Graduation!

He did it!

Birthday Cake!

 It's an angel food cake with vanilla cream filling, chocolate sauce, and raspberries on top.

Happy fourteenth birthday, Owen!

Pig Day

On Friday Owen put an ad on Craigslist;  by Saturday morning Jeff had five responses.  By Saturday afternoon four pigs were gone, and the rest will be gone by Monday. So next time we'll ask for more per head (the price was $30 each), and maybe Serena will be having another litter soon.

The Melon Bed of my Dreams

There are 9 (or 12 -- I forget) "hills" in there, marked by tires, so we could find them to water.

Fortunately it's raining, so we don't have to find them.

A watermelon -to-be.

Cantaloupes.

Our melon bed has never been so well-mulched, and therefore weed-free.  Now no weed could compete with the plants -- and the melons are happy to grow.  They don't mind life on the Great Plains!

Not in the Garden

What Owen is taking pictures of. 
She has a chew.

Dog and Cats

Sasha gets bigger and smarter every day.

This year, grey is the theme.

On The Other Hand...

This praying mantis on the end of the clothesline post is little.  But cute? Ah, no.  An alien among us, perhaps.  While I took the picture, its head would swivel to watch me stumbling around to change angles. It was listening to me telling it to "hold STILL." It did -- a bit.

Is Anything Little, Cute?

"I'm little;  therefore, I'm cute."

Or is that "we"?

The Tomato Forecast

I can't ever just "wait and see."  Every walk through the garden includes speculation about the coming harvest.  So, what is the tomato forecast, you ask?  

Well, the roma types are setting and growing fruit well.  The actual fruits do not much like the heat, I've noticed, since there are strange kinds of damage that I'm unfamiliar with -- so blame it on the heat.

But there are tomatoes on those plants.

The big table varieties, Mortgage Lifter and German Pink, are not showing any fruit.  At least I'm not seeing any.  I always hope that when they start turning red I'll suddenly spot many more -- but at this point they don't seem to be there.  Here's hoping I'm wrong...

Yesterday we got almost 1/2 an inch of rain in a horizontal downpour that I missed (off grocery shopping).  Chance for more today, but we're also watering.

The Onion Harvest

They are drying well in the basement -- since we got the dehumidifier going.

Serious Mulch

Finally, we have some serious-looking mulch.  Last Saturday we got some spread around.

Two rows of beans above and cuke plants beginning (at the flag).

Two rows of kidney beans.

Grapes to the right, zuchini to the left.  In the middle, peppers, and far off at the top, melons.

On the day we returned from Colorado, the boys had all been out to a harvested wheat field where the farmer was baling the straw.  He sold it at two-fifty per bale if you picked it up in the field.  They loaded many more bales than they should have on the trailer (50), made it home, and now we can defend against the weeds.  Of course, now that it's hot, no weeds are sprouting or growing.  In fact, last night I witnessed a first:  bindweed wilting in the heat and dryness, while the grapes looked okay.

Tomorrow the heat is supposed to ease.  That means ninety-four instead of one hundred.

Growing Along

A week ago.

Today. 

These are the heat-lovers: sweet potatoes.  Lots of water and lots of heat make nice sweet potatoes. Looking good.

On the other hand:

This little nasturtium (next to a grape) is certainly a month old.  But its leaves are curled, there are some holes, and it is not happy.  Oh well. I shouldn't be surprised that a plant that loves Colorado Springs would hate Nebraska. It was a lovely February dream: banks of pale yellow flowers under the grape vines.

Lasted Until Eleven

It's hot--95 today.  But at 6AM it was cloudy with circling rumbles, and the gardening was very comfortable.

I got some weeding, some mulching, and the gathering-in of the last onions all done. Just because it's hot does not mean that it's dry, of course.  Most of the ground is not dried out yet.  But I did water some things because the last two-inch rain happened  10 days ago.


Driving to town, the corn is amazing.  I've never seen it look so perfectly dense -- all the same height, ears in the same spot, dark, dark green leaves.

