corn: pulled all the mid season corn this week (Chubby Checker). Set aside 6 boiling ears, and cut the rest with the OXO corn stripper, which continues to be a godsend. It cuts the kernels so neatly, and you have whole kernels... well, more so than if you try to cut the kernels off with a knife. No need to scrape the ears to get the milk out, either, since you're getting the whole kernel off. Final yield from the Chubby Checker corn was 18 boiling ears and 12 pints canned. Yesterday I pulled all the stalks, today I'll take up the soaker hose, hoe up the grass, and spray Round-Up along the fence. Tomorrow I'll till, rake, and plant NK-199.

Speaking of NK-199, I planted the early patch with it last weekend, and have pretty good germination so far. I've had to hand-water it, so I've been giving it a good soak every 3 to 4 days.

Beans: pulled up all the bean plants from the first planting and planted with Derby bush bean, using my new toy, the Earthway Garden Seeder 1001-B. That little sucker is GREAT! Got that planted July 1, and they had started germinating by July 6. I went out yesterday and thinned since it all is pretty much up, and now I have a decent bean crop coming on.

A little about the seeder -- I don't know how I managed before I had it. You just set the plow blade to the depth you need, set your first row using string, fill the seed hopper, and walk along your row marker. The blade opens the ground, the hopper drops a seed using a seed plate with holes that space your seeds perfectly, a chain follows to cover the seed, and the rear wheel firms the soil over the seed. It has a row marking arm that you set for the distance between rows, then you just keep the row marker on your previous row while you plant the current one. I can plant a 13 x 20 plot in less than 15 minutes -- doing it the old way with the high-wheel plow, marking every row, cutting a furrow, planting the seed, then covering with a rake, then firming it, would take me about an hour to do the same plot. All I do now after planting is rake over the whole plot to make sure everything is covered, then water the seeds in. Easy Peasy. I highly recommend getting one of these seeders if you're doing a fair sized garden. Be sure to shop around though, I didn't pay what Amazon is asking.

Went out and picked most of the early corn (there's still 2 or 3 rows I need to get tomorrow). Got 7 boiling ears out of it and the rest made 6 pints of cut corn. The OXO Corn Stripper worked just great!

The lid didn't pop on one pint, so it's in the refrigerator until I pick the rest of the corn, and I'll mix it in and reprocess it. I've also told our mail carrier, Shirley, that the corn is ready. She'll be by tomorrow afternoon to get some, which she insists on paying for. I wish she wouldn't -- part of the fun of a garden is being able to give the produce away. I'll probably tell her 10 cents an ear or something.

Had more boiled corn tonight with supper, again, it was fabulous. This Early Choice cultivar is outstanding. It will be planted again.

Didn't get around to the beans today, got a canker sore on my tongue that's laying me low as well as a foster kitten that's waking me up early, so I slept most of the day. But tomorrow, I promise!

Pulled up the bean plants yesterday after picking them clean. Got 4 quarts of beans out of them. Tomorrow I'll plant another crop, which will hopefully come up better than this first planting did, because of the horrid wet weather which rotted about half my seeds. This will be a pure stand of Derby bush snap beans. I hope they're prolific.

Also had some of the early corn today with supper. Mmmmmm -- beautifully filled ears, crisp and sweet. Incredible flavor. The mid and late corn will be ready in a couple more weeks. I'll pull as much of the corn as is ready tomorrow and get it put up -- probably half as corn on the cob and the other half as cut corn.

Got one of these:

OXO Good Grips Corn Stripper

from Amazon the other day, we'll see how it does for stripping the corn. Reviews say it's really good, hope so. I like cream corn, but I'd like to have whole kernel corn sometimes, too.

Went out and picked my first mess of beans today, just enough for supper. Mmmmmm boy, they were good! The beans weren't quite big enough, but that's alright, they tasted just fine. Got about a quart from half of the plants, I'll be checking the other half tomorrow.

