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.

Heating Up

By midday the cabbage was wilting, and so was I.  It doesn't matter how wet the ground is, when it's too hot, the cabbage lets you know.  And I agreed.

Jeff made good progress weeding some walkways, I got some parsley planted and peppermint picked and dried.  Owen planted melon seed. Pictures tomorrow?

Rain in the Morning, Dogs in the Evening

This is not a garden picture.  

Well.  Owen was not in the garden today, but Sasha was.  

Some weeds did get pulled, more rain fell, and more weeds grew. More.

Pretty Day

The borage is in bloom.  

Its flowers are edible and it reseeds itself -- two key reasons why it survives in my garden.  Martha Stewart freezes the blossoms in ice cubes.  I haven't.

Some rain last night, so weeding was easier today.

Guess Who's NOT in The Garden!

Finally.  

They are in a pen, eating hay.  

No more outsmarting us, nosing open gates, slipping under fences, jumping over panels, squeezing through corners, eating whatever the humans will miss most at the time.

Lovely Foggy Day

Yesterday was cool, and today it's cool and foggy.  Unusual, to say the least.

We're glad we don't live next to any rivers that are rising.  We can be grateful for any rain, not fearful.  The ground under the tomatoes is actually developing the tell-tale cracks that mean water is needed.  So I've watered today, in the cool and the fog.  Note to self:  those cracks also mean more sand needed.

Another New Resident

Presenting Sasha.

Vacation Day One

Here's a thing.  (Thing from the OED:  A matter of debate before the thingen, the Scandinavian Parliament.)

Why would I much rather weed than harvest?  Both produce obvious results -- great results! But the weeding, I guess, is, in fact, instant.  The pea picking takes more time.  It feels like work.

But weeding is work too!  

Moving on, here we have peas grown on a support:

And here are the same kind of peas growing unsupported:

Which are easier to pick?  I'm not sure.  I have to bend over for both.  With the unsupported row I can flip them over and back to find the hidden pods.  With the supported row I can see most of the pods more clearly.  Conclusion:  no real advantage to either, at least in re. harvesting.

Here is an hour's labor:

Pickin' Peas

Yum.

Another Cutie!

Lots of these live in our sewer pond -- and they're growing quickly.  Owen got to watch a mamma laying her eggs up the hill near the pigpen!  He's hoping to be around for the hatching as well, but that might be hard to time. They're painted turtles.

More Heat

I'm hiding in the house and grading papers.  Outside it's very hot and very windy.  Ugh. But now we have the new computer, so here is a lovely picture from early spring.  Hooray!

Too Hot!

No work is getting done today because it's somewhere close to 100 degrees.  Ugh.

Overcast and Warm

A good day for getting a few things done--mostly overcast with a kind of a haze.  The sun would come out and I'd realize that it really was a hot day, and then the haze would reassert itself, and it was bearable again.

I got a second bed of peppers planted and figured out how to deal with the lack of milk jugs.  I put a thick layer of lightweight, dry hay over the bed that had the peppers covered with jugs.  Using the jugs, I shaped a shelter around each plant, and then removed each jug and put it over a plant in the new bed. So the plants have shelter from the wind, but not, unfortunately, from the heat.  The forecast is for 99 degrees on Monday.

And here I am planting peppers that the guide says do best at 70-80 degree ranges.  Oh, well.

Week's End

I visited three different recycling bin stations in town.  All of them had been recently emptied, so no milk jugs.  Hmmph.

Mulching

I'm not getting the rest of the peppers in because it's ninety degrees today and tomorrow -- too hot for transplants, I figure.  Plus I'm out of milk jugs for protecting them, and those "cloches" really do help plants deal with the wind.

So I mulched around half of the new grapes.

And Rain Again

A thunderstorm.  Before it arrived I didn't get much done.