It never gets that hot here, but it was roughly 112 yesterday and 111 today. Some of the plants in the garden are just sort of fading away. An example is the sunflowers in the east side of the garden. We’ll see what happens. #weather
Screen capture from Weather Underground that showed that it was 109.4 degrees early this afternoon.
We’ve been getting lots of green, yellow, and purple beans and basil. We’ve gotten a few squashes so far, and a couple of tomatoes this week. My seedlings have made it so far – even the ones that I transplanted this week! They are flowers that probably won’t get to flower before it gets too cold, but I felt like I should try. I picked 2/3 of a 5-gallon bucket of pears the night before the 1st extra-hot day. I think that’s all I will get for the rest of the season! I can still see a few out there, but I just don’t have the time or energy. I got too hot in our carport on Friday and am still recovering.
There might be a monarch butterfly or two in this photo – that’s what I was trying to capture! I’ve been seeing a monarch pretty much every day lately 🙂
Wow, the days have been in the mid-to-high 70’s with fog until 11am or later. Today it may have gotten up to 101 degrees. I fertilized today and in the morning we will hopefully water twice as long as we’ve been doing lately. My 2nd-year Seascapes have 0 flowers. The green, yellow, and purple beans are delicious.
I sold some kale and pears this week (to a local juice company) – the day after I had started new kale seeds! The Red Russian kale has pretty much been destroyed by aphids (and their predators), and the dino kale is starting to go. It’s time for a new bed of greens. I’ve also got a lot of broccoli seedlings to pot up. The juicer said he’d love to take all of my kale every week. I’m not sure if it’s financially worthwhile for me to grow “for” him. I way undercharged since I figured this is sort of a wholesale thing. The way that we were put in touch with each other was througha gleaning organization that I emailed because I don’t have time to pick the pears! Tomorrow is probably the last day on which it’d make sense to pick pears (because of this heat). I wish I could’ve gotten out there to pick pears every day. Also, I’ve been wanting to buy a new dehydrator and still haven’t picked the right one. I wish we had the time and gumption to build one ourselves. (Z’s back has been out again the last few days, and with the need to prep beds, he’ll need to get on the tractor, at least to mow for new beds)
I’d really like to get some cover crops planted, but I feel that we need a new watering system. We use sprinklers that are on these little 2ish foot posts (which are all bent from our hard soil)
The neighbors built an “eff-you” fence. That’s what a friend of mine and I call it, anyhow. I figure that it’s either because they don’t want to see our butt cracks, or they don’t want us to see when their kids are playing on our side of their house, or they don’t want their kids to always be coming to the fence to look for my kid/produce from our garden, or they don’t want my kid to play with their kids. 😦 One could look at it in an unrelated way such as “or maybe someone gifted them some redwood fencing slats and then when they ran out they just continued with that hideous, kinda-seethrough bamboo or whatever that is.” It’s been 2 weeks since the mom texted me back about setting up a playdate (with an “i’ll let you know.” I know they are busy and our schedules haven’t lined up, but still… I feel sad and confused, and rejected. Believe me, we’d move if we could really afford it. It looks like our place is worth about $200,000 less than a more-ideal home with some land that would have certain better features (and there are few of those places on the market).
Today we had a nice visit (at her place) with a neighborhood flower farmer who I met through the community ed flower class I took this spring. 🙂 She had a “certified organic” sign on the property. Awesome!
Still no progress on the selling-cut-flowers thing… no time. I’ve been doing too much facebook/politics and a lot of parenting stuff and health stuff have been taking up garden time.
I harvested 4 baskets of strawberries today. Got about 15 pears (low-hanging) from trees in garden. They are still ~75% ripe. It feels like they are ripening very slowly this year. And of course about a pound of green, yellow, and purple green beans.
Got my 40 yards of compost delivered this week. They didn’t call in advance (I hadn’t even paid yet, and they hadn’t confirmed!!!), so I didn’t get to move the old compost out of the way before it got buried.
The second, larger batch of green, yellow, and purple (Trilogy) beans is starting up… hoping that folks we know will come over and pick some (pears, too). I planted another round of them today. Maybe I’ll get to one more before I stop planting them. There’s always that fantasy of having fresh green beans for thanksgiving, lol.
I have some flower and dill seedlings to get into the ground really soon. Those are for fall. I am missing my chance to plan and plant for the spring. Missing the chance to get cover crops in. It’s really a terrible month for planting because the raccoons do so much digging at this time of year :(. I have to pot up my broccoli seedlings in a few days, and start many other kinds of greens. The aphids are destroying my red russian kale and have moved on to the dino kale. i need to clean that bed up (deadhead and harvest and sell flowers, as well as getting rid of old kale leaves) and just cannot find the time. I started a compost pile last week and never managed to turn it. I did add water to it once or twice. Z even got me a new hose for it.
Have been thinking about how I need a farm partner or three.