Also ran soaker hose in the corn patch, and finally have it all worked out so that it all gets watered. We don't have quite enough water pressure to do the whole thing at once, what with it being on a slight slope, so I set it up so that it's split into two runs and the hose attaches at the top of the slope. I'll have to remember to move the hose from one side to the other, and I have the timer set to run every 3 days for 45 min.

Set up a sprinkler in the bean/tomato/pepper patch, which is set to run for 60 min once a week. I might need to have it run twice a week, some of the beans were a bit floppy, not plump and firm, so they're a little water poor. I really need to just get more soaker hose, but it's gone up in price this year, I already have the sprinkler, and our water restrictions have eased so that I can run it.

The early corn is doing very well. Just about every stalk has at least 2 ears silking on it, and the tops have opened out and are producing pollen. We've had good winds recently too, so I don't really have to wander around out there shaking the stalks, but I might do it anyway tomorrow. It's getting ready to rain tonight, so I'll need to dust the silks again tomorrow.

Yesterday I tied up the tomato plants and did some light pruning -- mostly just pinching off the lowest branches and making sure there was just one main stem. Almost all of them were big enough to tie -- about a foot tall or more. Just a couple were still too small. They've done amazingly well. Also got some plastic stakes from Home Depot for the peppers, $0.97 each, and put them in next to the pepper plants. I forgot to tie up the Godfather peppers, they really need it, so I'll do it tomorrow. The others aren't quite big enough yet, but they will be soon. I have some blossoms on the Godfather plants already!

And as promised a post or two ago.... pictures!!
( clicky for garden pics )

All the tomatoes and peppers have been planted, and I've only lost 3 tomato plants and 2 pepper plants. The four tomato plants I started from seed are already setting blossoms, so I did some pruning and tying. The mail order plants are all still too small, but they're pretty vigorous. I mulched them because they were just getting too dry, watered them well, and put in their stakes so I could see where they were.

Mulched the pepper plants, too, and they're doing fine.

Beans have set blossoms and some of the blossoms have even dried and have tiny baby beans growing. The Purple Queen set gorgeous purple blossoms.

Also finally harvested the garden peas. I got about a pint of peas, just enough for one meal, so I blanched them and froze them. We'll probably eat them this week. I've learned that I need to really stay on top of the grass that comes up in the pea rows, because it will flat out-compete the peas. Also learned that planting them along the fence makes it difficult to keep the grass out of them.

Happily, though, I've been keeping a spreadsheet on what I plant, when, how long it takes to reach maturity, and all that sort of stuff. The next variety of pea I'll be planting is Alaska, which takes 50 - 60 days. I've calculated when to plant it so that I will miss the earliest frost date, and that is September 9, which coincidentally is also when my second planting of beans should be done. So the beans will come up and the peas will go in, all in the original sideyard garden. I'm determined to get enough peas to put up for the winter.

Got a new piece of equipment, too -- a Dustin Mizer Dust Spreader. I used it today to dust Sevin on the corn, to prevent earworm, corn borer, and all the other nasties that can decimate your corn. Just in time, too, I have some silking in the early corn! Yeah, yeah, I know, Sevin is bad for pollinators, but I'm not dusting the tops of the corn, just the whorls of the leaves and the silks. Bees don't pollinate corn (it's wind pollinated), but they do gather the pollen. I didn't dust the sunflowers out there, either.

I'm not putting the Sevin on the beans, tomatoes or peppers. Beans self-pollinate, but the peppers and tomatoes rely on the bees, and I don't want to endanger them by having the Sevin near the peppers and tomatoes. I'll just use my regular insecticide, and spray in the early evening after the bees have gone home.

According to my spreadsheet, I should be harvesting beans around 6/20, and the early corn should be ready around 6/26. The rest of the corn will be in the first week of July. The tomatoes I started should be bearing around 7/20, the Godfather peppers around 7/20, and the mail order tomatoes around the middle of August. The mail order peppers should bear around the middle to end of August.

