Sunday, July 25, 2010

Waterlogged

Three happy team members.
This tropical plant loves this heat and rain mixture.
My transplanted carrots.
Yes, they are good.


These are the Red Peach the fourth week of July- they are over my head.
This is the largest container I used to be able to get - I have three.
The front walk with the pouring pot planter.


Next year I am only going to have Spider plants in each of the four pots.
A crop that came with the straw bales and all this rain. (not edible that I know)

Last summer was really dry but this summer has been a complete turnaround - overall that's a good thing to help replenish the soil moisture that several dry years has produced.

Now for something entirely different. The DOOR County Triathlon was a great success for us as the picture shows - the most happy team. Even with big waves I had a great time (fastest in my age group!) my wife's bike speed was her best - 2mph faster than she had ever done and our runner was happy with her time because the day had turned real hot and that made her run tough. We were all most pleased and look forward to this event next year.

Back to gardening.

With all the rain I have not gotten too much done as the ground was quite soggy and easily compacted so I have tried to stay on the boards and could not be doing much planting. We have plenty of cucumbers, peppers, lettuce and a few tomatoes. Cracking is a problem with all the moisture. On a sad note, the most recent grafting experiment ended is disaster - all but one of the grafts were lost. Back to trying to get this worked out. I think I am going to try to find someone who has done this and talk to them - there has to be something I am not doing right.
The grafted plants in the garden are doing fine and have set fruit. I have included a picture of my root stock plants (Red Peach) just to show how big they are. They have reached the top of the posts and are still growing so that is why I used them for rootstock - vigor.

I have spoken about using Cayenne pepper before but have had some questions again. Mammals can taste hot peppers but birds, because they have such poor taste buds, do not taste that well. Mixing the Cayenne with your bird seed to repel squirrels is one way to keep them out of the bird feeder. You can sprinkle it on the seed, or mix it in water and pour that mixture over the seed too. When squirrels sit in the feed they get it on their feet too and as they preen that causes them problems. So buy the largest container of the stuff you can find. I discourage the bunnies by sprinkling it on my crocus flowers in the lawn and around my new transplants in the front yard that is not fenced.

I recently got an email about a garden project that is interesting. Its called Vacant 2 Vegetables and is a vegetable sharing garden by a friend of my brother. Chris has a garden web site at GreenThumbDuJour.com that is full of interesting info and if you Goggle Vacant 2 Vegetables you will get a nice video that explains the project. Take a look - great sharing and caring.

I have included a carrot picture that shows how the transplanted carrots have done. I have more to transplant and lettuce, fennel, and some really late beans to plant as soon as I can get into the garden - seed dry and plant wet.

Happy Gardening

3 comments:

  1. Your tomatoes look healthy. Are you using any fungicide on your tomato plants this year? Last year, here in western Pennsylvania, we had late blight that completely destroyed the crop for hundreds of miles around us. I'm using chlorothalonil weekly this year and hoping for the best.

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  2. Hi Richard,
    Knock on wood, but all I have so far is the leaf spot and my treatment for that is to remove any infected leaves. I never compost any tomato or cucumber leaves, stems, or end of season plants as I think that helps remove disease from wintering over. Are the plants you are treating ones you bought or grew yourself? I think that helps me to have all home grown plants and no store bought or shipped in plants.
    Happy Gardening

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  3. I'm treating plants I bought and practicing good soil hygiene at the end of the season. No tilling tomatoes under. So far so good.

    Happy Gardening to you too. I enjoy your blog.

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