Better get ready for bed. Phone having trouble posting photo but i think one may have gotten thru to my flickr page…
The quality of the sunlight totally changed this week. I guess it could partly be from the clouds that have been around here and there, but I think it’s mostly because the sun is hanging lower in the sky…
I still have zinnias I planted this week germinating (would love to find the packets and write down the names!) (Wow, next year I will need much larger quantities of flower seeds). And I direct-seeded some Cosmos today. And so on…
Well, I finally finished transplanting the watermelons I started and the tomatoes that I bought around 4th of July… things are coming along very slowly. I have come to a lot of realizations about how in order to really produce much, I need labor-saving devices. Or I would at least need clean, tilled, shaped beds. I don’t have all that equipment, so I did individual planting holes. Sometimes the area hasn’t received much water, so I have to do a lot of tiresome handwatering. After planting, I keep handwatering once or twice a day to make sure that the plants get a good start. It’s a lot of work!! Carrying the 2-gallon watering can all the time is really hurting my elbow. Not sure if that’s the bursitis, or something else. I’m getting ready to plant my 4th planting of green, yellow, and purple beans. It’s been 2 weeks since the last one went in…
We’re still not getting very many strawberries. They taste very good, but the pests are starting to get going again. I’ve been lucky about the taste, considering it’s been quite some time since I last fertilized.
I still can’t get much done when T is there in the garden with me. I actually have to redo some things, like how he put about a dozen sunflower seeds in a few different spots. I transplanted a few of them to other spots in the bed the other day. I’m really working at garden-scale, and farm-scale (especially in terms of having space for trays of seedlings) seems very far off. That reminds me, I need to plant the sunflowers that are best for cut flowers really soon! The cucumber beetles will kick their butts, though. This morning I killed the most I’ve ever done in one visit to the garden (7ish). I could be misremembering, because we grew a lot of sorghum-sudangrass (it makes so much biomass!!!) two years ago, and the cucumber beetles just loved it.
I checked my notes yesterday and yep, I did plant a bunch of things this week last year. It was way too late for longbeans (I wonder if it might not be hot enough for them here). So it’s a good thing that I am trying to prep some beds. This involves hoeing like 12′ long beds, putting compost out as a mulch, and then moving on to the next ones. (I am going to need to sneak a large purchase of compost in in the next few weeks. Good thing I have my own bank account ;)). The heads of these beds have gotten really messed up from when Z has plowed with the chisel plow in past years. When you first start to drive the tractor, it can dig into the ground before it starts moving. I bought some soil conditioner to try to help soften up that soil so it can be repaired at some point. I’m thinking 2 cucurbit beds, 1 of tomatoes, and a bunch of beans, sunflowers, etc.
My inlaws helped me pull out the peas at the end of July. Z ran over them with the flail mower and I started a new compost pile, including them and the mowed grass that they landed in, as well as the previous pile and the buckets of stuff (house compost, greens, and strawberry waste). When I finally got around to turning the pile some 3-4 days later, there was no “green” (nitrogenous) stuff left. Oy. Anyhow, that bed had a lot of borage and some volunteer tomatoes in it, so I’ve left it alone for now. When I tried to plant into it this spring, the soil was rock-hard. I think I should put a cover crop there. I need to get a new kind of sprinkler that can cover a single bed so I can water individual cover crop plantings. More $ (not gonna get around to researching, and not gonna spend it).
I’ve been trying to tuck in plantings of flowers here and there, and I even finally planted some sunflowers 2 weeks ago. I have yet to plant corn (maize) but I finally got some sweet corn seed this week. And overgrown summer crop seedlings. I just cannot resist planting tomatoes, even though T and I don’t eat many of them. I started some seeds last week- tomatoes, tomatillos, cayenne pepper (I know, it’s too late. I’m getting emergence after 10 days, though), basil, melons… the evenings are going to be too cool to get much, but I have to try.
the view from the southwesternmost bed that is in use (flowers on left, bush green, yellow, and purple beans out of picture on right)
I need to make time to do fall crop planning. Especially for flowers to overwinter.
There appear to be 3-4 gophers per bed right now. They are turning the newest strawberry bed into a raised bed. It’s ridiculous. I have been very lucky to have lost so few plants so far.
I haven’t been harvesting the peas – it’s time to get them out of there before the bugs decide to migrate to the strawberries. Ok, they’ll do that either way. They’ve reached the stage where every pea is trying to be a seed.
T and I started some seeds tonight – things like tomatoes, etc that most people would have been planting almost 2 months ago. I’m just kind of on my own late timeline. Someday I need to write something up about our cheapo starter greenhouse, but not today. Let’s just say that I take the trays out and leave them on a table in the sun because it’s too hot in there in the daytime. Tonight when I was putting trays away, I broke the clothespin that was holding the bird netting over the door. Sigh! At least the heat wave is ending.
Today Z mowed the area where I want to put the summer crops. First I need to deal with the pea bed and the Chesnok Red garlic. I can’t tell if it’s ready to pull or not. Most people either pull theirs or use a pitchfork. My soil is so hard that I have to dig with a shovel. I dig all around the plant and still usually end up cutting the bulb. Need to develop a better technique. Need to improve the soil!
The strawberries need fertilizing. I didn’t mulch them because 1. I never had the time, and 2. I wanted to compare the sow bug presence when there’s no compost on the ground. It’s a lot better, but the berries are VERY thirsty. They got 1.5 hours of water (through drip tape) yesterday and were dry today. I’m trying to go back to every other day watering as we come out of this heat wave. Gotta let those roots spread.
The cabbage and broccoli (or whatever) that I transplanted this week have had all but one leaf eaten off of them. There’s a thick layer of compost on the ground in that bed.
I did a bit of mowing along the blackberry patch that borders our driveway to make access this summer a bit easier. And, of course, also to check if they’re ripening. They usually start in the first few days of July, but… I harvested and ate 3! I need to figure out a way to hang the harvest bucket around my neck so I can use both hands.
farmingmum 