All my corn should be finished by the middle of July, and then I'll plant the whole corn patch in NK 199 corn, which will be ready by the very beginning of November.

And that's it for now.

Hilled up the rest of the corn yesterday. I used the Ryobi tiller to cultivate the soil between the rows, then hoed the loose dirt up over the bottom inch or two of the corn stalks. Also cultivated the early corn between the rows, after all the heavy rain it was pretty compacted. Side dressed the mid and late corn with 10-0-0 nitrogen, then hilled over that.

Saturday I planted the tomato plants I had from Totally Tomatoes, and watered them in with a 20-10-10 water soluble fertilizer. Checked on them yesterday, they were a bit limp, so gave them a good soaking.

The pepper plants I got from R. Shumway are looking lively, I'll be putting them out Wednesday, as the temperatures will moderate (high of 86) and there will be scattered thundershowers Wed and Thurs. It's been actually HOT the last couple of days, high yesterday was 90 and today is going to be 89. Low humidity, though, so it hasn't been too horrible going out and working in the gardens.

Peas are setting blossoms, the Purple Queen has the prettiest dark purple buds! I need to cultivate between the rows out there too. Strawberries have about finished their first flush of berries, I should have another good size harvest of them then they'll be done by the end of the month.

Got my corn and bean seeds for the next plantings. I'm planting NK 199 Sweet Corn, a variety developed in the 50's which was THE corn you bought from roadside stands. I'll be putting this in the corn patch after the late corn finishes up. It's an 84 day corn, so it'll be ready around the end of September. As for beans, I'm planting Derby Bush, an heirloom variety that has exceptionally large yields. It's a 55 day bean, so when what I've got planted is done, I'll till over the ground and put in these beans.

And that's it...

Don't remember what I said last time, but here is your End Of May Garden Update.

CORN: all my corn is up and doing well. I hilled the early corn last week (where you pull dirt up out from between the rows and to the base of the plants on both sides, burying them about 1 to 2 inches deep) and side dressed with ammonium nitrate. It's about 2 feet tall now and very sturdy. The mid and late corn is still too small to hill up yet, but probably by the end of the week I can do that. I've been hoeing it to keep the grass down, and I've done a pretty good job.

BEANS: because of all the rain we've had in the past month, over 5 inches in a month we usually only see about 3.5 in, most of my seed rotted in the ground. So I went back and replanted the skips. Most of them came up, and I have a good number of healthy plants. I think, though, that I'm going to just pull these plants up when it's time to harvest and completely replant.

TOMATOES: I had 25 healthy seedlings, but when I planted them it was far too wet, and I only have 4 plants that survived. So I ordered 16 plants from Totally Tomatoes, which came last Friday. Of course it's been raining again, so it's still too wet to plant them. We're supposed to have a break from the rain until Thursday of next week, so it should be dry enough by Sunday maybe to put them out. I have 4 Viva Italia in the ground, 8 more that I ordered, and 8 Amish Paste, which makes a huge Roma type paste tomato, about 8 to 10 oz where a regular Roma is only 3 to 4 oz.

PEPPERS: ditto on the rain. I have 4 Godfather Italian pepper plants that survived. I ordered 16 pepper plants from TT, 8 Big Bertha bells which ripen red, and 8 Super Heavyweight bells which ripen yellow. They came today, so I'll hopefully be able to put them in when I put in the tomatoes.

STRAWBERRIES: these plants have been extremely productive this year. They're tall and vigorous, and because of the rain I haven't been able to get out there and keep them picked! So I've lost a good many to slugs and just plain rot. Went out and got a quart of them today, hulled them, sliced them and put them in the freezer with 1/4 cup Splenda. I'll be able to keep an eye on them this week and beat the slugs to them. Need to spread more slug bait (iron phosphate, not metaldehyde).

SOMETHING I DISCOVERED: my little Ryobi tiller does a fantastic job going between the rows and cultivating the ground! It also is great for busting up the dirt between the corn rows and makes hilling them a heck of a lot easier.