Swords. In the Garden.

"Deadheading is a most important part of gardening...and I even deadhead my naturalized daffodils so that they do not deteriorate.  I have some old swords and I keep one sharpened for this job.  One can slash off a lot of heads in a very short time."  Margery Fish, 1956, quoted in The Penguin Book of Garden Writing

I want a sword to deadhead with, and I also want enough naturalized daffodils to need it!

(It occurs to me that I'm spending too much time around teenaged males.)

Hot, Hot, Hot

I have a job in air-conditioning all day long.

Why would I want to come home and garden when it's 98 degrees?  I don't.

Even Saturday morning feels like a long shot.

Like Gardening Under Water

The water is in the air, in the ground, and bursting through plant life.  It's a flood of LIFE!  I leave for nine days and come back to a deluge of life. Bumblebees and butterflies; raspberries up to my nose. July is usually hot and dry here on the plains.  This year we get hot and under water.

A disappeared onion bed.  Chives in the lower left corner, a young hollyhock in the right, and the rest is, well, weeds.

Anna and the hollyhock, which is  fairly bloomed out.  Echinacea in front.

Here are the sweet potatoes two weeks ago, when I was pulling onions.

The sweet potatoes this morning.

At the top of this row you can see two rows of beans I planted 9 days ago.

 In the forecast?  98 degrees tomorrow.

Under It

The water is in the air, in the ground, and bursting through plant life.  It's a flood of LIFE!  I leave for nine days and come back to a deluge of life. Bumblebees and butterflies; raspberries up to my nose. July is usually hot and dry here on the plains.  This year we get hot and under water.

Now Hot

The pepper beds, with weeds.

The pepper beds, without weeds.

 

 

One hundred plus degrees forecast today!

Another Soggy Morning

No recognizable rows.

Recognizable rows.

An inch of rain, a little hail, tornado sirens, but no bad news.  Everything just keeps growing.

Miss Quote

She's not really a tame cat any more.  She hunts out in the pole barn.  And on the pole barn.  She's very thin but pretty happy.  I think.  Photos by Owen.

Onions

Here they are, tops flopped over.  Initially I thought it was the result of dogs running through the garden, but closer examination showed that they were declaring themselves ready to be pulled.

Here is about half the crop, I think.  The rest are still in the ground -- they might grow another week, I guess. The second photo shows them "drying" on the mulch of the sweet potato row.  Drying in quotes because we had another inch of rain last night! I'll have to move them into the basement soon.  The trampoline was a great onion-dryer, but Corbie the cow now owns it, and she would eat them, I'm sure.  Sheep did last year!

Progress!

There they are -- the hatched-by-incubator babies.  Flight lessons have been successful, and they are now OUTSIDE, in a newly-built pen.  Hooray!  They were flying up to roost on the sides of their box, and of course visiting the floor on occasion.

Apres Le Deluge

There are puddles on the cardboard and everything is dripping wet.

Can you see the droplets of water?

Poor holey cabbages -- the cabbage worms have arrived.

Last night there was a lot of thunderstorm excitement over all of Nebraska and much of Kansas.  We got a bit over an inch; it all came down in about half an hour.  And now the temperatures are lovely and cool.  But it's too muddy to actually pull the weeds!

Some Blooms

Well, the yellow are calendula, there are some white cilantro blossoms, and the borage is blue, but nearly invisible.  Oh, and yellow dill above, and weedy garlic further up.

The Hollyhock

It all started with a volunteer hollyhock about 5 years ago that appeared in the chicken coop.  It was a dark maroon. After it was done, another volunteer appeared in the garden;  it was pale pink. Then another one appeared last year in a spot that seemed workable, so I left it. What you see above is how it looked a month ago.

Now we know what color IT is. It is a cream color that I find I like better than the pale pink.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another time there'll be a person next to it for scale.  This is its size this morning.

I should note that I did buy some seeds after the volunteers arrived, since I was inspired.  None of those plants have survived.