AND IN OTHER NEWS: one of the outdoor half-wild cats brought her only kitten up today! It's a little female, coal black, and about 4 weeks old. She's got her baby teeth, but her eyes are still that smokey greenish blue of babies. Mike managed to pick her up this morning, then I went out but she tried to run off. She dodged through the strawberries and got caught in the netting, so I managed to catch her and carried her back to the deck, where I sat in the rocking chair and cuddled her for about 15 minutes, until she relaxed and started to go to sleep.

Went out about 2 hrs later to do gardening, and after I'd picked strawberries I got her again (she didn't run away this time, just crouched next to her mama) and snuggled her about 10 minutes and talked to her. I'm determined that she's going to be well socialized so that we can get her fixed and maybe find her a home. Her mama (Li'l Lisa) needs to get fixed, too. Li'l Lisa is Little Boy's mama, her kitten from last year that we thought was a girl and went by Little Girl until the vet found out he wasn't. Right now we're calling the baby, Baby.

And that's it. I'll get Mike to take some pictures when it dries out a little more and the garden looks prettier.

Yesterday and today I hilled up the early corn. It's about 18" tall, and doing very nicely. So yesterday I did the hoeing between the rows to dig up the dirt and drag it up onto the plants. You do this so the adventitious roots of the corn have more dirt to grow into, and it makes for healthier, sturdier corn.

And hoeing was HARD. I got a blister! So today I put on a pair of gloves, and looked speculatively at my tiller. I have about 2 feet between my rows.... so I fired up the tiller to bust up the dirt, then hoed it up into the hills. Worked beautifully, and I didn't run over any corn at all! Then I side-dressed with nitrogen; it's supposed to rain tomorrow or Friday so that will get watered in well.

So while I was at it, I went into the mid-season and late corn, and cultivated it -- just kind of broke up the surface and buried grass that was trying to come up (again). So for my money, my little $100 Ryobi tiller did a superior job.

I need to move the straw from between the bean rows and cultivate them tomorrow -- the grass is just getting too vigorous and the beans are big enough to shade it out yet. My tomato plants from Totally Tomatoes are supposed to ship this week, and I ordered some pepper plants from R.M. Shumway, which should get here next week too.

Picked about a pint of strawberries today, would have had about half a pint more if I'd picked a couple of days ago, there were several that were rotted. Fortunately the slug bait has worked, I haven't had anymore slug damage out there. Which is good.

I hate slugs. Ick. I went out about a week ago to pick 'em from my shade garden. They were ALL OVER my hostas, my ferns, my azaleas, my hydrangeas... I pick them wearing nitrile gloves and put them in a ZipLoc bag with soapy water in it. By the time I was done, I must have killed about 100 slugs, most of them about an inch long. Then I spread more slug bait out -- don't worry, I only use the iron phosphate kind, because there are dogs and cats all over the place outside, don't want to poison them.

Death to all slugs!!

The wet ground seems to have been just too much for the tomato plants to handle. Out of 16 I planted, only 4 look like they're going to make it. The others are limp or outright dead. The 6 plants I haven't put out yet aren't doing anything, either. Just sitting there, being 2 inches tall. This has been an unusually wet spring, and the poor little dears just can't handle it.

So I had to break down and ORDER some tomato plants. There are no good paste tomato plants available locally, they're all slicers, which don't make good paste. Too much water, too many seeds, not enough meat.

I ordered from Totally Tomatoes, which seems to have the best prices around. If I understand the ordering system right, a unit is four plants. I ordered 2 units (8 plants) of Amish Paste, and 2 units of Viva Italia, so with the 4 Viva Italia plants that might make it, I'll have 20 plants.

The Amish Paste is an heirloom variety, which makes huge 8 oz fruits as compared to the usual 2 to 4 oz fruit from your average Roma type plant. So they should make up for any shortfall from the VI plants.

My peppers though are doing quite well. The ones I haven't planted yet got a good dose of insecticide, so whatever was eating them has quit. I'll probably set some of them out tomorrow or Thursday. I replanted the skips in my beans, they apparently rotted in the ground thanks to all the rain. I had plenty of Purple Queen, but ran out of the Heavyweight II, so I filled in the skips in half the beans with Derby bush beans.

The Lemon Queen sunflowers are up and have their 3rd and 4th sets of leaves, so I thinned them to 1 foot apart. Cultivated the corn, thinned the early corn to 8" apart. The mid and late corn aren't up good enough yet to thin, probably next week. They'll be thinned to 1' apart.

Went slug picking about a week ago, got around 40 young slugs between 1/2" to 1" long. Drowned 'em in a bag of soapy water and put the whole mess in the garbage. I wear nitrile gloves to pick slugs, I'm weird about getting slimy stuff on my hands. Ran out of iron phosphate slug bait, so I had to order some. That stuff works really well, and it's safe for animals if they happen to eat a sick slug. Makes the slugs stop eating.

And that's about it from the half-acre farmlet...

Well, planted some of them...

It's been raining and storming on a daily basis since the end of April, and as you know I started the seeds in March with plans to put the tomatoes in the ground on May 1, and the peppers on May 15. Well, with all this heavy rain, I haven't been able to get out there to do so, and when it wasn't raining, the ground was too sloppy to put the plants in.

It was clear yesterday and today, and the ground dried out a good bit, so I did my transplanting. I hope they make it -- the tomatoes had gotten a bit rangy so I had to plant almost all of them on their sides, with most of the stem underground. The peppers were better, they were just right to transplant.

The Godfather Italian peppers were, anyway. The California Wonder and Golden Giant bells are still a little too small to put out yet, and something's been eating away at their leaves!! Don't know if it's slugs (which the rain brought out in full force) or bugs, but either way they need to leave my peppers alone.

After I planted as much as I could (some of the tomatoes aren't quite ready to set out), I mulched everything -- beans, peppers, and tomatoes -- with wheat straw. That will help keep the moisture in the ground. Haven't run the soaker hoses yet, I'm waiting to see what the weather is going to do.

In other plants, the strawberries are going great guns, loaded with baby fruits and blossoms. All the corn is up, and I need to hoe the grass out from between the rows (tomorrow). Can't mulch until I tiller the corn when it's about a foot high, at which time I'll also run the soaker hose right up next to the plants. Then I'll be spreading the wood chip mulch. Beans are doing okay, haven't gotten the germination I was looking for, but I think the wet weather had a lot to do with that. Hopefully the ones that aren't up yet haven't rotted in the ground; I do have some Purple Queen seed left over, and I got some bush bean seed at the Wal-Mart (Ferry-Morse Derby bush bean). So if I need to replant, I can.

And that's it from the half-acre farmlet...

Well, I haven't put the tomatoes in yet. It's been raining HARD off and on for the past 3 days. Now, usually I wouldn't complain about that, because it fills up my rain barrels and rain right now, when I have all the seeds in the ground, is perfect.

But it's also saturated the ground, and it's hard driving thunderstorms for the most part. NOT the best situation for planting baby tomato plants!

So they're still sitting in the cold frame, with the lid propped up to act as a rain canopy, waiting for it to be (relatively) dry so I can put them in. Tuesday is supposed to be mostly clear, hopefully it'll dry up enough that I can plant them Wednesday before it begins raining again.

All my early corn is up now, about 1 inch tall. Sunflowers are up, too. I need to hill the potatoes again. Beans are beginning to come up, can't really see the rows of them yet, but there are several in each row just breaking the ground. Strawberries look great. I still need to stretch the bird net over them.

After the beans are up good enough that I can see the rows, I'm going to hoe them, then spread these wonderful woodchips we had dumped. The wood chips will mulch them perfectly, and then they'll rot into the ground over the year and make beautiful soil for next year. Going to do the same thing in the corn patch.

Yes, there's that much woodchips. Of course I have to pull out the logs and trash I don't need, but that's not much of an issue.

That's all for now...